Page 99 of Double Trouble for the Mafia Prince
"And you think it’s someone we knew."
Marco answers for him.
"One of the old men who vanished. Disappeared during the border fires, back when we took the southeast."
"There were a lot of bodies in that campaign."
"Not this one," Luca says. "He didn’t go missing in the field. He walked away."
"Who?" I ask.
They share a look.
Luca’s voice is quiet. "We called him Arditi. Not his real name. That was the title the soldiers gave him."
The Daredevil.
"Tracker. Enforcer. Deep logistics. He built smuggling networks for the old capos and dismantled them just as fast when orders shifted. He was loyal. Then he wasn’t."
I look down at the cloth again. The edge is blackened. Cut clean, not torn.
"And you think he’s behind this?"
"We don’t know," Luca says. "But if he’s not leading Il Sangue Nero, someone who trained under him is."
Marco lifts his glass. "Either way, we have a problem."
18
GIANNA
Dante hasn’t looked me in the eye since the morning the docks burned.
He has kissed me.
He has fucked me.
He has held the girls and poured coffee and run his thumb across my lower back in the kitchen like nothing is coming undone.
But I know what silence tastes like when it is meant to keep me out.
I know the way a man disappears without leaving the room.
And Dante is disappearing.
Not loudly.
Not obviously.
Not in the way most men unravel.
But I feel the hollow growing behind every word he doesn’t say.
I feel it in the way his jaw tenses when I ask if he’s coming to bed, in the way his hands linger a second too long on the security briefings and not long enough on me.
He thinks he’s protecting me by shutting me out. He doesn’t understand that distance is its own kind of wound.
The girls chatter through breakfast like the world is intact, their little voices bouncing off the tiled walls of the solarium.
