DANTE’S POV
I didn’t sleep. Couldn’t.
The house was quiet, the kind of silence that could kill a person. Every creak in the floorboards, every sigh of the wind through the shutters put my instincts on edge. When you’ve lived in war as long as I have, you learn that silence is never safe.
I sat in the armchair by the window, a pistol resting on the table beside me, eyes fixed on the street. Empty. Still. Too still.
But my mind wasn’t on the street. It was upstairs.
He was upstairs.
Luca.
My son.
I tried the word out again in my head, but it still felt foreign, dangerous, like handling a weapon with the safety off. Five years of silence had made him into an idea, a ghost I’d tried to bury under whiskey and violence. And now here he was ….. flesh, blood, breathing.
And if I was hones
