HIS BELLISSIMA

WHAT HE WANTED

He hung up the phone and let the silence settle back into the room.

His grandfather's voice still lingered in his ear, that particular cadence he used when he suspected something but hadn't decided yet whether it was worth pursuing. *Who is this girl,* he'd asked, without preamble, the way he asked everything.

*Why does she matter enough to bring to Sicily.*

Matteo had given him the answer he'd prepared before the call even connected. A woman on his arm, he'd said, was good for business. Men trusted a Don who had something worth protecting, something that made him look settled instead of reckless. It photographed well at the events his grandfather liked him to attend, the dinners with men who still weren't entirely convinced a boy his age deserved the chair he sat in. Nothing more than that.

Salvatore had accepted it easily enough, which meant either he'd believed it, or he'd decided it wasn't worth the effort of not believing it yet. Either way, it bought Matteo time, and time was the only currency that mattered right now.

He thought of her and everything she'd said in his office. He had wanted her in that moment more than he could remember wanting anything in years, wanted her mouth, her hands, the sound she'd make if he closed that last half inch instead of standing there daring her to speak. It hadn't been the manageable, ordinary want he'd catalogued and dismissed a dozen times since the alley. It had been sharper than that, hungrier, the kind of want that didn't ask permission from the rest of him before it took over.

His mind travelled to business awaiting in Palermo. The shipment was due within the week, and he intended to be standing on the dock himself when it came. It was a simple enough operation on paper. Product moved from the boat to trucks, trucks moved from the port to three separate warehouses before anyone had time to organize a raid even if someone tipped one off, and by morning the product would be scattered too widely to matter if any single link in the chain failed. Simple on paper.

Nothing was ever simple in practice. Men got greedy, or careless, or both, and a shipment this size, moving through territory his family hadn't fully secured in years, was exactly the kind of operation that ended careers or ended lives depending on how the first hour went. He'd go over the routes again tonight. He'd go over them every night until he was standing there watching the boat come in, because the men underneath him needed to see a Don who checked everything twice, who never assumed loyalty was a given rather than something earned fresh every single time.

He thought, unbidden, of Alondra.

She'd been in this house less than a week, and she'd already managed to make herself impossible to ignore. Most people who ended up under his roof learned quickly to make themselves small, agreeable, invisible enough not to draw attention. She'd done the opposite from the first hour, fighting him in the alley, fighting him at dinner, storming into his office last night like she had every right in the world to demand something from him. He should have found it exhausting. He found, instead, that he looked forward to it in a way that unsettled him more than the defiance itself.

Dante's comment from the study kept surfacing too, uninvited, the way certain thoughts did when a man tried hardest to set them aside.

Something familiar about her.

He didn't know what to do with that, and he trusted Dante's instincts too much to simply dismiss it as nothing. If there was a thread there, it would surface eventually. Everything did, in this life, sooner or later.

He turned from the window and crossed to the dresser on the far side of the room, opening the top drawer and lifting out a small silver frame he kept beneath a stack of shirts he rarely wore, in the one place none of the staff had permission to touch.

The photograph inside had gone slightly soft at the edges, handled too many times over too many years. His mother stood in the center of it, laughing at something outside the frame, her dark hair loose around her shoulders in a way she almost never wore it in public. Beside her, his sister Bianca stood with her arms crossed and her chin lifted, seventeen and furious about something even in a photograph, the way she'd been furious about most things that year. And in front of them both, small and grinning with a gap where his front tooth hadn't grown in yet, was his brother Enzo, seven years old forever now, caught mid-laugh at whatever their mother had just said.

Matteo lifted two fingers to his lips and pressed them lightly to the glass.

His mother had never wanted any of this. She'd married into the Santoro name and spent every year after trying, quietly and without much success, to keep some part of her children out of its reach. She used to say the family's business was a debt that got inherited whether anyone asked for it or not, and she'd hated that Matteo would be the one paying it. Bianca had wanted the opposite, had begged to be let into rooms she was never allowed near, furious that her brother got trained for a life she was told, over and over, wasn't hers to want. Enzo had been too young to want anything yet except attention and sweets and to be carried on somebody's shoulders. Matteo had tried, in his own limited way, to keep them both far enough from the edges of this world that it couldn't reach them.

It had reached them anyway, in a single blast that had taken Dante's father Romano along with them, Four lives folded into one report nobody had ever fully explained to either of them. Matteo still didn't know how, or who had decided that reaching them was worth the cost. He had combed through organization after organizations, clan after clan,family after family. Bringing down operations,combing through Italy to find answers. To find the bastards who dared crossed him in a way no one who knew him and his family would.

Every search came to a dead end. Every lead turned cold.Including bodies.Dante was still looking. Matteo had stopped asking for updates months ago, because the answer never changed, and not hearing it change had started to hurt in a way he didn't have patience for anymore.

He set the frame down gently and closed the drawer.

There would be time for that later, when Dante finally had something worth bringing him. Today there was Sicily to prepare for, and before that, one thing he'd promised, however reluctantly, to see through.

*******************************************

Alondra was waiting by the car when he came downstairs, dressed simply, her arms crossed against the morning chill, flanked by two of his men who kept a respectful, watchful distance. She didn't look at him until he was close enough that ignoring him would have been its own kind of statement.

"You're actually doing this," she said. Not quite a question.

"I said I would, provided you behaved." He opened the car door himself, an old habit he rarely bothered with anymore. "I don't make a habit of breaking my word. It tends to be bad for business."

Dante had told him, briefly, over coffee that morning, that the call had already been made. Clarise had brought her the phone earlier, before Matteo had even finished his conversation with Salvatore, and Dante had stayed to make sure nothing went further than it should. He hadn't asked for details, and Dante hadn't offered many, only that she'd played it light, breezy even, telling Melanie she had big news and wanted everyone together to hear it properly instead of over the phone. No mention of the alley, or the men, or any of it. Whatever fear she'd been carrying, she'd kept it out of her voice entirely. The outcome: Melanie, Audrey, and Dave had all agreed easily enough,an hour set, and a woman still shaken enough by the sound of their voices that Dante had mentioned it twice, which for Dante counted as genuine concern.

He'd arranged a private room at a restaurant on the edge of town for the meeting itself, quiet enough not to draw attention, secured well enough in advance that he trusted nothing would go wrong inside it. His men would be positioned outside, close enough to intervene, far enough to give her the illusion of privacy she needed to actually believe any of this was real.

The drive over was quiet. She sat with her hands folded tightly in her lap, staring out the window at streets she probably hadn't expected to see again, and he let the silence sit between them rather than fill it with anything that would only sound hollow now.

Outside, as they pulled up to the restaurant, a car he didn't recognize sat parked across the street, engine idling, windows dark enough that he couldn't make out who was inside it.

He watched it a moment longer than he needed to, filed the thought away without deciding yet whether it mattered, and stepped out to open her door.