Stolen By The Devil's Brother

CHAPTER THREE

Don't Ask About the Brother

I learned about Luca Moretti the same way I learned most things about Dante's world by accident, around the edges of conversations I wasn't fully meant to hear.

It was at a family dinner six months ago. Long table, heavy silverware, Dante at the head with his mother Rosaria to his right, a collection of cousins and associates filling the rest of the chairs. I'd been seated beside a woman named Gia, a cousin's wife who had the friendly, slightly-unhinged energy of someone who'd been kept out of the main conversations too long and was desperate for someone new to talk to.

She'd leaned close to me between the soup and the main course and said, in a low, conspiratorial voice: "Has Dante mentioned when Luca's coming back?"

I hadn't known there was a Luca to come back. "Who?" I'd asked.

Gia's eyes had gone slightly wide, a flicker of something; surprise, maybe pity; moving across her face before she smoothed it back down to polite neutrality. "His brother," she said carefully. "Younger. He's been... away."

Before I could ask anything else, Dante's hand had landed on my knee under the table, not rough, just firm. The universal signal for: “stop.” I'd looked up and found him watching Gia with an expression that ended the conversation instantly.

Later, in the car ride home, I'd asked.

"You have a brother?"

Dante had kept his eyes on the window. "I have a lot of family."

"But a younger brother specifically."

A pause. "Luca."

"What's he like?"

Dante had turned to look at me then, and his expression was the one I had come to recognize as his final-answer face; the one that wasn't unkind but was absolutely not an invitation to keep going. "He's not someone you need to think about," he said. "He makes his own choices. They're usually the wrong ones."

End of conversation.

Dante had a talent for that, closing doors inside discussions so smoothly that you almost didn't notice until you were already standing in a smaller room.

But I thought about Luca anyway. The way you think about a door you've been told is locked, not because you're trying to be difficult, but because something in the human brain reads “forbidden” as “interesting.”

I wondered what choices Luca made that Dante considered wrong. I wondered if they were actually wrong, or just wrong by Dante's precise, controlled standards. There was a difference, I'd started to realize. Dante called a lot of things wrong that were really just “free.”

Three weeks after that dinner, I found a photograph. It was tucked inside a book on the study shelf; one of those old, heavy books that existed in the apartment purely for aesthetics. I'd been dusting, a habit left over from my old life that the housekeeper found mildly offensive, and the photo had slipped out and fallen face-up onto the floor.

Two boys. Maybe sixteen and eleven, standing in front of what looked like a summer house. The older one was clearly Dante, same sharp jaw, same straight posture, already carrying himself like a man in a child's body. The younger one was grinning so widely it looked like it might hurt. Dark curly hair. A split lip that hadn't quite healed. Eyes that even in a faded photograph carried something unruly and alive.

I held the photo for a long moment.

Then I put it back exactly where I'd found it and didn't mention it.

But I didn't forget those eyes.