IT'S COMPLICATED: THE MAFIA'S HEIRS

Chapter 27: The Attack

Bryan came on a Thursday.

He texted an hour before, short, careful, the way he had been texting since the honest phone call, not too much and not too little, the specific calibration of someone who has accepted a situation and is learning how to exist inside it without losing himself, and I read the text sitting in the garden with the afternoon sun on my face and felt the familiar warmth of it, the warmth that had been there for six years and was not gone, just different now, reshaped into something that fit the new edges of things.

Luca was in the study when I told him.

He looked up from whatever he was working on and held my gaze for a moment, doing the calculation I had watched him do every time Bryan's name came up, not jealousy exactly, or not only that, but the specific assessment of what it meant for the security situation, who knew Bryan was coming, which route he would take, whether the Ferrano intelligence had eyes on anyone connected to this compound.

"I will tell Marco," he said.

"Thank you," I said.

He nodded and looked back at his work, and I stood in the doorway for a moment and thought about how far we had come from the man who had sat in Bryan's chair at the kitchen table two nights ago and listened to Luca run through security protocols like Bryan was a variable to be managed rather than a person who mattered to me.

Bryan arrived at two.

He brought food. Of course he did, that was Bryan, showing up with his arms full of things he had made or bought because Bryan expressed everything through feeding people, through the specific love language of turning up with something warm and saying here, eat this, let me do this one thing for you. He had containers of things from the restaurant near his apartment that he knew I liked, and he stood in the compound kitchen unpacking them with the easy competence of someone who had done this a hundred times in a hundred different kitchens, and I sat on the counter and watched him and thought that some things did not change no matter what happened around them.

We talked for two hours.

About Maya, who had started a new job and was characteristically furious about the commute. About my mom, who had been calling more frequently and crying less on the calls, which was progress. About my thesis, which was somehow still technically in progress despite the fact that my life had become almost entirely unrecognisable from the life I had been living when I started it. About the twins, who Bryan asked about with the specific careful warmth of someone who loves you and is learning to love the things that are yours even when they are complicated.

He did not mention Luca once.

I noticed that. The deliberateness of it, the way he navigated the whole afternoon without once touching the edges of that particular thing, not because he was avoiding it but because he had decided this visit was not about that, that this visit was about the six years and the jollof and sitting in a kitchen together the way we had always sat in kitchens together, and he was protecting that by keeping everything else outside the door.

At four he started packing up the containers.

I walked him to the gate the way I always did, or as far as Marco's current protocols allowed, which was the inner courtyard just inside the main entrance. We hugged at the gate the way we always hugged now, longer than we used to, tighter, with the specific weight of people who have said important things to each other and cannot unsay them and have decided to carry them as gently as possible.

"Text me when you get home," I said.

"Always," he said.

He got in his truck.

I watched the gate close behind him.

I was back in the garden when Luca found me twenty minutes later, sitting with my hands on my stomach and my face in the last of the afternoon sun, and he sat in the chair beside mine without being asked, which he had started doing in the past weeks, this small deliberate choice to be beside me rather than across from me, and we sat together in the quiet of the compound and I thought that this was what peace felt like when you had earned it.

Then Luca's phone rang.

Not his usual line. The security line. The one that only rang when something had happened that Marco considered too significant for a text.

He answered before the second ring. I watched his face. I had become very good at reading what happened to Luca's face on security calls, the specific way his jaw moved and his eyes changed and his posture shifted depending on the nature of what was being told to him, and what I saw in the first three seconds of this call made something cold move through me before I had heard a single word.

"Where?" he said. His voice had dropped into the register it only reached when something was very wrong.

A pause. He listened.

"How bad?" he said.

Another pause. Longer.

His eyes moved to me. Just briefly. Just one second. Then back to whatever point on the middle distance he had fixed on.

"Lock everything down," he said. "Full protocol. Nobody in or out." He paused. "And get me everything on the vehicle. Make, plates, direction of travel. Everything."

He ended the call.

He looked at me.

And I knew. Before he said a word I knew, the way you know things when your body understands something faster than your brain does, when the cold that had moved through you at the first three seconds of a phone call suddenly has a shape and a name and a face attached to it.

"Bryan," I said.

Luca's expression did not change. Which was its own kind of answer.

"Tell me," I said. My voice sounded like someone else's.

"There was an incident on the road between the compound and the city," he said carefully. "Bryan's truck was run off the road approximately two kilometres from here. A vehicle came from a side street and hit him at speed and kept moving."

The garden was very bright suddenly. Too bright. The afternoon sun doing something aggressive and inappropriate.

"Is he alive," I said.

"He is alive," Luca said immediately. "He is conscious. The paramedics are with him now."

I was off the chair before I finished processing the sentence. "I need to go..."

"Natalie." Luca was on his feet too, his hand on my arm, not restraining, just present. "Listen to me. The Ferrano family just made a move against someone connected to this compound. Which means they are watching the approach roads. Which means if you get in a car right now you are doing exactly what they want."

I looked at him. "Bryan is hurt because of me."

"Bryan is hurt because of them," he said. "Not because of you."

"Luca..."

"He is conscious and the paramedics are with him and I have people on the way to him right now who will make sure he gets to the hospital safely." His hand was still on my arm, steady and real. "I need you to breathe. I need you to trust me to handle this. And I need you to understand that you getting into a car and driving toward the place they just hit is not something I can allow."

I looked at him. At the steadiness of him, the absolute controlled certainty, and I wanted to argue with it and could not find the argument because he was right and I knew he was right and being right had never felt so much like something I could not stand.

"I need to know he is okay," I said. My voice broke on the last word. Just slightly. Just enough.

"I know," he said. "You will know. I promise you that."

I pressed both hands over my face. Breathed. Tried to locate the part of me that was capable of being rational about this and found it very small and very far away.

My phone buzzed.

Maya.

I answered immediately. "Maya..."

"I know." Her voice was tight in the way it got when she was scared and managing it. "I just got a call from the hospital. He's there. He's awake, Nat. He has a broken arm and some cuts from the glass and they want to keep him overnight for observation but he is awake and talking and he asked for you."

He asked for you.

The tears came before I could stop them, silent and sudden, the specific tears of relief that felt nothing like relief because relief was supposed to feel better than this. This felt like everything catching up at once, the meeting with Don Adriano, the fist through the wall, the afternoon in the garden, the gate closing behind Bryan's truck, and now this, now Bryan in a hospital bed with a broken arm asking for me.

Because of me.

Because of who I was connected to and what that connection had made him.

"I need to see him," I said to Maya.

"I know," she said. "Let me talk to..." she stopped. I could hear her breathing. "Nat, are you okay? You sound..."

"I am fine," I said. "I just need to see him."

But the garden was doing the too-bright thing again and the ground felt slightly wrong under my feet and the twins were doing something that was not the usual movement, something that felt like they were responding to everything happening in the body that carried them, to the cortisol and the adrenaline and the specific weight of a fear that had no good place to go.

"Natalie." Luca's voice, sharp, closer than he had been.

I heard Maya say something else but the phone was suddenly very far away and the garden was tilting in a direction gardens did not usually tilt and I had time to think, very clearly, that this was not a good development, before my knees went and Luca caught me before I reached the ground, one arm around my waist and one hand at my back and his voice saying my name in a way I had never heard it said before, not calm, not controlled, not the managed version of himself he presented to everything.

Urgent. Real. Frightened.

"I have her," he said, but not to me. To Marco, who had appeared from somewhere. "Call Dr Reyes. Now. Tell her it is the twins."

The garden was very bright.

And then it was not.