IT'S COMPLICATED: THE MAFIA'S HEIRS

Chapter 25: Alone With The Don

Maya arrived in nineteen minutes, which was a personal record.

She came through the gate with two coffees and the expression of someone who had been briefed by approximately no one and was going to need the full story immediately, and I gave her the full story over the coffees at the kitchen table while she listened with the focused attention she reserved for situations that required it.

When I finished she looked at me for a moment. Then she looked at my clothes. Then back at my face.

"Right," she said. "First things first."

What followed was forty minutes of Maya going through everything I owned in the compound, which was not much, and making decisions with the efficiency of someone who understood that what you wore to a meeting with a man like Don Adriano was not about fashion but about statement. Not too formal, which would look like performance. Not too casual, which would look like disrespect. Something that said: I am someone. I belong in rooms. I am not here to apologise for existing.

She settled on a dark dress, simple and well fitted, that my mom had insisted I pack when I left home because you never know, Natalie, and which I had not worn once since arriving at the compound.

"The shoes matter," Maya said.

"Maya."

"I am serious. The shoes are the thing that tells him whether you walked in there for yourself or for him." She held up two options. "These say you dressed up for his approval. These say you dressed for yourself and it happens to be appropriate." She put the second pair on the floor in front of me. "These."

I put them on.

She stood back and looked at me.

"Hayes and Wolfe," she said quietly. "Remember that."

"I remember," I said.

She hugged me at the door. Long and tight and without saying anything, because Maya knew when words were not the right instrument and this was one of those times.

Then Marco drove me to Don Adriano's residence.

It was nothing like the compound. Where Luca's world was glass and concrete and functional angles, Don Adriano's residence was old in a way that announced itself, high ceilings, dark wood, the particular weight of a place that had been significant for a very long time and knew it. It did not need to declare its power because the power was in the walls and the floors and the specific quality of the silence inside it.

A member of staff showed me to a sitting room on the ground floor and left me there.

I sat in the chair nearest the window and folded my hands in my lap and breathed and waited.

He kept me waiting for eleven minutes. I counted. I understood it was deliberate and I used the eleven minutes to look at the room, at the photographs on the walls and the books on the shelves and the specific objects a man chooses to keep in his spaces, which told me things about him that he had not told me himself.

There was a photograph of Luca. Young, perhaps twenty, standing slightly apart from a group of people at what appeared to be a formal event. He was already wearing the composure even then, the controlled expression that gave nothing away, but he was thinner and there was something in his eyes that had not yet been replaced by what I now knew in them, something that might have been uncertainty, which I had never seen there and which made the photograph feel like a glimpse of someone I had not been allowed to meet.

Don Adriano came in at eleven minutes and twelve seconds.

He moved with the same unhurried authority he carried everywhere, sat across from me without preamble, and looked at me in the way he had looked at me at dinner, thoroughly, without apology, taking inventory.

"Natalie," he said.

"Don Adriano," I said.

A slight pause. Something moved in his expression that was almost approval of the directness, and I noted it and filed it away.

"I will not waste your time with pleasantries," he said. "You strike me as someone who prefers directness, which is something I understand and respect."

"It is," I said.

"Good." He settled back slightly in his chair and looked at me with those dark eyes that were his son's eyes in an older face, carrying more of everything, more history, more weight, more of the specific quality that came from decades of making decisions that other people lived with. "I have been told certain things about your situation. About the complexity of your personal life. About your relationships and your history and the question of whether someone in your position is the right person to be raising children connected to my family."

I held his gaze. "You have been told things by Selene," I said.

He looked at me for a moment. "Among others."

"And you want to know if what she told you is true," I said.

"I want to know who you are," he said. "Which is a different question."

I sat with that distinction. With the specificity of it, the way he had separated the facts of my situation from the question of my character, which told me that Don Adriano Vitale was more sophisticated than the version of him I had been building in my head, which had been primarily composed of danger and authority and the word determinative.

"Then ask me," I said. "Whatever you want to know. I would rather answer your questions directly than have you form conclusions from what other people have told you."

He looked at me for a moment. Then he did something I had not expected, which was almost smile. Not the thing near one that Luca did. Something smaller and more private, the expression of someone encountering something that has surprised them mildly and is choosing to acknowledge it.

"All right," he said. "Tell me about Bryan Rollins."

I had prepared for this question in the car with Marco, had known it was coming in some form, and I had decided in the car that the only approach available to me was the honest one, because Don Adriano had people in places that told him things, and a version of events that did not match what those people had observed would not help me.

"Bryan Rollins has been my closest friend for six years," I said. "He is my best friend's brother and he is one of the most genuinely good people I have ever known. He was in love with me before either of us said it out loud, and I was in love with him in the specific way you are in love with someone who has been your safe place for a long time." I paused. "What happened between Luca and me was not planned and it was not simple and it did not erase what I felt for Bryan. Those two things existed simultaneously for a while and I am not going to pretend they didn't because you clearly already know they did."

Don Adriano looked at me. "And now?"

"And now I have made my choice," I said. "I told Bryan directly. He knows where things stand. He accepted it with more grace than most people could manage." I held Don Adriano's gaze. "The complexity of how I arrived here does not change where I am. I am here. I am carrying Luca's children. I have chosen this, as much as this can be chosen, and I am not going anywhere."

Don Adriano was quiet for a moment.

"Selene suggested," he said carefully, "that someone who was unable to make a clear decision between two men might find it equally difficult to make clear decisions regarding the welfare of children."

I felt the specific precision of that. The clean logical construction of it, the way it connected two things that were related but not the same, the way it would land in a man like Don Adriano who valued decisive action and clear positions.

"Selene is not wrong that the situation was complicated," I said. "She is wrong about what it means." I paused. "I was twenty one years old, newly pregnant with twins for a man I had been in something undefined with for four months, living in his compound, navigating his world and his family's politics, while also carrying six years of real feelings for someone else. The fact that it took me time to arrive at clarity does not mean I am incapable of clarity. It means the situation was exactly as complicated as it was." I looked at him steadily. "I sat across your table and said Hayes and Wolfe to your face. I said no to you directly when you outlined a future for my children I had not agreed to. Those are not the actions of someone who cannot make decisions."

The room was very quiet.

Don Adriano looked at me for a long time. The inventory kind of look, the kind that felt like being read at a level below the surface of things.

Then he said: "My son."

I looked at him. Waited.

"Do you love him?" he said.

The question I had not expected. Not because it was surprising but because of where it was coming from. Don Adriano Vitale, asking about love across a sitting room in a residence full of dark wood and old power, with Luca's young face on the wall behind him.

I thought about the sitting room three days ago. About getting quiet and hearing it. About telling Luca what I heard and his hand in my hair and the specific rightness of it.

"Yes," I said. Simply. Without qualification or hedge.

Don Adriano held my gaze.

"He has not loved anyone," he said quietly. "Not in the time I have known him. I was not sure he was capable of it." A pause. "I want you to understand that I say that not as a warning but as information. As context for what I am about to tell you."

I went very still.

"What are you about to tell me?" I asked.

He looked at me for a moment. The sharp dark eyes absolutely steady.

"There is something about my son's position within this family," he said, "that you do not know. That he does not know I know." He paused. "And that changes the nature of everything I have said to you until now."

The sitting room was completely silent.

"Tell me," I said.

Don Adriano looked at me across the space between us, and for the first time since I had walked into this room, what was in his eyes was not assessment.

It was something that looked, from a certain angle, almost like concern.