IT'S COMPLICATED: THE MAFIA'S HEIRS

Chapter 18: Bryan's Call

"Hey Nat," he said. "I just wanted to hear your voice."

I sat very still on the edge of Luca's bed and let those words land one at a time, the way Bryan's words always landed, without drama or calculation, just exactly what they were.

"Hey," I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected, which was either a sign of growth or a sign that I had become very good at functioning while internally coming apart at the seams. I was not sure which one I wanted it to be.

"How are you feeling," he said. "The twins. Everything."

"Good," I said. "Everything is on track. The doctor came again yesterday." I pressed my free hand flat against my stomach, the automatic gesture I had developed over the past weeks, grounding myself in the most real thing available to me. "They're getting big."

"Good." A pause. The kind that had warmth in it rather than discomfort, because Bryan's silences had always been the comfortable kind, the kind that didn't require filling. "Maya made your mom's jollof recipe yesterday. It was not as good as your mom's."

I laughed despite everything. "It never is."

"She knows. She was very annoyed about it." I could hear the smile in his voice, the easy familiar rhythm of it, and I closed my eyes for a moment and let it be what it had always been, this voice, this person, six years of the most uncomplicated warmth I had ever been given. "She wants to come see you again. She is trying to be patient about it."

"Tell her soon," I said. "and tell her I miss her."

"She knows," he said. "She misses you too. She just expresses it by overcooking rice and being furious about it."

I smiled. Opened my eyes. Looked at the room around me, Luca's room, the jacket on the chair, the books on the nightstand, the particular lived-in quality of a space that belonged to someone who did not decorate for anyone but himself.

The smile faded slightly.

"Nat," Bryan said, and his voice had changed. Just slightly. The ease was still there but underneath it something had shifted into the register he used when he was about to say something he had been carrying for a while. "Can I ask you something?"

"Yes," I said, because with Bryan the answer was always yes, even when I didn't know yet what the question was.

"Are you safe in that house?" Not accusatory. Not demanding. Just the question, plain and direct, the way Bryan asked things when he actually needed to know. "Not the version where you tell me what you think I need to hear. The real version."

I thought about the photograph slipped under my door. About three members of the household staff walking out through the gate yesterday morning. About the envelope and the angle of the shot and the gardener's eyes finding my window on his way out.

"It's complicated," I said.

"It's always complicated," he said. "That doesn't answer the question."

"I'm safe," I said. "Luca is... he takes it seriously. The security. He takes all of it seriously." I paused. "More seriously than I understood when I first got here."

Bryan was quiet for a moment. "I believe that," he said, which surprised me slightly, the absence of resistance in it. "I have actually... I've been looking into him. Luca." Another pause. "I want you to know I didn't do it to cause problems. I did it because I needed to understand who you were with, what kind of situation you were in, and nobody was telling me anything useful."

I went still. "How long have you been doing that?"

"A few weeks," he said. "I hired someone. An investigator. I know how that sounds."

It sounded like Bryan, actually. Like the specific kind of Bryan thing that was simultaneously overstepping and completely coming from love, the thing he did where he showed up for people in ways that were slightly more than they asked for because he could not help it, because caring was the only mode he had.

"What did you find?" I said.

A pause. Longer than the others.

"Some of it I expected," he said carefully. "The organisation he works for. The Vitale connection. The kind of operation it is." His voice was measured in the way of someone choosing words with deliberate care. "But there is something else. Something from before you. From about three years ago." Another pause. "Nat, I need you to hear this, okay. I need you to hear it and I need you to tell me if you already know about it because if you do then I don't need to..."

The call dropped.

I pulled the phone from my ear and looked at the screen. No signal. The bars that were usually present had disappeared completely, and I looked at them and felt a specific kind of frustration that was made worse by the fact that I had no idea what he had been about to say, that the sentence had ended in the middle of something that had been building toward something important and now there was just silence where the information was supposed to be.

I tried calling back immediately. Nothing. The signal was gone completely, which happened sometimes in this part of the compound, there was a dead zone near the east wall that Marco had mentioned once and I had not thought about until now.

I tried three more times. Nothing.

I set the phone on the nightstand and sat in the quiet of Luca's room and thought.

Something from three years ago. Something Bryan's investigator had found that Bryan had considered significant enough to tell me about, that he had been building toward carefully, that had made his voice go into that measured register. Something that existed in Luca's history before any of this, before me, before the gallery and the book title text and four months of something without a name.

Luca had told me things in the study two nights ago. About his father dying when he was sixteen. About Don Adriano taking him in. About the kind of world he had been shaped by from a young age. He had told me those things in the honest voice he used for facts, and I had believed them, and I still believed them.

But believing what someone chose to tell you was different from knowing everything.

I knew that. I had always known that. I had chosen, over the past weeks, to work with what Luca gave me rather than demanding everything at once because that was the only approach that had ever gotten me anywhere with him. Patient, present, reading the silences. And it had worked, in its way, it had built something between us that I had not expected and could not now imagine not having.

But Bryan's voice. The careful way it had gone when he said there is something else. Something from before you.

I picked up the hoodie from where it was draped over the foot of the bed, Bryan's hoodie, which I had brought with me when I moved rooms because I had not been ready to leave it behind, and I held it in my hands and I thought about the two men who were currently taking up space in my life and my heart and I tried to locate the version of myself who knew with absolute clarity what she wanted.

She was harder to find than she used to be. Not because she did not exist but because what she wanted had gotten more complicated than a single clear answer could contain.

I wanted Luca. That was real. The kiss was real and the four months before it were real and what I had felt in that room before the phone rang was the realest thing I had felt about anything since two pink lines on a test.

And I wanted Bryan. That was also real. Not the same way, not in the same language, but real in the way of something that had been growing quietly for six years and did not simply stop because the situation had become complicated.

I was twenty one years old and I was carrying twins for one man and falling in love with him and also in love with another man who was hiring investigators and finding things in the dark of Luca's history, and both of those things were simultaneously true and I did not have a framework for that.

I put the hoodie on over my clothes.

Not because of Bryan specifically. Because it was familiar and I was tired and the twins were doing something that felt like practicing football against my ribs and I needed something that smelled like before in a room that smelled like now.

I heard Luca's footsteps on the stairs a few minutes later. He knocked this time. One knock, which was still one knock, but he waited.

"Come in," I said.

He opened the door and looked at me on the bed with the hoodie on and the phone on the nightstand and the expression on my face that I had not managed to fully compose, and he read all of it in about two seconds with those eyes that had always seen more than I intended to show.

He came in. Sat in the chair across from the bed, which was the same position we had been in an hour ago when we were talking about the gallery and the painting and the first night, before everything shifted.

"The call dropped," I said.

"I know. There is a dead zone near the east wall. I have been meaning to fix it." A pause. "Was it important?"

I looked at him. At the steadiness of him, the composure, the face that had kissed me an hour ago and had not made anything of the interruption beyond stepping back and giving me space.

"He has been investigating you," I said. "Bryan. He hired someone."

Something moved in Luca's expression. Not surprise exactly. More like the acknowledgment of something he had already considered as a possibility. "What did he find?"

"I don't know," I said. "The call dropped before he could finish." I held his gaze. "He said there was something from three years ago. Something he called significant." I paused. "Is there something I should know about three years ago, Luca."

The room was very quiet.

He looked at me for a long moment. The kind of moment that told me the answer was yes, that there was something, that the question had landed somewhere real.

"Yes," he said. Simply. Without deflection.

"Then tell me," I said. "Before Bryan does."

He held my gaze. Something moved across his face that was, for the first time since I had known him, something close to reluctance. Not the controlled strategic reluctance of someone deciding how much to say. Something more personal than that. The reluctance of someone who has shown you most of themselves and is standing at the edge of the part they have not shown anyone.

He opened his mouth.

His phone buzzed on the nightstand.

He looked at it. Then at me. The name on the screen was Marco.

"I have to..." he started.

"Go," I said. "We finish this conversation tonight. I need you to promise me that."

He looked at me for a moment. "Tonight," he said. "I promise."

He picked up the phone and walked out and I sat in the chair in his room in Bryan's hoodie with the dead signal on my phone and the promise of a conversation I was not sure I was ready for, and I thought about what it meant to love someone and not know all of them yet.

And whether not knowing all of them yet was a reason to be afraid or just a reminder that the story wasn't finished.