IT'S COMPLICATED: THE MAFIA'S HEIRS

Chapter 15: Target

I did not sleep that night either.

I went back upstairs eventually, when it became clear that Luca's phone call was not going to be brief and that standing in the doorway of the study waiting for it to end would have been both undignified and unhelpful. I lay in the dark with my hands on my stomach and listened to the compound and thought about everything that had happened in that room and what it meant and what Selene could possibly be saying to him at midnight that required a conversation that long.

I told myself it was probably the arrangement. Don Adriano's declaration at dinner that it remained in place, Selene calling to discuss what that meant for her, for Luca, for the shape of things going forward. I told myself it was administrative. Political. The machinery of the Vitale family doing what it did, which was operate at all hours and regardless of what else was happening in the rooms it moved through.

I told myself all of that and mostly did not believe it and lay in the dark being both certain and afraid exactly as I had said I would be.

Luca knocked on my door at seven the next morning.

Not his usual one knock and enter. He knocked and waited, which was different, and I called come in and he opened the door and stood in the frame the way he sometimes did when he had something to say and was deciding how to begin.

He looked like he had not slept.

"Selene called about her father," he said. "Don Adriano made contact with her last night after he left here. He gave her instructions regarding the arrangement." He paused. "She was calling to tell me that she has no intention of following them."

I looked at him. "She's refusing him."

"She is making her position clear," he said. "Which in her world carries significant risk." Something moved across his face. "She is not without courage."

"No," I said. "She isn't."

He looked at me for a moment in the way he had looked at me last night, before the phone rang, with that open quality that was still new enough to be startling. Then he said: "I wanted you to know before you heard anything else about it."

"Thank you," I said.

He nodded once. Turned to go.

"Luca," I said.

He stopped.

"Last night," I said carefully. "What you said. I want you to know that I heard it. All of it." I held his gaze across the room. "I am not ready to say everything back yet. But I want you to know that I heard it."

He looked at me for a long moment.

"That's enough," he said. The same words he had used about my learning to read his face, weeks ago, in a different conversation. That's enough. The way he had of taking what was available and not demanding what wasn't.

He left. And I lay there for a while longer and thought that of all the things Luca Wolfe was, patient was not the one I had expected.

Marco appeared at my door at nine with an expression I had not seen on his face before, which was the expression of someone who had received information they did not want and were now required to pass on.

"There's something you need to know," he said.

He came in and closed the door, which he had never done before, and sat in the chair near the window, which he had also never done before, and I sat up in bed and looked at him and waited.

"We received intelligence this morning," he said. "From a contact inside the Ferrano organisation." He paused. "Your name has appeared on a document. An internal communication between two senior members of the Ferrano family regarding assets and leverage connected to Luca."

I stared at him. "My name?"

"Yes."

"On a list."

"On a specific kind of list," he said. "The kind that identifies people whose proximity to a target makes them useful." He met my eyes directly, because Marco was the kind of man who delivered difficult information directly rather than around the edges. "You are on that list, Natalie. By name. With details that suggest they have been watching this situation for longer than we knew."

The room was very quiet.

I pressed both hands against my stomach, which had become my instinctive response to anything threatening, this physical act of placing myself between the twins and whatever was coming. "How long?" I asked.

"We don't know exactly. Long enough that they know you are here. Long enough that they know about the pregnancy." He paused. "Long enough that the document includes a photograph."

I went very still. "Of me."

"Taken outside this compound. Approximately two weeks ago." He said it steadily, professionally, the way he said everything, and I understood that the professionalism was a kindness, that the alternative was alarm and alarm was not what the situation required. "It was taken from a position that should not have been accessible. We are investigating how."

I thought about two weeks ago. About the garden, the small enclosed space Marco had approved for me because I had said I needed outside air. About standing in it with my face to the sun while Bryan visited, while Selene visited, while the world inside the compound shifted and rearranged itself around me.

Someone had been outside those walls watching.

"Does Luca know?" I said.

"He is being briefed now," Marco said. "I came to you directly because I did not want you to hear it secondhand and I did not want you to see his reaction to it before you had time to have your own."

I looked at him. At this man who had been a fixture of this compound since I arrived, who had looked at me with professional neutrality for weeks and who had just, quietly and without announcement, done something genuinely kind.

"Thank you," I said.

He nodded. Stood. "Security protocols are being adjusted as of this morning. There will be more people. Different positions. The garden access is suspended temporarily." He said it matter of factly, which was the only way he knew how to say things. "I know that is not what you want to hear."

"It's fine," I said. And meant it, which surprised me slightly. A few weeks ago the suspension of my twenty minutes of garden access would have felt like suffocation. Now it felt like the sensible response to a photograph taken through the compound walls by someone who wanted to use me as leverage against the man whose children I was carrying.

I was adjusting. I was not sure whether that was strength or something else.

Marco left.

I sat in the bed for a long time after that. Not panicking, which was its own kind of progress. Thinking, instead, about the shape of what I was in, about the specific reality of being the person whose name appeared on a Ferrano document, about what it meant for the twins who were still eleven weeks from existing in the world and were already on someone's radar as leverage before they had taken a single breath.

Luca appeared in my doorway twenty minutes later.

His face was doing the controlled thing, but underneath it something was moving that I could see now, could r******w, the thing that Marco had described when he said he hasn't slept since the photo, the thing that lived under all the composure and manifested as a particular quality of absolute attention when it was directed at me.

"You know?" he asked.

"Marco told me," I said.

He came in and sat on the edge of the bed, which he had never done, and looked at me in a way that covered the distance between assessment and something more personal, checking me the way Bryan checked me and the way my mother checked me but in the specific language of Luca Wolfe which was quiet and direct and left no room for pretending.

"I am going to fix this," he said.

"I know," I said.

"The Ferrano family has been building this for months. They have been patient and they have been careful and they thought they had more time before I identified the threat." His voice was level but the thing underneath it was not. "They miscalculated."

"What does fixing it look like?" I said.

He looked at me for a moment. "It looks like things I am not going to describe to you in detail," he said. "What I will tell you is that by the time the twins are born this particular threat will no longer exist."

I believed him. That was the thing I kept discovering, the thing I had not expected when I arrived in this compound with a duffel bag and absolutely no idea what I was walking into. I believed him. Not blindly, not without understanding what it meant to believe a man like Luca Wolfe about things like this, but with the specific informed belief of someone who had watched him operate for weeks and understood that when he said something would be handled, it was not a reassurance.

It was a fact stated in advance.

"Okay," I said.

He looked at me for a moment longer. Then he put his hand over mine on the bed, the same gesture as the kitchen counter, the same choice made again, and I turned my hand over under his and held it and we sat there for a moment in the quiet of a room where the morning light was coming through the curtains and somewhere outside there were more guards in different positions and somewhere in the city a family called Ferrano had put my name on a list.

And even in all of that, even with all of it pressing in from every direction, what I was most aware of was his hand in mine.

I went to bed that night at ten, which was early, because the twins had decided that today was a day for making their presence aggressively known and my back had been aching since afternoon and I was twenty one years old and tired in a way that went deeper than sleep could easily reach.

I was almost asleep when I heard it.

A sound. Small. The specific sound of something being slid under a door.

I opened my eyes.

The room was dark. The compound outside was doing its usual nighttime sounds. I lay still for a moment, telling myself it was nothing, telling myself Marco's new security protocols meant that nothing could get in, telling myself I was tired and imagining things.

Then I got up.

The envelope was on the floor just inside my door. White. No name on the outside. I stood and looked at it for a moment before I picked it up, and even as I was picking it up I was telling myself it was probably from Luca, probably something practical, something about tomorrow's schedule or the doctor's next appointment.

I opened it.

A photograph.

Me. In the garden. Looking up at the sun with my hands on my stomach and my eyes closed, the specific private moment of a person who thinks they are alone.

Taken from inside the compound.

Not from outside the walls.

From inside.

I stood in the middle of my room holding a photograph of myself taken by someone who was already in here, already moving through these spaces, already close enough to slide something under my bedroom door in the middle of the night, and I understood with a cold and absolute clarity that whatever Luca had said about fixing this, about the Ferrano family miscalculating, about the twins being safe before they were born...

Someone had already gotten in.