IT'S COMPLICATED: THE MAFIA'S HEIRS

Chapter 16: Inside Job

I did not go back to sleep.

I sat on the edge of the bed with the photograph in my hands and looked at it until the image stopped being shocking and became something else, something I could examine without the fear getting in the way of the thinking. Me in the garden. Eyes closed. Hands on my stomach. The specific private posture of a person who believed, in that moment, that she was not being watched.

The angle was from the east side of the garden. Low. Close. Someone who had been crouching, or positioned below eye level, with enough patience to wait for the right moment. Someone who knew the garden's layout. Someone who knew when I was out there and when the guards' rotations left that particular angle briefly unwatched.

Not a visitor. Not someone who had gotten in and gotten out. Someone who had been here long enough to know the patterns.

I went to Luca's door at 2am in the morning and knocked.

He opened it in under ten seconds, which told me he had not been sleeping either, and he looked at me and then at the photograph in my hand and his face did something that I had never seen it do before and have not forgotten since. It went completely, utterly still in a way that was different from his usual stillness. His usual stillness was controlled. This was the stillness of something that had passed through controlled and come out the other side into something colder and more absolute.

He took the photograph from me without a word.

Looked at it for five seconds.

"Inside," he said quietly, to himself as much as to me.

"Yes," I said.

He looked up at me. The thing in his eyes in that moment was not anger exactly, though anger was somewhere inside it. It was the specific focused quality of a person who has identified a problem and shifted entirely into the mode of solving it, where the emotions are not gone but have been filed away for later because they are not useful right now.

"Go back to your room," he said. "Lock the door. Do not open it for anyone except me or Marco."

"Luca..."

"Please," he said. Which was not a word he used often, and its appearance stopped me mid-sentence. "I need to know you are behind a locked door while I handle this."

I went back to my room. Locked the door. Sat in the dark and listened.

What followed was not loud. That was the thing I had not expected, the thing that made it more unsettling rather than less. I had expected raised voices, the sound of confrontation, something that matched the scale of what had been discovered. Instead there was almost nothing. Quiet footsteps at intervals. Doors opening and closing with careful precision. Marco's voice once, very low, saying something I could not make words out of. Luca's voice not at all, which was somehow worse.

He was operating in silence. Moving through the compound in the dark, methodical and unhurried, and the quiet of it was its own kind of statement about who he was when something required him to be that person.

I did not sleep. I sat in the locked room and held the photograph and thought about the garden and about the twins and about the fact that I had been standing in that space thinking I was safe while someone with a specific purpose had been close enough to document it, and I felt something shift in me that was not quite fear but was related to it, the specific hardening that happens when you understand something about your situation that you had been slightly softening before.

This was real. It had always been real. But now it was real in a way I could hold in my hands.

At seven Luca unlocked my door. He came in and looked at me on the bed, still dressed, clearly not slept, and sat in the chair across from me and looked at the photograph on the nightstand.

"Tell me," I said.

"We have identified the source," he said. "Not fully. But enough to act on." He looked at me steadily. "Three members of the household staff. A gardener who has been here for four years, a security rotation member who joined six months ago, and one of the kitchen staff." He paused. "All three had access to the eastern garden area. All three have connections, at varying degrees of separation, to the Ferrano organisation."

I stared at him. "Four years," I said. "The gardener has been here for four years."

"Yes."

"He was here before me?"

"Yes." Something moved in his expression. "This is not new. The Ferrano family has been building infrastructure inside my operation for longer than I knew. The pregnancy accelerated their timeline because it changed my vulnerabilities." He held my gaze. "They have been patient. I will give them that."

"What are you going to do?" I said.

"What I have already done," he said. "And what comes after."

I looked at him. At the composure of him, the complete unshaken steadiness, and I thought about the hours between two and seven while I had been sitting in a locked room listening to silence, and I understood that the silence had not been nothing. The silence had been Luca Wolfe operating at the full extent of what he was capable of, and that the three people he had identified would not be a problem going forward in any form.

I did not ask what that meant exactly.

I was not sure I wanted to know exactly.

"The security protocols are being overhauled completely," he said. "Everyone in this compound will be re-vetted. New rotations. New positions. Marco is bringing in people he has worked with personally for years, people whose loyalty is not a question." He paused. "It will feel different here for a while. More presence. Less freedom of movement."

"I understand," I said.

He looked at me for a moment. "You are taking this very calmly."

"I sat with it for five hours," I said. "I used up the not calm part in the dark."

Something moved across his face. "Are you alright?"

"I am adjusting," I said, which was the truest answer I had.

He nodded. Looked at the photograph one more time. Then he picked it up from the nightstand and I watched him fold it once, precisely, and put it in his jacket pocket, and I understood that he was putting it somewhere close to him the way he had put the ultrasound image somewhere close to him, these pieces of evidence of her existence in his world, kept rather than discarded.

I did not say anything about that. I filed it away with everything else.

At ten o clock I heard them leaving.

Three sets of footsteps through the compound. Marco's voice issuing instructions in a tone that left no room for response. The main door opening. I went to the window of my room that looked over the front of the compound and I watched.

Three people. The gardener, a broad shouldered man I had seen in the grounds every morning since I arrived, moving mulch and trimming things with the unhurried patience of someone who had been doing this work for a long time. A younger man in the dark clothing of the security rotation whose name I had never learned. A woman from the kitchen who had twice, without being asked, left a glass of warm milk outside my door in the evening because she had apparently decided that a pregnant woman needed it.

I watched them walk to the gate.

The gardener turned his head as he walked. Not toward the gate. Toward the house. His eyes moved up the front of the building in the particular way of someone taking a last look at something, and they landed on my window, and for a moment he looked directly at me through the glass.

I did not move.

His expression was not angry. It was not guilty. It was something more complicated and more unsettling than either, the expression of someone who had been doing a job and had been caught doing it and was now recalibrating what came next.

Then Marco said something and the gardener looked away and the gate opened and they left and the gate closed behind them and the compound was quiet again.

I stood at the window for a long time after.

Luca appeared beside me. I had not heard him come in, which was either a testament to how distracted I was or to how quietly he moved, probably both. He stood next to me and looked at the closed gate.

"The way he looked at me," I said.

"I know," Luca said.

"What does that mean. That look."

He was quiet for a moment. "It means he knows who you are and what you are to this situation," he said. "It means the people who sent him know the same thing." He paused. "It means they will send someone else."

I looked at the gate. At the quiet ordinary surface of it, metal and functional, the thing between this compound and the rest of the world. "So we are back to the beginning," I said.

"No," Luca said. "We are further along than the beginning. We know more than we did yesterday. We have closed three points of entry and we know the shape of their approach." He turned to look at me. "We are not back to the beginning. We are better prepared than we were."

I looked at him. At the certainty of him, the absolute unshaken conviction that this was solvable, that every problem had a solution if you approached it with enough clarity and enough patience.

"How do you do that," I said.

"Do what?"

"Stay that certain," I said. "When everything keeps proving that the situation is bigger than the last version of it."

He looked at me for a moment. "Because the alternative," he said, "is that I stop being certain. And I cannot afford to do that right now."

He looked at the gate one more time.

"Neither can you," he said. And then he left.

I stayed at the window. One hand on the glass, one hand on my stomach, looking at the gate that had just closed behind three people who had been inside this compound while I thought I was safe, and I thought about what Luca had said.

They will send someone else.

And I thought about the photograph in his pocket.

And I thought about what it meant to be the person whose existence changed someone's vulnerabilities.

And I stood there in the morning light of a compound that was already, quietly, rearranging itself around what had happened, and I understood that the war Luca had been fighting alone for years had just, without my choosing it, become mine too.