IT'S COMPLICATED: THE MAFIA'S HEIRS

Chapter 7: Blood Business

The phone call lasted four minutes.

I know because I counted. Standing in the driveway with my mom's hand in mine and Maya's eyes still fixed on the ultrasound images and the folder shaking slightly in my grip, I counted every second of the silence that had fallen over the compound the moment Luca answered that call and his whole body changed.

Not dramatically. Not the way it happened in films, where someone gets bad news and staggers or drops things or makes a sound. Luca Wolfe did not do any of those things. He simply went still in a way that was different from his usual stillness, turned slightly away from all of us, and spoke in a voice so low I could not make out a single word from where I was standing.

Four minutes. Then he hung up.

He stood with his back to us for a moment longer than was necessary. Just a breath. Just one. Then he turned around and his face was exactly what it always was and I would not have known anything had changed except that I had been watching him long enough now to notice the things that didn't move when they should have.

His jaw was tight in a way it hadn't been this morning.

"Inside," he said. To me. Then, with a politeness that surprised me because I hadn't known he had it: "All of you. Please."

My mom looked at me. I looked at Luca. Maya looked at the ultrasound images one more time and then closed the folder and handed it back to me without a word, and I understood that we were not done with that conversation but that she was choosing to set it aside for now, which was the most Maya thing she had ever done and I loved her for it even in the middle of everything.

We went inside.

The house did not get warmer with four people in it. If anything it felt more like itself with my mom standing in the kitchen looking at the stainless steel surfaces and the absence of anything personal and pressing her lips together the way she did when she had opinions she was choosing not to share yet. Maya stood near the door with her arms crossed, taking inventory the way she always did in new spaces, filing things away behind her eyes.

Luca put a glass of water on the counter in front of my mom without asking if she wanted it. She looked at it. Then at him.

"You're the father," she said. Not a question.

"Yes," he said.

"Of both of them."

"Yes."

My mom picked up the glass of water and took a sip and set it back down, and I could see her deciding things, could see the calculation happening behind her eyes as she looked at this man who had driven her daughter away in a black car and brought her back with an ultrasound folder and nothing resembling an explanation.

"What do you do," she said carefully, "for a living."

The pause before Luca answered was barely there. Half a second. "Import and export," he said. "Private logistics."

The most technically accurate lie I had ever heard.

Maya made a sound that was not quite a laugh. "Import and export," she repeated, looking around the kitchen, at the size of the house visible through the open doorway, at the compound walls through the window. "Right."

Luca looked at her. Just looked. And Maya, who was afraid of very few things in this world, held his gaze for exactly three seconds before she looked away. Which told me something about both of them.

"I need to speak with Natalie," Luca said, to the room in general. "Alone. Five minutes."

My mom opened her mouth.

"Five minutes," I said. "It's okay, Ma. I'll be right back."

She did not look convinced. But she stayed in the kitchen with her glass of water, and Maya moved to sit beside her at the island, and I followed Luca through the door and into the hallway and out of earshot.

He stopped near the foot of the stairs and turned to face me. And I could see it now, up close, the thing the phone call had done to him. Not fear. Luca Wolfe did not do fear, or if he did he had buried it somewhere deep enough that it had stopped showing. But something. Urgency, maybe. The specific alertness of a person who has just been told that the timeline they were working with has changed.

"That was Don Adriano," he said.

I already knew. I had known from the moment he answered. "He knows."

"He knows about the pregnancy. He doesn't have details yet." A pause. "He will."

"Selene told him."

"Selene told someone who told someone." He said it without emotion, which told me he had already processed the anger about it and moved past into strategy. "It doesn't matter how. What matters is that he is coming here."

The compound walls suddenly felt less like security and more like something else entirely. "When?"

"Two days. Maybe three." He looked at me in the direct, undecorated way he had that I was beginning to understand was not coldness but a specific kind of honesty. "I need you to understand something before he arrives. Don Adriano is not a man you misread. He will come here and he will look at you and he will make a decision about what you are to him. To his family. To his plans."

"And what am I?" I asked. "To his plans."

Luca was quiet for a moment. "The mother of his bloodline's next generation," he said. "Whether he welcomes that or resents it depends entirely on how the next two days go."

I stared at him. At the absolute composure of him, delivering information that should have been delivered with some kind of alarm, some acknowledgment that what he was describing was not normal, that a twenty one year old girl standing in a hallway being told that a mafia don was coming to assess her was not something that happened in ordinary lives.

"You're not scared," I said.

"Scared doesn't help."

There it was again. That word. That logic. The same thing he had said about crying, about panicking, about every emotion that didn't come with a practical application. And I had been annoyed by it every time before, had felt it as coldness, as absence.

Standing in that hallway looking at him, for the first time I wondered if it was something else. If the reason he didn't allow himself those things wasn't because he didn't feel them but because feeling them had never once in his life made anything better, and he had learned that the hard way in ways I probably didn't know about yet.

"What do I do," I said. "When he comes."

"You let me handle him," Luca said. "You don't volunteer information. You don't apologise for existing. You don't let him see that he frightens you." A pause. "And you don't let Selene speak to you alone."

That last one landed somewhere cold. "She'll be with him."

I nodded slowly. Filed it away next to everything else I was filing away in this new life of mine where the filing cabinets were overflowing after less than forty eight hours.

"Okay," I said.

He looked at me for a moment longer than necessary. Something moved across his face that I was starting to recognise without being able to name yet. "Go back to your family," he said. "I'll handle the rest tonight."

I turned to go. Got two steps.

"Natalie."

I looked back.

He was still standing at the foot of the stairs, and he was looking at me with that expression, the one I couldn't name, and for a moment neither of us said anything and the hallway felt very quiet and very small and I was aware of him in that particular way I kept being aware of him when I didn't want to be.

"The images," he said. "From this morning. Can I have one."

I looked down at the folder in my hands. At the ultrasound pictures inside it. At the two small flickering shapes that were his children and mine, printed on paper, something you could hold.

I opened the folder. Took one image out. Held it out toward him.

He took it. Looked at it for one second. Put it in his pocket without another word and walked past me toward the back of the house.

I stood in the hallway and looked at the space where he had been and told myself that the feeling in my chest was just leftover emotion from the appointment, from the heartbeats, from everything that had happened in the last twenty four hours, and that it had nothing to do with the way he had asked for that picture or the way he had looked at it before he put it away somewhere close to him.

I told myself that.

I went back to the kitchen.

Maya looked at me when I walked in. Looked at my face. And I watched her read something there that I hadn't meant to show, because Maya had always been able to read me and apparently nearly two days of catastrophe had not improved my ability to hide things from her.

She didn't say anything. Just looked at me with those careful eyes of hers.

Then she looked at the door Luca had gone through. Back at me.

"Natalie," she said quietly, so my mom wouldn't hear. "Tell me you're not."

I opened my mouth.

Outside, through the kitchen window, headlights swept across the compound wall.

A car. Not Luca's. Bigger. Darker. Moving slowly up the private road with the kind of unhurried certainty that belonged to people who had never once in their lives needed to hurry because the world rearranged itself around them before they arrived.

Luca appeared in the kitchen doorway behind me. I heard him. Felt the change in the room when he came into it.

He looked at the car through the window. And I saw it then, for just a fraction of a second before he locked it down completely.

Something that looked, on Luca Wolfe's face, very much like the thing he had said he didn't do.

Fear.

"Get upstairs," he said. Very quietly. "All of you. Now."