IT'S COMPLICATED: THE MAFIA'S HEIRS

Chapter 14: Midnight Truth

I found him in the study at midnight.

Not intentionally. I had come downstairs because sleep had decided it was not interested in me tonight, which was becoming a pattern, and I had wanted water and possibly something to eat because the twins had opinions about 11pm that were becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. The study door was slightly open and the light was on inside and I almost walked past it, almost went to the kitchen and came back upstairs and let him have whatever he was doing in there alone.

Instead I stopped.

He was sitting at the desk with papers in front of him that he was not looking at, which told me he had not actually been working, that the papers were something to have in front of him while he thought about other things. He had taken off his jacket and rolled his sleeves up and he looked, in the particular light of that room at that hour, like someone who had put down a very heavy thing and was sitting with the absence of it.

He looked up when I appeared in the doorway.

"You should be sleeping," he said.

"You should be sleeping," I said back.

Something in his face shifted. Not quite a smile. The thing near one. "Come in," he said. "Or don't. Either way close the door."

I came in. Sat in the chair across the desk from him, which was a large leather thing that I sank into slightly, and looked at him across the surface covered in papers he wasn't reading.

"Tell me something true," I said.

He looked at me for a moment. "About what?"

"About you. About this. About any of it." I held his gaze. "We just sat through dinner with your father and I said no to him at his own table and you sat beside me and said I don't have anything to add and then he left and we cleared the table and we did not talk about any of it. And I am eleven weeks pregnant and I am sitting in your study at midnight and I think I deserve something true."

He was quiet for a long moment. The kind of quiet I had learned to wait out rather than fill.

"What do you want to know?" he said finally.

"Everything," I said. "Start wherever you want."

He looked at the papers in front of him. Then he leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling briefly in the way of someone deciding not how much to say but how to begin, which was different and more significant, and I stayed very still because I understood that this was one of those moments that could close if I moved toward it too fast.

"I was nineteen," he said, "when Don Adriano first brought me into the family's operations properly. Not as a visitor. Not as an observer. As someone with a function." He paused. "My father... my biological father, not Adriano, had been in Adriano's organisation for years. When he died, Adriano took an interest in me. He called it an investment. I called it the only option available to me at the time." Another pause. "I was not wrong about that."

"How old were you when your father died?" I said quietly.

"Sixteen." He said it without self-pity, which was somehow harder to sit with than if he had said it with some. "It was not a peaceful death. It was the kind of death that people in this world have when they have made too many mistakes with people who do not accept mistakes."

I looked at him. At this man who had been sixteen and fatherless in the specific brutal way of someone whose father's death was a message rather than an event, and I thought about the version of him that had existed before all the composure and the controlled silences, the version that had learned to be unreadable because being readable had been dangerous.

"And Adriano," I said. "He took you in."

"He saw something useful," Luca said. "Which in his language is the same as taking someone in. He gave me structure. Education of a specific kind. Access to things I would not otherwise have had access to." He looked at me steadily. "And in exchange I gave him loyalty and competence and the understanding that what I built inside his organisation was his before it was mine."

"And the arrangement with Selene?" I said. "That was part of it."

"That was always part of it," he said. "From the time I was old enough for it to be relevant. Two families. One alliance. Selene and I have known what we were to each other since she was seventeen and I was twenty. We were never in love. We both knew that. It was an arrangement between two people who understood the world they were in." He paused. "That does not mean it was nothing. It means it was a specific thing, and that specific thing had a shape, and that shape has been part of my life for a long time."

I sat with that. With the particular honesty of it, the way he was not pretending it had been less than it was in order to make me feel better, which I was beginning to understand was one of the most specific ways Luca Wolfe showed respect.

"And then I came along," I said.

"And then you came along," he agreed. Something moved across his face. "You were not part of any plan. There was no calculation. What happened between us happened because I allowed it to happen when I should have known better, and I allowed it because you were the first person in a very long time who talked to me like I was a person rather than a position." He stopped. Let that sit. "I did not expect that. I did not prepare for what it would do."

The study was very quiet. Outside the compound the night was doing its night things, and inside this room at this desk there were two people and a conversation that had been waiting to happen for weeks.

"In the hallway," I said carefully. "After Bryan left. You said so do I and walked away before I could answer."

He looked at me. Said nothing.

"And then at dinner last night, after Bryan visited, you said he loves you and then you said so do I and walked away again." I held his gaze. "You keep saying it and walking away, Luca. And I need you to understand that I am not built for that. I am not built for half of something. So if you are going to say it I need you to say it and stay in the room."

The silence that followed was the longest one he had ever given me. Long enough that I started to wonder whether I had miscalculated, whether I had pushed past whatever line existed between what he could say and what he couldn't.

Then he stood up.

He came around the desk and crouched down in front of my chair so we were eye level, which was something he had never done before, this deliberate act of making himself smaller, and he looked at me with the expression I had been trying to name since the ultrasound and finally, in this room at this hour, I understood what it was.

It was the face of someone who had spent a very long time not allowing himself to want things.

"I love you," he said. Plainly. Directly. In the voice he used for facts. "Not because of the twins, though they are everything. Not because of the situation, though the situation is what it is. Because of you specifically. Because of the way you said no to my father tonight at his own table and meant every word of it. Because of the way you cried at the ultrasound and tried to hide it. Because of the way you still wear Bryan's hoodie when you think I'm not looking and I have never once asked you to take it off because it is not mine to ask." He held my gaze without flinching. "Because you are the first person I have ever been in a room with who made the room feel different."

I looked at him. At this man crouched in front of my chair at midnight in his study telling me the truest thing he knew how to say.

"Luca," I said.

"You don't have to answer," he said. "I am not saying it to put something on you. I am saying it because you told me to stay in the room and this is me staying in the room."

I reached out and put my hand against the side of his face and he went very still, the specific stillness of someone who was not accustomed to being touched gently, and I felt something in my chest open up in a way that was terrifying and necessary and completely beyond my ability to stop.

"I know," I said softly. "I know I told you to stay and you are."

He turned his face slightly into my hand. Just slightly. Just for a moment.

Then his phone buzzed on the desk behind him.

He did not move immediately. Let it buzz. Then it buzzed again, and something in his posture changed in the way it changed when the world outside this room was requiring his attention, and he stood slowly and turned to look at the screen.

I watched his face.

Something moved across it that was not quite readable. He picked up the phone and looked at the name on the screen for one long moment and then he looked at me.

"I have to take this," he said quietly.

"Who is it? " I said, though some part of me already knew, had known from the moment his expression did that specific thing.

He looked at me for a moment. Something in his eyes that was almost an apology.

"Selene," he said.

He walked to the far side of the room and answered, and his voice dropped to something I could not make words out of, and I sat in the large leather chair with my hand still warm from his face and the word he had just said sitting in the room between us like something that had changed the shape of everything.

And I did not know whether to be certain or afraid.

So I was both.