IT'S COMPLICATED: THE MAFIA'S HEIRS

Chapter 11: Selene

He said it and walked away.

That was the thing I kept coming back to, turning over in the quiet of the next two days like a stone you keep picking up because you haven't decided yet whether to put it in your pocket or throw it into the water. So do I. Three words delivered in a hallway and then he was gone, and I had stood there with my hand on my stomach and my heart doing something irregular and absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do with the information.

I did not bring it up.

Neither did he.

We existed around it the way you exist around something large that has been placed in the middle of a room, navigating the edges of it, pretending it is not taking up the space that it is. Breakfast happened. The doctor came again, listened to two heartbeats, said everything was progressing well and looked at Luca's list of questions with the expression of someone who had not expected to be quite this prepared. Dinner happened. The compound was quiet in the way it had been since Maya and my mom left, and I was learning the rhythms of it, the sounds, the particular quality of the silence at different times of day.

I was in the garden, the small enclosed section near the back of the compound that Marco had approved after I had made it clear that I was going to lose my mind if I didn't feel the outside air on my face at least once a day, when I heard the car.

Not Luca's. The engine was different. Higher. More expensive in a different register, the kind of expensive that announces itself rather than simply existing.

I turned around.

The car came through the gate and parked near the main entrance and the door opened, and the woman who stepped out was exactly what I would have designed if someone had asked me to imagine the opposite of myself and make her beautiful.

Selene Vitale was tall in the way that read as effortless rather than inconvenient, wearing something that was simple and perfectly fitted and probably cost more than my semester's tuition, with dark hair pulled back in a way that managed to look both severe and elegant at once. She moved across the compound with the particular ease of someone who had been here before and remembered where everything was, and when she turned her head and saw me standing in the garden, she stopped.

We looked at each other across the space between us.

I had been imagining this moment since the night I heard her laugh drifting up through the floorboards and Luca had told me her name the next morning in a voice that was careful in a way his voice was not usually careful. I had been building a version of her in my head, half villain and half ghost, and the woman standing across the compound was both of those things and also somehow more complicated than either.

She was not what I had expected. Which was, I was learning, a recurring feature of this life.

She walked toward me. I stayed where I was because I was not going to walk backward into a wall in my own temporary garden, and we met somewhere in the middle of the space like two people who had been circling each other for a long time and had finally run out of room to keep circling.

"You're Natalie," she said. Her voice was low and precise and carried the faint trace of an accent I couldn't place exactly.

"You're Selene," I said.

She looked at me the way I had expected her to look at me, which was with the specific assessment of someone calculating the distance between what they anticipated and what they got. Then she looked at my stomach, briefly, and something crossed her face that I had already learned to watch for because I had seen it once before, when she came the first time and looked at the twins through me and her face did something unreadable.

"You're further along than I thought," she said.

"People keep underestimating that."

Something moved in her expression. Not a smile. Adjacent to one. "I imagine they do."

We stood in the garden and the sun was doing something pleasant and entirely inappropriate given the circumstances and I thought about what Luca had told me: she will try to make you feel like you are in her space. You are not. You were here first.

"How long have you known Luca?" I asked, because I had decided that the version of me who waited to be spoken to was not the version of me that was going to survive this particular conversation.

"Since I was seventeen," she said. "My father and his have been in business together for a long time. Luca and I have been..." she paused, choosing the word with the care of someone who understood that words were precise instruments, "arranged, for most of my adult life."

"He told me."

"I know he told you." She looked at me steadily. "He tells you more than I expected him to tell someone in your position."

"What position is that?"

She considered the question. "The unexpected one," she said finally. And there was something in how she said it that was not entirely unkind, which was the most disorienting thing about this conversation so far.

I had expected cruelty. What I was getting was precision, and precision was harder to defend against because it did not give you anything clear to push back on.

"Are you here because of Don Adriano?" I said. "Or because of yourself?"

She looked at me for a moment with an expression that suggested the question had surprised her slightly. "Both," she said. "My father wants a report. I wanted to see for myself."

"See what?"

"You." She said it simply. "What you are. What he has chosen over what was already arranged." Her eyes moved over me again, not unkindly, just thoroughly. "I needed to understand what I was dealing with."

"And do you..." I said. "Understand it?"

She was quiet for a moment. Then she said: "More than I did this morning. Less than I need to." She looked at my stomach one more time, and the thing on her face this time was something I almost recognised, something that sat in the neighbourhood of grief without quite being it. "Are you going to stay?"

The question landed differently than I expected. Not aggressive. Not a challenge. A genuine question, one woman to another, stripped of all the other things that should have been attached to it.

"I don't know," I said. Because it was true, and because lying to Selene Vitale in a garden while she looked at me like that felt like the wrong move entirely.

She nodded. As if that were the answer she had expected and perhaps the only honest one available.

Luca appeared at the back door of the house.

He took in the scene with one look, me, Selene, the space between us, whatever was on both of our faces, and crossed the garden in a way that was unhurried but covered the distance quickly, which was the Luca Wolfe approach to most things.

"Selene," he said. Not warm. Not cold. Precisely calibrated.

"Luca." She looked at him the way you look at something you have known for a long time and are in the process of relearning. "You look well."

"You should have called ahead."

"I did. Marco didn't tell you?" She glanced toward the house with the expression of someone filing that information away for later.

Something shifted in Luca's jaw. "Come inside," he said. "My father's expectations can be addressed inside."

She looked at him for a moment. Then at me. Then back at him, and whatever passed between them in that look was in a language I did not have yet, layered with years I had not been present for.

"Of course," she said.

She moved toward the house. At the door she paused and turned back and for a moment it was just the two of us again, her in the doorway and me in the garden, Luca slightly ahead of her and not yet aware she had stopped.

She looked at me for one long, careful moment.

Then she stepped close enough to speak quietly.

"He has never," she said, her voice low enough that it was meant only for me, "in all the years I have known him, looked at anyone the way he looks at you." A pause. "I want you to know that I am telling you this not to make you feel victorious. I am telling you because you look like someone who is still deciding whether to believe it." She held my gaze. "Believe it."

Then she turned and walked inside.

I stood in the garden alone with the sun on my face and the sound of the compound around me and the weight of what she had just said settling into me like something that had been waiting to land.

The woman who had the most reason in this entire situation to want me to doubt Luca Wolfe had just told me not to.

I pressed both hands flat against my stomach and stood there for a long time.

And somewhere inside me, in the place where I had been keeping the thing I was not ready to name, something shifted into a position it had not been in before.

Something that felt, for the first time, a little like certainty.