Chapter three
894 Words
The black armoured SUV rolled through the iron gates slowly, deliberately, the way everything Dante Moretti did everything like he owned the world.
Two escort vehicles flanked it , one ahead, one behind. Nobody got close to Dante without going through them first. No one actually dared to come close him in the first.
The moment the convoy appeared at the top of the driveway the entire estate came to attention. Guards who had been standing easy snapped straight. Maids who had been moving through the entrance hall stopped where they were.
A young maid pressed herself against the wall and whispered to the one beside her.
"He's here."
"I know." The other one whispered back without moving her lips.
"He looks exactly like his father."
"He looks worse than his father."
Nobody laughed. Nobody even smiled. Because the car had stopped and the door was opening and that was not the moment to be caught doing anything other than standing completely still.
Unless you want your fingers ripped off or better still….your head.
Dante stepped out.
He was tall , the kind of tall that changed the scale of everything around him. Broad shouldered, dressed in all black, except for his inner white shirt showing slightly on his chest.
His dark hair fell slightly onto his forehead and his golden brown eyes moved across the entrance with the slow sweep of someone who noticed everything and reacted to nothing.
The guards nodded as he passed.
The maids bowed their heads slightly.
He did not acknowledge them. He barely noticed he just walked straight ahead.
He walked through the front entrance like the house already belonged to him …because in every way that mattered, it did.
He found his grandmother in the sitting room at the back of the house.
The one room in the entire estate that felt like an actual home. Warm and cluttered with old photographs and soft furniture and the particular smell of the perfume she had worn since before Dante was born.
She looked up from her book when he walked in and her whole face changed.
"There he is." She said softly.
And just like that … in the space between the door and the armchair where she sat ,something in Dante's face changed too. He actually smiled.
He crossed the room and bent down and kissed her cheek.
"Nonna." He said quietly.
She took his face in both her hands the way she had been doing since he was four years old and looked at him properly.
"You are not sleeping." She said.
"I sleep fine."
"You look like your father when he is lying." She released his face and patted the seat beside her. "Sit."
He sat.
For a few minutes they just talked. Nothing important. Nothing heavy. She told him about her garden and the book she was reading and the cook who had been overseasoning the soup for three weeks.
He listened attentively with a sweet smile. You could tell he had missed everything about his Nonna. The only place he lets his guard down.
Don Ricardo walked in twenty minutes later.
He stopped briefly when he saw his son and then continued into the room and settled into the armchair across from them.
"You are back." He said.
"I am back." Dante replied.
His grandmother excused herself quietly … she had lived in this family long enough to know when the room was about to change temperature.
Don Ricardo waited until she was gone.
Then the conversation began the way their conversations always began.
They talked about the family's business interests. Territory that needed reinforcing on the east side. A political contact who was becoming unreliable. Two men in the organisation who had been talking too loosely and would need to be reminded of the value of silence.
Dante spoke precisely and without hesitation. His father listened and occasionally nodded. This was their language ,the one they had always been most fluent in.
Then Don Ricardo leaned back in his chair and looked at his son directly.
"You know why I called you home."
Dante was quiet.
"The condition Dante,a wife, an heir." He paused.
"The family cannot wait indefinitely. Your position is secure in every way but one and that one way matters more than all the others combined.
Without it you cannot take the seat. Without the seat the family is exposed. And an exposed family…."
"Is a vulnerable one." Dante finished.
"Is a dead one." His father corrected quietly.
The room was silent.
Don Ricardo leaned forward.
"This is not about tradition. This is about protection,legacy. About making sure everything we have built cannot be taken apart the moment I am no longer here to hold it together." He looked at his son steadily.
"I need to know it is in the right hands Dante. Yours. But your hands need to be tied to this family properly. Officially and Publicly."
Dante said nothing for a long moment.
Then he stood.
"I will handle it." He said.
Don Ricardo watched his son move toward the door with the quiet resignation of a man who had been hearing those four words for two years.
"Soon Dante." He said to his back. "It has to be soon."
Dante paused at the door for just a fraction of a second.
Then he was gone.
- Writer
