HIRED BY THE DEVIL

Chapter Sixteen: The Dinner Pt 1

villa took forty minutes.

Enzo sat in the back with Luca the way they had sat in the backs of cars together since they were seventeen — comfortable in the silence, not needing to fill it. Jeremy drove with his usual unhurried precision, the city giving way gradually to wider roads and older trees and the kind of quiet that only existed on the edges of Milan where the money was old enough to afford space.

Luca had his phone in his hand but wasn’t looking at it.

“You’re thinking about what your mother is going to say,” he said.

“I’m not thinking about anything,” Enzo said.

Luca looked at him.

“I’m thinking about the Ferrara contract,” Enzo said.

“You’re thinking about what your mother is going to say,” Luca said pleasantly, and looked back at his phone.

Enzo said nothing further.

Outside, Milan disappeared behind them and the road opened up into the kind of evening that didn’t care what anyone was thinking about — soft and darkening, the trees catching the last of the light in a way that had nothing to do with board meetings or succession optics or mothers who had been waiting patiently for years and were done waiting.

Jeremy pulled through the gates at seven fifteen.

The villa appeared the way it always appeared — like it had been there forever and intended to remain so. Warm light in every window. The kind of house that looked, from the outside, exactly like what it was. A family lived here. A real one, loud and loving and entirely impossible to prepare for no matter how many times you arrived at its door.

Enzo looked at it for a moment through the window.

“Ready?” Luca said.

“I was born ready,” Enzo said.

Luca smiled. “You absolutely were not.”

Jeremy opened the door and they stepped out into the evening air.

Butler Tony had worked for the Salvatore family for twenty two years and had opened this door for every version of Enzo Salvatore that had ever existed — the small serious boy, the difficult teenager, the young man who had inherited an empire at twenty four and carried it without complaint. He opened it now with the warm unhurried smile of someone who was genuinely glad to see you and had never once needed to pretend otherwise.

“Young Master.” He stepped back to let them in. “Mr. Anderson. Welcome.”

“Tony.” Enzo shook his hand — not the handshake of an employer, the handshake of a man who meant it. “How are you?”

“Very well sir. Very well.” Tony’s eyes crinkled. “They’re all in the dining room. They’ve been there since six.”

From somewhere deep in the house came the sound of the family.

Not words exactly — just the quality of it. Laughter. Someone saying something that got cut off by someone else saying something louder. A sound that might have been Aiden or might have been a small controlled explosion. The warm, slightly chaotic music of a table that had been set for people who loved each other and had no intention of being quiet about it.

Luca tilted his head toward the sound with a smile. “There they are.”

“There they are,” Enzo agreed.

Something in his face — quietly, without announcement — became something else entirely.

The dining room was everything it always was.

The long table that had seated every version of this family across every important moment for thirty years was full tonight — candles lit, good dishes out, the kind of spread that Sophia Salvatore produced when she wanted everyone to understand that this meal mattered and they should behave accordingly.

Romano Salvatore sat at the head of the table — broad shouldered, dark haired going silver at the temples, with the same green eyes he had passed to his eldest son and the relaxed authority of a man who had built something real and knew it. Beside him, close the way she had always sat close, was Sophia — warm and beautiful with soft dark hair and the particular energy of a woman who loved her family so completely that the room itself felt it.

Alfredo Salvatore — Romano’s younger brother, easier in the way younger brothers were always easier — was deep in conversation with his wife Theresa, a small sharp woman with kind eyes who was currently pointing at Aiden across the table with the expression of a mother who had run out of patience approximately twenty minutes ago.

“I’m just saying,” Aiden was saying, with the confidence of someone who had never once been successfully argued out of anything—

“You’ve been just saying for forty minutes,” Theresa said. “Eat your bread.”

“I ate my bread—”

“Aiden.”

“I ate it very quickly—”

“AIDEN.”

Adrian sat beside his brother in the particular stillness of a man who had spent his entire life next to a small tornado and had made his peace with it. He was eating. Calmly. As though none of this was happening.

Matteo was laughing at something Alfredo had said, leaning back in his chair with the easy delight of a younger brother who had never once had to be the responsible one and found this deeply satisfying.

And at the corner of the table closest to the kitchen — because she had never once been able to resist getting up to check on something — sat Nonna Emilia.

She was small and sharp eyed and had the particular quality of a woman who had lived long enough to understand exactly what mattered and had stopped pretending otherwise. She had a glass of wine she had been nursing for an hour. She was watching the door.

The moment Enzo walked in she put the glass down.

“There he is,” she said. Not loudly. She didn’t need to be loud. “There is my boy.”

She was on her feet before he reached her.

Enzo crossed the room and bent down and let his grandmother hold his face in both her small hands the way she had done since he was old enough to walk toward her. Her eyes — dark and bright and full of everything she felt without apology — looked at him the way they always looked at him.

Like he was still hers. Like nothing that had happened since would ever entirely change that.

“Nonna,” he said, quietly and warmly.

“You’re thin,” she said.

“I’m not thin.”

“You’re thin and you’re working too hard and you didn’t call me on Tuesday.”

“I was in meetings on Tuesday.”

“You’re always in meetings.” She kissed both his cheeks firmly. “You need to eat more.”

“He just walked in the door,” Matteo said from across the table.

“You be quiet,” Nonna Emilia said, without looking at him. “I’m talking to my Enzo.”

Matteo looked at Aiden.

Aiden was already looking at Matteo.

“She didn’t even look at us when we arrived,” Matteo said, in the tone of someone raising a formal complaint.

“She told me I had a nice jacket,” Aiden offered.

“That’s it? A nice jacket?”

“It’s a very nice jacket.”

“He is my firstborn grandchild,” Nonna Emilia said serenely, still looking at Enzo. “He gets greeted first. This has always been the rule.”

“There is no rule,” Matteo said.

“There is absolutely a rule,” she said. “I made it. Sit down.”

Luca had appeared in the doorway behind Enzo and was already smiling with the particular joy of a man who was not family by blood but was family in every way that counted and had a front row seat to all of this.

“Luca!” Sophia was on her feet, both hands extended, the warmth in her face entirely real. “Come here, come here—”

“Aunt.” Luca kissed her cheeks and she held his hands and looked at him the way she always looked at him — like he was one of hers, which he was, had been for years. “You look beautiful.”

“Sit down sit down—” She was already moving, already arranging, already making sure everyone had what they needed because that was simply how Sophia Salvatore moved through a room she loved. “Romano, look who’s here—”

“I can see who’s here,” Romano said warmly, standing to embrace his son properly. His hand on Enzo’s shoulder — firm and real, the grip of a father who meant it. “You look well.”

“You look older,” Enzo said.

Romano laughed — a big real sound that filled the room. “Sit down before I change my mind about being glad you came.”

******