The Mafias Deadliest Rosé

Chapter 2 – The Devil's Son

The De Santis family did not hold ceremonies for power. Power simply moved, quiet as a tide, from one hand to the next — and on a gray Tuesday morning, it moved into Luca's.

"Effective today," Don Vittorio said, sliding a leather folio across his desk like he was passing his son a grocery list rather than three shipping routes, two casinos, and the loyalty of forty armed men, "the western operations are yours. Marseille, the ports, the Chicago accounts. You'll answer to no one but me."

Luca opened the folio, scanned it once, and felt something settle into place in his chest — not triumph exactly, more like the particular satisfaction of a key finally fitting a lock he'd been picking at for years. "And Damien?"

"Stays your right hand, as always." Vittorio's eyes flicked, briefly, toward the window, where Rose stood in the courtyard below, sparring with Marco in the cold morning light, moving like something poured rather than built. "You'll also need protection befitting your new position. Someone who won't hesitate. Someone who already knows how you think."

Luca followed his father's gaze and understood a half-second before the words came.

"Rose is your personal guard now," Vittorio said. "Effective immediately."

---

"Absolutely not," Rose said, twenty minutes later, arms crossed, standing in the doorway of what used to be Luca's father's old study and was now, apparently, Luca's. "I'm an assassin, not a babysitter."

"I didn't request this either," Luca said, not looking up from the papers on his new desk, which was a lie, because he had, in fact, stopped reading the same sentence four times since she'd walked in. "Take it up with my father."

"Oh, I intend to."

"Good luck with that." He finally looked up, and something in his expression — that infuriating, easy confidence, like the world had simply agreed in advance to go his way — made her want to throw something. "In the meantime, I have a meeting in an hour, and apparently I'm not allowed to walk there without you."

"I don't take orders well," Rose said.

"Neither do I," Luca said. "So I suppose we'll manage."

She hated that he was smiling when he said it. She hated more that some traitorous part of her chest had gone warm at the sight of it, the way it used to when she was seventeen and stupid and hadn't yet learned that wanting things got you nothing but disappointment in this house.

"Fine," she said. "But I walk in front. I choose the routes. And if you get yourself killed doing something reckless, I am not carrying your body home."

"Deal," Luca said. "Though for the record, I've never once needed carrying."

"There's a first time for everything, De Santis."

---

The meeting was at the docks, a cargo warehouse repurposed for a sit-down with a shipping contact who smelled faintly of fear and cheap cologne, and Marco was already there when they arrived, running security with a woman Rose didn't recognize — dark hair pulled back tight, three laptops open across a folding table, headset looped around her neck like a stethoscope.

"Elena Russo," Marco said, by way of introduction, and there was something in the way he said her name — too careful, too deliberate — that made Rose's mouth twitch. "She's running comms and cameras for the meeting. Elena, Rose."

"The Rose," Elena said, not looking up from her screens. "The one who took out Voss without leaving a print on anything, digital or otherwise. I reviewed the security footage afterward. Impressive work. Genuinely — I couldn't find you in eleven different camera angles, and I'm very good at finding people."

"Thank you," Rose said, and meant it, because competence was the only currency she respected.

"She's also terrifyingly good at her job," Marco added, with the specific enthusiasm of a man who'd clearly noticed several things about Elena Russo that had nothing to do with her job at all.

"I can hear you complimenting me from here," Elena said, still typing. "It's very sweet. Slightly unprofessional. Continue."

Marco went the particular shade of red that only happened to men who'd been caught, and Rose filed the moment away for later, because a man who blushed that easily was a man worth teasing mercilessly.

The meeting itself went smoothly enough — the contact was nervous but honest, numbers were agreed on, hands were shaken — but Rose spent the entire forty minutes with her attention split three ways: the exits, the contact's hands, and Luca, who stood too close to the warehouse's open bay door for her liking, half his body exposed to the street.

"Move," she said quietly, halfway through, hand finding his shoulder and pulling him two feet left before he'd even registered the words.

"I was fine," Luca murmured.

"You were an easy shot from that rooftop," Rose said, nodding toward the building across the lot without looking directly at it. "Fine doesn't keep you alive. I do."

Something shifted in his face — not annoyance this time, but a kind of startled respect, like he was recalculating her in real time. He didn't argue again for the rest of the meeting.

---

"They fight like they've been doing it for years," Damien said afterward, watching from the loading dock as Luca and Rose argued their way back to the car about whether the route home should go past the harbor or through the industrial district. Neither of them was actually angry. Both of them were smiling in the particular, furious way people smiled when they were enjoying themselves and didn't want to admit it.

"They fight like two people who've forgotten how to talk to each other any other way," Marco said, coming up beside him, still faintly pink around the ears.

"You noticed it too, then."

"Hard not to." Marco watched Luca hold the car door for Rose, watched her roll her eyes and take it anyway. "Question is whether the Don's noticed."

Damien didn't answer that, because he already knew he had.

---

That night, Vittorio summoned a man to his study whose name did not appear on any payroll, whose face had not been photographed since 2009, and whose only job for the past decade had been to disappear into the background of other people's lives.

"Watch her," Vittorio said, without preamble, sliding a photograph of Rose across the desk. "Everywhere. Every conversation, every person she speaks to, every hour she spends near my son. I want to know if she remembers anything. If anyone gets close enough to remind her."

"And if someone does?" the man asked.

Vittorio's face, for just a moment, showed the thing he spent every waking hour hiding from the rest of the world — not cruelty, but fear, old and deep and fourteen years buried. "Then you make sure they regret it," he said. "Quietly."

The man nodded once and left the way he'd come, without a sound, and Vittorio sat alone in the dark of his study, listening to laughter drift up faintly from the courtyard below — his son's, and the girl's whose whole life he'd built on top of a lie — and wondered, not for the first time, how much longer he could keep the walls standing.