The Mafias Deadliest Rosé

Chapter 3 – Dangerous Partnership

The restaurant was Luca's choice, which Rose had argued against on principle — too many windows, too few exits, a valet stand that put half a dozen strangers within arm's reach of the car before anyone could vet them. But it was a meeting with the Kovač brothers, old money looking to move into new territory, and Luca had insisted on somewhere that didn't look like he was afraid of them.

"Confidence isn't the same as safety," Rose muttered, scanning the room for the fourth time in ten minutes, cataloguing exits the way other people catalogued small talk. Two waiters who moved like waiters actually moved. One busboy who didn't. A couple by the bar too interested in each other to be watching anything else, which made them safe, and a man alone in the corner nursing a scotch he hadn't touched in fifteen minutes, which did not.

"Confidence is half of safety," Luca said, not looking up from the wine list, entirely too pleased with himself for a man who'd spent the last two weeks being shadowed by someone who could kill him faster than he could finish a sentence. "Men don't shoot at people who look like they're not worth shooting."

"That is, statistically, the worst thing anyone has ever said to me."

He smiled, and it was the smile that had started to annoy her less and less over the past two weeks, warm in a way that didn't match anything else about the life he'd been raised into. "Relax. Marco's got the perimeter. Elena's got the cameras. What could possibly—"

The window behind him exploded.

Rose moved before the glass finished falling, one hand closing around Luca's collar and yanking him sideways out of his chair a half-second before the second round tore through the space his head had just occupied. Screaming erupted across the restaurant, chairs scattering, and Rose had her blade out and Luca's borrowed pistol in her other hand before most of the room had finished registering that the first shot had even been real.

"Kitchen," she said, low, already moving, dragging him low behind an overturned table. "Now."

"There's a man with a rifle on the rooftop across the street," Luca said, breathless, following her without argument for the first time since she'd met him again. "How did you—"

"I counted the angle of the window shatter. Ask me later if we're not dead." She shoved him through the swinging kitchen doors, ducked a startled line cook's tray, and put three rounds through the back exit's lock before it had finished swinging shut behind them. "Move."

The alley outside was narrow, wet with rain that had started an hour ago and hadn't let up, and Rose had already clocked the second shooter — ground level, coming around the dumpsters with a handgun raised — before Luca had even seen him. She didn't hesitate. She didn't ask permission. She crossed the distance in a heartbeat, disarmed him with a movement too fast for Luca's eye to fully track, and had him on the ground with his own gun against his throat before he'd finished falling.

"Who sent you," she said. Not a question. A demand with a deadline attached.

The man said nothing, which was, Rose reflected, a very stupid decision. Men who got paid enough to shoot at a De Santis usually got paid enough to know what happened to them if they got caught — and usually, that knowledge bought Rose exactly the kind of silence she didn't have patience for tonight, rain soaking through her dress, Luca still exposed six feet behind her with nothing between him and a second rooftop she hadn't cleared yet.

"Last chance," she said.

He spat at her feet instead, which was, in the end, the decision that cost him the chance to make any others.

By the time Marco and Damien arrived — sirens already wailing somewhere behind them, the rooftop shooter long gone into the maze of the city — Rose was crouched beside the body with the calm of a woman doing paperwork, and Luca was standing several feet away, soaked through, staring at her like he'd never actually seen her before.

"You good?" Marco asked him, breathless.

"I'm—" Luca looked at Rose again. At the blood on her sleeve that wasn't hers. At the way her hands, wrapped around the dead man's gun, hadn't shaken once through any of it. "I'm fine."

---

"You didn't hesitate," Luca said later, in the car, once the adrenaline had drained out of him enough to speak in full sentences. "Not for a second. I've been in this life my whole life and I still hesitate."

"Hesitation gets people killed," Rose said, watching the street instead of him, though her voice had gone quieter than usual. "It's not bravery. It's practice. I've had a lot of it."

"How much practice, exactly, does it take to disarm a man in under two seconds?"

She almost smiled. Almost. "More than you'd want to know about."

He didn't push, which surprised her, and for the first time since he'd come home, the silence between them didn't feel like a standoff. It felt, dangerously, like something closer to comfortable.

---

Back at the estate, Elena had the rooftop shooter's abandoned rifle case pulled up on three separate monitors before Marco had even finished toweling off the rain, tracing serial numbers and shipment records with the single-minded focus of someone who found bad men's mistakes personally satisfying.

"You're doing the face again," Marco said, watching her.

"What face."

"The one where you're two minutes from solving something and you get this little crease right—" he gestured vaguely at his own forehead "—here."

"I do not have a face," Elena said, without looking up, though the crease deepened. "I have a *process.*"

"Your process is very attractive," Marco said, and then looked immediately horrified at himself.

"Noted," Elena said dryly, though her ears had gone faintly pink. "Now hush, I found something you're actually going to want to see."

What she'd found, laid bare across her screen twenty minutes later for Damien and Luca both, was a shipment manifest that placed the rifle case inside De Santis territory three days before the attack — moved through a checkpoint that only family insiders had clearance to access.

"Someone inside gave them our restaurant schedule," Damien said grimly. "Down to the table number."

Luca's jaw tightened. "Find out who."

"Already started," Damien said. "It's going to be someone close. I don't like what that means."

---

The attack had frightened Vittirio more than he'd let anyone see. Not because Luca had nearly died — though that fear was real enough — but because for one unbearable moment, watching the chaos unfold on Damien's phone footage, he had thought: *if she dies before she remembers, at least she dies not knowing what I took from her.*

He watched the drawing curl and blacken and turn finally to ash, and told himself, as he always did, that it was mercy. A five-year-old's crayon rendering of a house with a red door and two stick figures holding hands beneath a sun with too many rays — evidence of nothing to anyone else in the world, and everything to him.

He thought of Sophia Carter's face in the last moment before he'd given the order, and of the way her daughter had not cried once, not that night nor in all the nights that followed, as though some instinct in her small body had already understood that crying changed nothing. He had called that strength, once. He had told himself he was proud of it.

Tonight, watching the last curl of ash settle into the grate, he wondered — not for the first time, and not, he suspected, for the last — whether what he'd actually built was a girl too broken to grieve, wearing a dead woman's name like a wound that had healed over wrong.

He did not entirely believe it was mercy anymore. He closed the stove door anyway, and locked it, and went back upstairs to be a father.