THE MAFIA WIFE

The girl on the screen

Chapter Two

Sebastian

The handle of my office door made a sharp sound.

I looked up from my laptop as Elijah entered. He closed the door behind him the way he always did — quietly, deliberately. A man who had spent two decades understanding what happened inside this office stayed inside this office. I nodded toward the chair on the other side of the desk without speaking.

He sat. I waited.

Elijah never wasted words. In twenty years he had never once walked into my office and opened with anything other than exactly what I needed to hear. It was one of the reasons he was still alive and still sitting across from me after all this time.

"Did you find out who she is?" I asked.

"Yes." He paused — the particular pause he used when what came next was unexpected. "And you will not believe it."

I held his gaze and let him arrive at it.

"She is Natalie Romano."

The last name caught me in a way I had not expected. Not like information landing. More like a door opening onto a room I had not known existed — sudden and quietly significant.

"The only daughter of Sergio Romano," Elijah continued. "Don of the Italian mafia."

I leaned back slowly.

Sergio Romano. A name I had spent years filing under dangerous, unpredictable, and not worth the cost of direct confrontation. A man whose greed was so deeply intertwined with his identity that he could no longer distinguish between what he wanted and what he believed he deserved. My history with him was long and unpleasant, ending in a betrayal I had not forgotten.

His daughter was in my city. Working a front desk job. Under a name that was not hers.

"You are sure?" I asked.

"She disappeared from Italy days after her father announced her engagement to Luciano Deluca." Elijah's voice was even. Certain.

"Interesting," I said. It was the kind of information that rearranged the furniture of a room entirely.

Elijah slid a folder across the desk. Inside was a photograph — the young woman from the café collision, taken from a distance, unaware of the camera. A copy of her birth certificate. She was smiling in it, standing beside a middle-aged woman — her mother, from the similarity in the jaw and the unconscious way they leaned toward each other.

The smile was not posed. Not the careful expression of someone performing happiness. It was open and unguarded and entirely genuine — the kind that surfaces only when a person has, for one moment, completely forgotten the world might be watching.

I sat with that photograph longer than I intended to.

"It's her," Elijah said.

I knew it was her. That was not why I was still looking.

There was something about the genuineness of it that unsettled me. I dealt with a world of carefully neutral expressions. I had not seen a genuinely unguarded face in so long that I had almost forgotten what one looked like.

And then there was the other thing. The memory of her sitting on my lap in the café. Thirty seconds. She had jolted upright almost immediately, stammering apologies, face flushed. The warmth of her. The slight weight of her. The way she smelled — something clean and faintly floral — and the expression on her face when she realised where she was, not quite hidden before she covered it with a flustered apology.

How would it feel, I thought, entirely against my will, to have someone smile at me the way she smiled at that woman in the photograph.

I looked away from the file.

"Do you want me to bring her to the basement?" Elijah asked. "We break her down. If she is a spy she will confess at Daniel's hands in under five minutes."

I stood, walked to the liquor cabinet, poured two glasses of whiskey, and set one in front of Elijah. The silence that followed was the calculating kind — the kind my office was built for.

She was not a spy. I had spent twenty years reading people, and the girl who had pressed a napkin against my hand and dragged me inside to find ice was not conducting surveillance.

"No," I said. "And do not call Romano yet."

Elijah looked at me steadily. He did not question it. But the quality of his attention sharpened.

"If Romano finds out his daughter is hiding in my city under a false identity, he will not believe she arrived alone. He will assume I took her for leverage, revenge, provocation. That leads to war. I am not interested in that war. What I need is to understand why she ran from the marriage. What she knows. What she is carrying."

"Put someone on her. Do you have her address?"

"She is living with Mrs. Kristy Malcolm," Elijah said. "Her mother's distant cousin."

The architecture of it — the mother arranging the escape from inside the Romano household, the cousin opening a door without questions, the girl walking through it with nothing but a forged name.

"I suppose we now know who helped her into my city," I said.

"I want cameras in her apartment. Living room and bedroom, not the bathroom. The feed streams directly to my laptop. No one else has access. Not you. Not anyone."

The expression on his face I had seen perhaps twice in twenty years. Genuine surprise. He had been with me long enough to know I don't do this. I surveilled territories, organisations, supply chains — never a single woman's apartment routed to my own laptop. In two decades this was a first.

I did not offer an explanation.

"Find out everything there is to know about Luciano Deluca. I want it before the day ends."

"Done." He stood, gathered the folder, and left.

I sat in the quiet and looked at the closed file for a long time after he was gone.

Weeks passed.

I told myself the surveillance was a precaution. A variable that required monitoring. A strategy — intelligent, considered, professional.

I believed it for four days.

By the fifth I was watching the feed on my phone during meetings.

I watched her rush to catch her morning bus, always slightly late. I watched her return home in the evenings, shoulders carrying the visible weight of the day — the exhaustion of a person learning what it felt like to work for something that belonged to them.

The need to see her was stronger than the trying.

Several days ago she woke earlier than usual. I watched her pull on fitted leggings, a black turtleneck, lace gloves — then sit on the edge of her bed to lace her trainers slowly and carefully, with a focused attention that applied equally to small tasks and large ones.

"Who is on watch at Natalie's apartment?" I asked Elijah.

"Thomas."

I called Thomas immediately. "She is leaving shortly. Not dressed for work. Report the moment you know where she is going."

"The gym," he reported fifteen minutes later. "With her colleague Maya."

I was in a meeting when it happened. Luca was reporting on a brawl between rival gang members at one of my casinos. I processed what he said with the part of my mind that never fully switched off. The rest of my attention was on the screen.

Last night she played the violin.

There was no sound from the feed. I did not need it. I could see it in the way her entire body changed when she lifted the instrument — a softening, a settling, like watching someone arrive somewhere they had been trying to reach all day. Hair in a rough bun. Eyes closed. She played with complete absorption — not practice, not performance, but something closer to breathing.

Then I saw the tears. Slow and quiet, moving down her face while her expression stayed composed, while her hands kept moving, as though the grief on her cheeks was simply another thing happening in the room. She did not stop to wipe them. She carried both things at once — the music and the weeping.

Something moved through my chest. I did not have a name for it. That was the part that bothered me most — not the feeling itself, but the absence of a category. I was a man who had a category for everything. Threat. Asset. Variable. Liability.

Watching a girl cry silently over a violin at midnight, I felt something I had almost concluded I was no longer capable of.

I felt it anyway.

"She is your enemy's daughter," I said to myself, the way you say something when you are trying to make it do the work it is no longer doing.

Sergio Romano was arrogant, greedy, and cunningly cruel. His sins were extensive and well documented, and I had personal experience of his betrayal that I carried with a particular coldness. Years earlier he had secretly transported trafficked minor girls along my routes — using my borderlines, my networks, my name as cover for cargo I would never have agreed to carry. I understood many sins in the name of business. But trafficking minors was never something I would do. It was the one absolute I had maintained without exception, and Romano had disregarded it with the arrogance of a man who believed his power protected him from consequences.

He had been wrong.

But none of that was the girl on the screen. She had run from her father's world with nothing but a forged name. She cried without sound, and she had grabbed a stranger's hand in a café because someone was hurt and helping them was simply what needed doing.

She was not her father.

"The gang members who fought in my casino," I said, cutting across Luca's report. "Take them to Daniel's basement. Let the message be clear."

Luca nodded.

I looked at the screen a moment longer. Then I looked up.

"Add audio," I said. "I want to hear her voice."

The room went quiet in a different way. Luca looked at Elijah. Elijah looked at me with the careful neutrality of a man who had learned certain expressions were inadvisable in this office.

Neither of them said a word.

That silence was its own kind of answer. And I found, for the first time in a long time, that I did not particularly care what the question was.