Chapter 7: One Hundred Missed Calls

VITTORIA'S POV

Alberto replied within four minutes.

That was the first warning sign. My brother never replied to messages quickly. He was the kind of man who read a text, set his phone down, made himself a coffee, thought about his response for twenty minutes, and only then typed back. Four minutes meant he had been staring at his phone, waiting for me.

The message read: "Vittoria, I have been awake for two days. Two days. Do you understand what that means? I don't care what you're involved in. I don't care who the man is. You are my blood, and I am coming for you."

Then a second message, thirty seconds after the first.

"And don't bother lying to me again. I know you're not with Diego."

I pressed my back against the terrace wall and read both messages three times. My chest felt like someone was slowly tightening a rope around it.

Alberto, knowing I was not with Diego, was manageable. Alberto deciding to come looking for me was not. Because Alberto asking the wrong person the wrong question in this city would lead him straight to the Giordano name, and the moment that happened, the one wall standing between my family and destruction would come down.

I typed back fast, faster than I should have.

"Alberto, I am safe. I promise you I am safe. But you have to trust me right now and stay where you are. If you love me, stay where you are. I will call you tonight."

I hit send, turned my phone face down against my palm, and stood very still for a moment, pulling air into my lungs slowly.

Tonight. I had promised him tonight.

Which meant I needed to find a way to be alone tonight without making Marcello suspicious, without triggering Ric, and without unravelling the thin, careful story I had constructed around myself like tissue paper armour.

Simple.

"You've been out here a long time."

I spun around.

Marcello was standing in the terrace doorway, one shoulder leaning against the frame, arms crossed over his chest. He was wearing a plain dark shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, and he looked completely relaxed in the way that I had come to understand meant he was paying his most careful attention.

"I like the view," I said.

He looked past me at the skyline, then back at me. "What were you reading?"

"Nothing important."

"You looked tense."

"I'm always tense," I said, and immediately regretted how honest it came out.

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not quite amusement. Not quite concerned. Something is sitting right in the middle of both. He pushed off the door frame and walked towards me, stopping at the railing beside me, close enough that his arm brushed mine.

We stood like that for a moment, both looking out at the city.

"My mother likes you," he said.

"She has a very quiet way of showing it."

"That's how she shows everything." He paused. "She asked me this morning if you were staying."

I turned my head to look at him. "What did you tell her?"

"I told her yes." He said it without hesitation, without looking at me, his eyes still fixed on the horizon. "Because you are."

It was not a question. It was not even really a statement. It was a fact he had already filed away somewhere and closed the drawer on, and the certainty of it sent a chill through me that had nothing to do with the morning air.

I looked back at the city and said nothing.

Lunch was served at a long table with too many chairs. Marcello sat at the head, Carmela to his right, Sera across from me, and Ric at the far end with his glass of water and his quiet, patient eyes.

He had not said a word to me directly since last night. Not one word. And somehow that was worse than anything he could have said, because silence in a man like that was not emptiness. It was preparation.

I focused on my plate and kept my answers short whenever Carmela directed conversation my way.

"You said you teach kindergarten?" Carmela asked, breaking a small piece of bread with clean, precise fingers.

"Yes. For the past two years."

"Do you enjoy it?"

"Very much." That part was not a lie. The classroom was the one place in my life that had always made sense to me. Small people with loud hearts who said exactly what they meant and meant exactly what they said. I missed it sharply in that moment, sitting at that table.

"Marcello was a difficult child," Carmela said, setting her bread down. "His teachers never knew how to manage him."

"Mama." His voice carried the same quiet warning as yesterday.

"I'm making conversation," she said simply, and Sera pressed her lips together to suppress a smile.

I looked at Marcello. "Difficult how?"

He met my eyes across the table. "I didn't like being told what to do."

"Some things don't change," I said before I could stop myself.

The table went briefly silent. Then Carmela made a sound that was unmistakably a laugh, short and controlled, but real. Sera looked at me with something close to respect. Even Marcello's expression shifted, that hard jaw loosening just slightly, his blue eyes warming by one degree.

Only Ric remained unchanged at the end of the table, watching me with that same measured look, his water glass held loosely in one hand.

"Castro," he said.

Just the one word. My surname. My false surname. Dropped into the middle of the table like a stone into still water.

Everyone continued eating. To them, it was nothing. To me,e it landed like a gunshot.

"That's an interesting name," he continued, his tone completely conversational. "Old family?"

"Not particularly," I said. My voice came out level. I was proud of that.

"Any connection to the Castros from Staten Island? Edmond Castro's people?"

My fork stilled on my plate for half a second. Just half a second, but in a room full of people trained to notice things, half a second is a lifetime.

"Distant," I said. "Very distant."

Ric nodded slowly, lifting his water glass to his lips. "Small world," he said quietly.

He did not push further. He set the glass down, turned to Marcello, and shifted the conversation to something about a shipment coming in from the south, and just like that, the table moved on.

But my appetite was gone.

He had mentioned Edmond Castro deliberately. He knew I had used Edmond and Patricia as my fake parents. Which meant he had already done more digging than I realised. Which meant whatever file he was building on me was closer to finished than I had hoped.

I spent the rest of lunch counting the minutes.

By nine that evening, Marcello was back behind the locked study door. I could hear the low murmur of voices inside, more than one, which meant people had come into the penthouse through an entrance I hadn't been shown yet.

I slipped into the bedroom, closed the door quietly, and called Alberto.

He picked up before the first ring finished.

"Vittoria." His voice was rough. Raw in the way that only happens when someone has been holding themselves together for too long. "Where are you? Are you hurt? I swear if any man has laid a single finger on you, I will—"

"Alberto, stop." I kept my voice low, one eye on the door. "I'm not hurt. I'm okay. But I need you to listen to me, and I need you not to ask questions until I am finished. Can you do that?"

A long pause. "Go ahead."

I took a breath. "I made a mistake. A big one. I ended up somewhere I shouldn't be, with someone I shouldn't be near, and right now the only way I stay safe is if nobody connects me to our family name. Not you, not Mama, nobody. You have to keep Mama calm. Tell her I went away for a few days to clear my head after the engagement fell apart. She'll believe that."

"Vittoria." His voice dropped. "Who are you with?"

"I can't tell you that right now."

"You can't tell me" He stopped himself. I could hear him breathing, slow and controlled, the way he breathed when he was fighting the urge to say something he knew he shouldn't. "Is it connected to what I warned you about? The Giordano name?"

My silence answered for me.

"Oh, God." His voice cracked on those two words. Just cracked, like something inside him split clean down the middle. "Vittoria, oh God. How did you"

"I didn't know. I swear to you I didn't know. And Alberto, listen, he doesn't know who I am. He thinks my name is Castro. As long as nobody says anything, as long as you stay hidden and keep Mama hidden, I have time to figure a way out of this."

"A way out?" His voice hardened. "You need to get out now. Tonight. Tell me where you are, and I will come"

"If you come here, he will know something is wrong. And if he knows something is wrong, he will dig, and when he digs, he will find the Alfonso name, and then it's not just me, Alberto. It's you. It's Mama. It's everyone."

Silence.

Long, terrible silence.

"Give me two weeks," I whispered. "Two weeks to find a way out that doesn't destroy us. That's all I'm asking."

I heard him exhale slowly. Then, in the quietest voice I had ever heard from my big, loud, protective brother, he said, "Two weeks, Vittoria. Not one day more."

"Thank you," I breathed.

"And Vittoria?" His voice dropped even lower. "Be careful. That man has never let anyone walk away from him. Not once in his life."

I opened my mouth to reply.

The bedroom door opened.

I spun around, and Marcello was standing in the doorway with his jacket off, and his sleeves still rolled up, looking at me with an expression that was impossible to read.

I pulled the phone from my ear in one smooth motion, but not before his eyes dropped to my hand, to the lit screen, to the call that was clearly still connected.

He said nothing. He just looked at me, at the phone, and back at my face.

And in the space of that silence, I watched something shift behind his eyes. Not anger. Not yet. Something quieter than anger and far more dangerous.

Suspicion, settling in like a key turning in a lock.

"Who were you talking to?" he asked.