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Chapter 13: Collateral
publish date:
2026-05-01 10:43:59
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IT'S COMPLICATED: THE MAFIA'S HEIRS Chapter 24: Selene's Play
Three days passed quietly. Quietly by the compound's standards, which meant the security rotations continued and Marco was everywhere and there were people at the gate at all hours, but inside the house the quality of the air had changed since the sitting room, since I had told Luca I heard it and he had come to stand in front of my chair and I had told him what I heard. He had not said anything dramatic in response. He was not a man who did dramatic responses. He had looked at me for a long moment with that expression and then he had sat on the arm of my chair and put his hand in my hair and stayed there for a while, and that had been enough. More than enough. It had been exactly right. Something had settled between us in the days that followed. Not a resolution of everything, the Ferrano family still existed, Don Adriano still had positions he had not abandoned, the twins were still coming and I was still a twenty one year old literature student with an unfinished thesis, but a
IT'S COMPLICATED: THE MAFIA'S HEIRS Chapter 23: The Question
Getting quiet was harder than Maya made it sound. I tried it the next morning. Got up before Luca, which was becoming my habit, and went to the small sitting room at the back of the compound that nobody used very much, the one with the window that looked out over the garden that I was still not allowed into, and I sat in the chair nearest the glass and I tried to be still. The compound was not still. It was never entirely still, there was always Marco or the guards or the specific background hum of a place that was operational at all hours, but the sitting room had a quality of remove from all of that, a slight distance from the main sounds of the house, and I sat in it with my hands on my stomach and I tried to listen to the thing Maya had said I would hear if I got quiet enough. What I heard instead was the twins. A small movement, a shift, the particular interior sensation that I had become familiar with over the past months, and I pressed my hands flatter and thought about
IT'S COMPLICATED: THE MAFIA'S HEIRS Chapter 22: Maya Returns
Maya knew the moment she walked through the door. I do not know how. I had spent the morning constructing what I considered to be a very convincing version of normal, I had eaten breakfast, I had showered, I had responded to my mother's text with appropriate warmth and an appropriate amount of detail, I had sat in the sitting room with my thesis open on my laptop and my face arranged into the expression of someone engaged in productive academic work. I had been, by any reasonable external measure, completely fine. Maya walked through the door at eleven, looked at me for approximately two seconds, and said: "What did you do." Not a question. A statement delivered in the voice she used when she had already done the calculation and was simply waiting for me to confirm the answer. I closed my laptop. "Sit down," I said. "That bad," she said, and sat down. I told her. Not everything, because some things belonged to the rooms they happened in and did not need to be carried int
IT'S COMPLICATED: THE MAFIA'S HEIRS Chapter 21: Three Rooms
Bryan came in the afternoon. He had called ahead this time, which was progress, and Marco had run the new protocol efficiently enough that by the time Bryan's truck came through the gate the compound had adjusted around his arrival the way it adjusted around everything now, quietly and without making it an event. I had been in the kitchen when I heard the gate. Luca had been there too, standing beside me at the counter while I tried to do something useful with the ingredients that had appeared in the refrigerator, and we had been in the particular comfortable proximity that had developed between us over the past days, the kind where you stop noticing how close you are because close has become the default. His hand had found my waist at some point. I had not noted the exact moment it happened because it had happened the way things happened between us now, without announcement, without either of us making it mean something out loud, just a hand and a waist and the warmth of him
IT'S COMPLICATED: THE MAFIA'S HEIRS Chapter 20: The Whole Truth
I woke up before he did. That was new. In all the weeks I had been in this house, in all the mornings I had come downstairs to find Luca already in the kitchen or already in the study or already somewhere that told me he had been awake for hours before I surfaced, I had never once beaten him to consciousness. But I opened my eyes in the grey light of early morning and the room was quiet and his breathing beside me was the slow even breathing of someone actually asleep, genuinely asleep, and I lay still for a moment and listened to it and thought about what Marco had said. He has not slept properly since the night you arrived. He was sleeping now. Here, in this room, with me beside him and the compound secured around us and the Caruso conversation sitting between us like something that had been laid on the table and not yet picked up again. He was sleeping, and I lay in the grey light and watched the ceiling and thought about everything I still did not know and everything I needed
IT'S COMPLICATED: THE MAFIA'S HEIRS Chapter 19: Bryan's Findings
Maya came the next morning. Not announced. Not with warning. She appeared at the gate at nine with her car and her expression and a coffee she had clearly been holding for too long because she did not trust the compound's coffee, which was fair, and she looked at the new guards with the specific Maya Rollins assessment that she gave everything she was not yet sure about, and then she looked at me when I came to the door and her face did the complicated thing it had been doing every time she saw me lately, the thing that was love and anger and worry all mixed together in proportions that shifted depending on the day. "Bryan called me," she said, when we were inside. Not in the kitchen this time. In the sitting room, away from Marco's quiet presence, the door pulled to. "Last night. After he lost the signal." I looked at her. "He told you what he found." "He told me what he found," she confirmed. She sat down across from me and put the coffee on the table between us and looked
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