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Chapter 21: Three Rooms
publish date:
2026-05-05 03:19:11
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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
IT'S COMPLICATED: THE MAFIA'S HEIRS Chapter 18: Bryan's Call
"Hey Nat," he said. "I just wanted to hear your voice." I sat very still on the edge of Luca's bed and let those words land one at a time, the way Bryan's words always landed, without drama or calculation, just exactly what they were. "Hey," I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected, which was either a sign of growth or a sign that I had become very good at functioning while internally coming apart at the seams. I was not sure which one I wanted it to be. "How are you feeling," he said. "The twins. Everything." "Good," I said. "Everything is on track. The doctor came again yesterday." I pressed my free hand flat against my stomach, the automatic gesture I had developed over the past weeks, grounding myself in the most real thing available to me. "They're getting big." "Good." A pause. The kind that had warmth in it rather than discomfort, because Bryan's silences had always been the comfortable kind, the kind that didn't require filling. "Maya made your mom's joll
IT'S COMPLICATED: THE MAFIA'S HEIRS Chapter 17: Closer
Marco found me in the kitchen at noon. I had been trying to eat something that was not toast, which had been my primary food group for the past week, and I was standing at the counter with a bowl of something warm watching the compound through the window, watching the new guards move through their new positions with the particular efficiency of people who had been briefed thoroughly and were taking their assignment seriously. Everything looked different today. Same walls, same gate, same glass and concrete house. But the air inside it had a different quality, tighter and more deliberate, like the compound itself had drawn a breath and not yet let it out. Marco sat at the island without being invited, which was new, and looked at me with the expression that had become familiar over the past weeks, the expression of a man who had more information than he was required to share and was deciding, in this particular instance, to share some of it. "You want to tell me something?" I
IT'S COMPLICATED: THE MAFIA'S HEIRS Chapter 16: Inside Job
I did not go back to sleep. I sat on the edge of the bed with the photograph in my hands and looked at it until the image stopped being shocking and became something else, something I could examine without the fear getting in the way of the thinking. Me in the garden. Eyes closed. Hands on my stomach. The specific private posture of a person who believed, in that moment, that she was not being watched. The angle was from the east side of the garden. Low. Close. Someone who had been crouching, or positioned below eye level, with enough patience to wait for the right moment. Someone who knew the garden's layout. Someone who knew when I was out there and when the guards' rotations left that particular angle briefly unwatched. Not a visitor. Not someone who had gotten in and gotten out. Someone who had been here long enough to know the patterns. I went to Luca's door at 2am in the morning and knocked. He opened it in under ten seconds, which told me he had not been sleeping ei
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