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6

Author: YURI TATE
last update Petsa ng paglalathala: 2026-02-01 10:24:36

Alessandro Rossi

The sun set like it was bleeding out over the Hudson red streaks fading to black. I watched from the penthouse window, tie loose around my neck, scotch untouched on the desk. Day shift was over. Rossi Enterprises had closed deals, moved stocks, built walls of legitimacy that no one could see through. But night? Night was when the real work began.Isabella waited in the living room when I came out. She was nursing a glass of red, legs crossed on the leather couch, her dark hair p
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  • MAFIA CEO'S OBSESSION   50

    Valentina ReyesI walked until the streetlights ran out of patience and the city started to feel like a stranger’s dream.Medellín at three in the morning was not the city I’d imagined. It was quieter than Queens, and darker, with narrow streets that climbed and curled around the hills in tight switchbacks. Shutters were down. A dog slept on a doorstep with its nose under its tail. Somewhere above me, on a slope I couldn’t see, a radio played a song so soft and sad it could have been a lullaby.I didn’t know where I was going.I only knew I couldn’t stand still. If I stopped, the walls would close in. The word daughter would find me. And wife, and armor, and bridge, and a dozen other words that other people kept tying around my neck like ribbons.So I walked.It took an hour. My feet, healed enough now to carry me, throbbed in the borrowed sneakers. I passed a shuttered bakery, a church with a blue door, a plaza with a dry fountain. And somewhere in the gray hour before dawn, I

  • MAFIA CEO'S OBSESSION   49

    Alessandro RossiVictor’s house sat at the top of a hill in El Poblado, behind a wall twelve feet high and a gate that took three men to open.It was a white villa with a red tile roof and a courtyard full of lemon trees. Floodlights, dogs, men with rifles at every corner. A swimming pool that glowed turquoise in the dark. Valentina had gone straight to a guest room on the second floor with a maid and a blanket and a cup of tea she wouldn’t drink, and I had let her go, because she’d asked for ten minutes alone and I had learned that when she asked for something she meant it.It was two in the morning.We sat in Victor’s study, a long, dim room paneled in dark wood, lined with books and trophies and a stuffed jaguar in a glass case. A fire burned in the grate, though the night was warm. Victor sat behind a mahogany desk with a glass of aguardiente at his elbow. Gino stood by the door. Kira’s face glowed on a laptop propped on a side table.And in a leather chair by the window, wit

  • MAFIA CEO'S OBSESSION   48

    Valentina ReyesI laughed.I hadn’t meant to. It came up out of me like a hiccup, dry and cracked and entirely out of place in that kitchen, and once it started I couldn’t stop. I stood in the middle of the room with a toy truck in my fist and laughed until my ribs ached, and the men in the doorway looked at each other, and Alessandro’s hands tightened on my arms.“Valentina.”“I’m fine.”“You’re not.”“I’m great.” I wiped my eyes with the back of my wrist. “I’ve had a good week. I got kidnapped. I got sold at auction. I found out my boyfriend is a mob boss and the father of my child, and now, in the kitchen of the apartment where my son was sold by his aunt, a Colombian drug lord rolls up his sleeve and tells me he’s my dad.”“Valentina…”“Anything else?” I said, to the ceiling. “Anyone else want to tell me something? Is the Pope my uncle? Does anyone have a long-lost twin?”Nobody spoke.I looked at Victor.He hadn’t moved. He stood with his sleeve rolled back and his can

  • MAFIA CEO'S OBSESSION   47

    Valentina ReyesI’d never seen a man look at me the way he did.Not with hunger. Not with calculation. Not even with the dark, careful possession I’d come to know in Alessandro’s face. This was something else, something I had no name for: an old man in a gray suit, standing in the doorway of my son’s kitchen, staring at me as if I were a ghost he’d spent thirty years praying for.Gino’s gun came up.“Gino,” Alessandro said, very quietly.“Boss, he…”“Put it down.”A long, heavy beat. Then the barrel lowered, an inch at a time.The old man didn’t seem to notice. His eyes hadn’t left my face. His cane trembled against the floor. His mouth worked, once, twice, and when he spoke at last, the polished baritone I’d heard only secondhand was gone. What remained was cracked and soft and disbelieving.“Valentina.”I stiffened.“You know my name.”“Your friend told me.” He took a step into the kitchen. Another. “On the phone, from the plane. He said Valentina Reyes had a boy, and th

  • MAFIA CEO'S OBSESSION   46

    Alessandro RossiI got to the kitchen door a half second behind her, and I put my body between her and the floor.“Don’t look.”“I’m looking.”“Valentina.”“It’s not his.” Her voice was thin and hollow. “It’s too much, and it’s too old. It’s not Santi’s. Please. Let me see.”I held her shoulders. Her whole body vibrated like a plucked wire. After a moment I stepped aside, because I’d promised to stop making her decisions for her, and because the blood was already days old and the thing she feared most wasn’t in it.She stood in the doorway with the yellow truck pressed to her chest and looked.Gino crouched by the table. He touched the edge of the stain with two fingers, sniffed them, and made a small, grim sound.“Two days. Maybe three.” He rose. “Big man. Adult. A lot of it, boss. A man could bleed out from this, or close to it.”“Not a child.”“No.”I felt Valentina’s breath leave her in a long, shaky exhale.The trail led from beneath the table across the linoleum to

  • MAFIA CEO'S OBSESSION   45

    I’d never seen the city my mother was born in, and it looked exactly the way she’d described it.We came in over the mountains at dusk. The plane banked through a gap in the clouds, and the whole valley opened below us like a bowl of jewels: hundreds of thousands of lights, climbing the green slopes in terraces, orange and gold and white, wrapped in a soft blue haze. Red brick rooftops. A river like a silver thread. Hills so steep that houses clung to them like barnacles.La ciudad de la eterna primavera, my mother used to say. The city of eternal spring. She’d whisper it in the dark, in a rented room in Queens, when she was too sick to sit up. One day I’ll take you, mi vida. We’ll eat arepas in the park and I’ll show you where I fell in love.I pressed my forehead against the cold window and cried without making a sound.Alessandro didn’t say anything. He took my hand and held it in his lap, and I felt his thumb moving back and forth across my knuckles, slow and steady, the way y

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