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Elise's POV

The Vitale estate sat at the end of a private road lined with iron lanterns that my grandfather had imported from Florence when he built the original house. I had grown up counting them from the back seat of my father's car — there were forty-three. I used to fall asleep before we reached the gate.

I knew I was home when I reached thirty-eight and my chest loosened for the first time in seven years.

Don Victor was waiting on the front steps.

He was not a tall man but he occupied space in a way that had nothing to do with height — the kind of stillness that came from decades of never needing to raise his voice to be obeyed. His hair had gone fully silver since I last saw him in person and there were new lines around his eyes but he was still the most commanding presence I had ever stood in front of and I had stood in front of heads of state.

He looked at me — the hospital bracelet still on my wrist, my dress creased, my hand pressed against my side — and something moved across his face that he did not try to hide.

He opened his arms.

I crossed the steps and walked into them and for the first time since the cemetery I let myself feel the full weight of everything — the bracelet, the slap, the burial, the bullet, the baby I never knew I had and now never would. I pressed my face into his shoulder and I shook once, hard, and then I breathed and I was still.

"I have you," he said quietly, against the top of my head. The same words, the same voice, as every difficult thing in my childhood. "I have you, Elise."

I pulled back and looked at him.

"I need a doctor first," I said. "My stitches tore."

He turned immediately. "Marco—"

His right hand was already moving.

—

The estate's physician worked quickly and efficiently and did not ask questions, which was one of the many reasons Don Victor had kept him on for twenty years. I was re-stitched, re-bandaged and given a list of instructions I intended to follow because unlike this morning I now had reasons to be careful.

I sat in my father's study afterward — the room that smelled of old paper and cedar and the particular brand of cigarette he had smoked every evening since before I was born — and I drank the tea someone had brought without asking and I looked at the portrait of my mother on the wall.

She had died when I was nine. I barely remembered her voice but I remembered her hands — the specific cool weight of them on my face when she said goodnight.

"The news is already moving," my father said from behind his desk. He was reading something on his phone, his expression giving nothing away. "Three outlets have picked up that you were shot at the burial. Two of them have connected your name to mine."

"Good," I said.

He looked up.

"Let them connect it," I said. "I'm done hiding."

A pause. Something shifted in his expression — not surprise exactly, more like a door opening that he had been waiting a long time for someone to push.

"Adrian will panic," he said.

"Adrian is already panicking." I set down my tea. "His business runs on connections he thinks are his. Half of them are ours. The moment the association goes public his investors will start asking questions he cannot answer."

My father studied me the way he always had — not with pride exactly, more with the focused attention of a man assessing whether the thing he built had held up under conditions he had not anticipated.

"You've been managing this for some time," he said.

"Since year two," I said. "When I realized he wasn't going to."

He was quiet for a moment.

"I should have brought you home sooner," he said.

It was the closest Don Victor Vitale had ever come to an apology in my presence. I did not press it. There was time for that conversation — the real one, the one I suspected had layers I hadn't reached yet. There was time.

"I need access to the full network," I said. "And I need a briefing on the Greco situation. Marco told me in the car that there was an incident with a shipment last week."

My father nodded slowly. "There was. I didn't want to worry you while you were still—"

"Father." I met his eyes. "I'm home now."

Another pause. Then he reached into his desk drawer and placed a phone on the table between us — matte black, no case, a number I recognized on the screen.

My number. The one only the inner circle had.

La Signora was back.

I picked up the phone.