CHAPTER THIRTEEN: ROCCO'S OBJECTION

ROCCO

I find him exactly where I expect to — standing at the same window he’s been standing at since the radio went dark, glass in hand, storm finally thinning to a grey drizzle over the vineyard rows.

I’ve known this man since we were both young enough to think the family business was something out of a story, back before either of us understood what it actually cost to keep a name like Romano standing upright in a city built to grind names like it down to nothing. I know his tells better than I know my own. Right now, watching the set of his shoulders, I know he’s already braced for this exact argument, which means some part of him expected me to disagree before I ever opened my mouth.

“You want to explain to me,” I say, not bothering to soften it, “why the woman who’s spent nine years gutting this family is currently sleeping in the east guest room instead of a hole in the ground.”

“She’s not sleeping. I doubt she’s slept at all.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Matteo turns from the window, and I see it then — something in his face I haven’t seen since his father died, a kind of tired certainty that used to worry me less when I understood exactly what was putting it there. “Because killing her doesn’t answer a single question that actually matters, Rocco. It just closes the only door we have into who’s really been doing this.”

“Or it removes the immediate threat sitting fifty meters from your bedroom.”

“She hasn’t been a threat since she lowered that gun.”

“You don’t know that. You want that to be true, which isn’t the same thing, and I’ve known you long enough to watch the difference happen in real time.”

He doesn’t argue with that, which worries me more than if he had. I’ve stood in this room through eleven attempts on his life, through his father’s funeral, through every terrible decision this family has had to make to survive one more year in a city that eats families like ours for breakfast, and I have never once seen him let a threat walk instead of ending it. Not once. Not even the times I privately thought he should have shown mercy he didn’t.

“I checked the ledgers myself, after,” he says, quieter now. “She gave me a date. It’s real, Rocco. Something did happen to her family nine years ago, and it happened close enough to this house that someone wanted her to believe it was us.”

“Someone,” I say. “You don’t know who.”

“No. Which is exactly why I need her alive and talking instead of dead and silent.”

I sit down across from him, because arguing standing up has never once worked on this man and I’m too tired tonight to keep pretending it will. “If Kessler finds out you’re harboring the Widow instead of executing her, he’s going to use it. You know that. He’s been looking for exactly this kind of story for a year — proof House Romano can’t be trusted to police its own house.”

“Then we don’t give him the story. Nobody outside this room knows she’s here except the men on that door, and I trust every one of them with my life, which is more than I can currently say for half the families at that Accord table.”

“And if she’s lying to you? If this whole thing — the hesitation, the name, all of it — is just a longer, smarter way of getting close enough to finish the job?”

Something flickers across his face, fast, and I understand, watching it, that he’s already asked himself that exact question and hasn’t fully answered it yet either. “Then I’ll have made a mistake,” he says finally. “But I’d rather make that mistake with my eyes open than make the other one — killing the one person who might actually be able to tell us who’s been doing this — and never finding out until it’s too late for the rest of us.”

I don’t have an answer for that. I’ve never had a good answer for Matteo when he gets that particular stillness in his voice, the one that sounds less like a decision and more like a man who’s already made peace with whatever it costs him. It’s the same voice he used the week his father died, telling me he was taking over the family whether the elders approved or not. I was wrong to doubt him that week. I don’t know yet whether I’m wrong to doubt him now, and not knowing sits heavier in my chest than I want to admit out loud.

I think about his father sometimes, more than I say out loud. Old Romano would have shot her the second she stepped through that window, no ledger, no conversation, no second thoughts about it after. There were years I thought that kind of certainty was strength. Standing here now, watching his son choose the harder, slower, more dangerous path instead, I’m no longer as sure which one of them actually had the harder job.

“Fine,” I say, standing. “But I’m doubling the men on that door, and I want eyes on her every hour, and the second she gives me one reason — one — I’m not asking your permission a second time.”

“Fair,” he says, and something in his shoulders loosens, just slightly, the particular relief of a man who expected a longer fight and got a shorter one instead. “Thank you, Rocco.”

“Don’t thank me,” I say, already moving toward the door. “Just don’t make me regret this. I’ve buried enough people this family loved. I’m not ready to add you to the list because you decided to trust the woman who was sent to kill you.”

Isolde is waiting in the hall when I step out, arms crossed, clearly having heard more of that conversation than either of us intended for her to. “Well,” she says. “That went about as well as I expected.”

“You were listening at the door.”

“I live here, Rocco. I don’t need to listen at doors, the walls in this house have never once respected anyone’s privacy.” She falls into step beside me, quieter now, some of the sharpness gone out of her voice. “Do you actually think he’s wrong?”

I don’t answer right away, because the honest answer keeps changing depending on which hour of this terrible night I ask myself the question in. “I think he’s taking a risk none of us would have taken,” I say finally. “I just don’t know yet if that makes him brave or just tired of being careful.”

Isolde doesn’t answer that right away either. We walk the rest of the corridor in silence, past the two men now doubled outside the east guest room, past a house that still smells faintly of gunmetal and rain even with the storm long since broken into ordinary grey morning. “For what it’s worth,” she says finally, stopping at the top of the stairs, “I don’t think he’s wrong either. I just think being right doesn’t always mean surviving it.”

I don’t have an answer for that, and I let the silence sit there between us a moment before we go our separate ways, because some things don’t need an answer so much as they need to be said out loud, once, by somebody who loves him enough to risk making him angry saying it.