Six Months

POV: Luciano

"Six months." Doctor Whitfield said it plainly, like he was reading a weather report, and I hated him for it even though none of this was his fault. "Perhaps less, if the treatment does not respond well. I am very sorry, Mr Rodriguez."

I did not look at him. I looked at my grandmother instead, propped up in the hospital bed with a spine straighter than mine had ever managed to be, and she was not looking at either of us. She was looking out the window like the news did not concern her at all.

"Say something," I said. My voice came out rougher than I meant it to.

"What is there to say, Luciano." She finally turned her head. Her eyes were the same eyes that had raised me since I was seven years old, sharp and clear even now, even with a tube in her arm and a death sentence hanging over the room. "I have run this family for forty years. I think I am allowed to die on my own terms."

"You are not dying." The words came out before I could stop them, stupid and useless, because we both knew better.

She almost smiled at that. Almost. "There is one thing I want before I go." She added

I already knew what was coming. I had known for years this conversation was somewhere ahead of me, waiting.

"No," I said, shaking my head as I said it.

"You have not even heard me ask." She smiled a little

"You want me married." My jaw was tight enough to ache. "You have wanted that since I was twenty two. The answer has not changed, even till now" I replied without looking back at her

"The answer will change today." Her voice was calm, but there was iron underneath it, the same iron that had built an empire out of shipping crates and buried threats.

 "I will not hand the company to a man with no wife and no name attached to his own, Lucianoa and certainly not with your uncle circling like he circles. A wife gives you something he does not have. Roots. A family the board can point to. Without it, I sign the controlling shares to a trust, and Marco will spend the rest of his life finding a way to bleed that trust dry."

"You would give him that much power just to make a point?" I retorted 

"I would give him nothing," she said. "I am giving you a choice. Marry, and the shares are yours the day I close my eyes. Do not, and I protect this family the only other way I know how, with lawyers and locks, and pray it is enough. It will not be enough. You know it will not be enough." She said the lost word softly 

I did know it. That was the worst part.

I did not answer her. I could not, not with my chest this tight, so I kissed her forehead and told her I would come back that evening, and I left before she could see whatever was happening on my face.

The city looked the same as it always did from the car, gray and glittering and indifferent, and I told my driver to drop me two blocks from the office because I needed air more than I needed to be on time for anything that morning. I took the east stairwell instead of the elevator, out of habit, because it was the one place in that building nobody ever tried to talk to me.

Someone was already there.

I do not know what made me stop. I have replayed it a hundred times since and I still cannot explain it cleanly. A woman in a cleaner's uniform, hair pulled back, eyes that did not drop the way most people's eyes dropped when they saw me coming. She looked at me like she was deciding whether I was a threat. Nobody looked at me like that, atleast not in the longest of time anymore.

I asked her name. She told me Mara Soto, easy, practiced, the kind of answer that comes too smoothly from someone who has said it a thousand times before.

I did not believe her. I could not have told you why, not in that moment, only that something about the shape of her face itched at the back of my memory like a word on the tip of my tongue.

By the time I reached my office, I could not stop thinking about her.

I picked up the phone before I had even sat down at my desk.

"Elena," I said, when she answered on the second ring. "I need you to do a background check on someone for me. A cleaner on our staff. The name on file says Mara Soto. I want everything you can get me by tonight."

"Everything meaning what, exactly?" She asked 

"Everything meaning I do not think that is her real name."

My phone buzzed again before I could set it down. It was Marco.

I almost let it ring out, because ignoring my uncle was more dangerous than answering him.

"Luciano." His voice was warm, easy, the voice he used right before he said something that was going to cost me. "I heard about your grandmother's news this morning. Terrible timing, do give her my love."

"How do you already know that." I asked coldly

"I make it my business to know things, nephew. You should try it sometime."he pause, long enough to be deliberate. "I also hear she is asking you to finally settle down. Difficult position for you. A man like you does not exactly attract women who want a ring instead of a headline."

"Is there a reason you called, Marco, or are you just enjoying the sound of your own voice." I asked him

He laughed, low and unhurried, the kind of laugh that had made grown men flinch across a boardroom table. "Only to say I hope you find someone quickly. Before I do."

The line went dead before I could answer him.

I set the phone down slowly, and I thought about the woman on the stairs, and I thought, God help me, that I already knew exactly what I was about to do.