All Chapters of MAFIA CEO'S OBSESSION: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

Alessandro Rossi“I know,” I said.The words came out of me like something that had been waiting behind my teeth for a week.Valentina stared at me.I watched her face go through it. Disbelief first, as though she’d misheard. Then a slow, white horror, the kind that crawls up a person’s throat before they’ve decided to feel it. Her lips parted. Her eyes went from my face to the phone in my hand, back to my face, back to the frozen frame of a small boy with my father’s eyes.“You know,” she said.“Yes.”“You know.”“Since the call.” My voice sounded calm. It was the calmest sound I’d ever heard. It had nothing to do with me. “Kira pulled the birth certificate that night. I counted the weeks. October nineteenth to July eleventh. There’s no other way it could be.”She took a step back.“You knew in the kitchen,” she whispered. “When I wrote the list. You knew when I said Elefante. You looked at me and let me say it, and you knew.”“I did.”“You knew in my bed.”“Valentina…”

Alessandro RossiI told my sister first.It was five in the morning, and she came up in the service elevator in a camel coat with her hair pinned back and a legal pad under her arm, looking like a woman who’d been awake all night. She had. So had I. We stood in the kitchen with the lights off and a pot of coffee between us, and the sky behind the glass was the color of an old bruise.“He’s mine,” I said.Isabella stopped with her cup halfway to her mouth.“The boy. The one Enzo took.” I kept my voice low. Gino was in the hall, Valentina asleep in my bed for the first time, and I would not raise my voice in a house with a child’s life on the line. “His name is Santiago. He’s two years old. He was born on the eleventh of July in a hospital in the Bronx, and his mother is Valentina.”She put the cup down.I watched it go through her. Shock, first. Then a rapid calculation, the lawyer’s mind snapping through dates and timelines and probabilities. Then, slowly, something that cracke

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

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

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