All Chapters of IT'S COMPLICATED: THE MAFIA'S HEIRS : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

56 Chapters

Chapter 11: Selene

He said it and walked away. That was the thing I kept coming back to, turning over in the quiet of the next two days like a stone you keep picking up because you haven't decided yet whether to put it in your pocket or throw it into the water. So do I. Three words delivered in a hallway and then he was gone, and I had stood there with my hand on my stomach and my heart doing something irregular and absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do with the information. I did not bring it up. Neither did he. We existed around it the way you exist around something large that has been placed in the middle of a room, navigating the edges of it, pretending it is not taking up the space that it is. Breakfast happened. The doctor came again, listened to two heartbeats, said everything was progressing well and looked at Luca's list of questions with the expression of someone who had not expected to be quite this prepared. Dinner happened. The compound was quiet in the way it had been since May

Chapter 12: The Don

He arrived the next morning. Not two days from now, not with warning, not with the courtesy of a phone call that would have given me time to prepare myself mentally and emotionally and sartorially, because apparently Don Adriano Vitale operated on a timeline that belonged entirely to him and extended to no one else. One moment the compound was quiet and the next Marco appeared at my bedroom door with an expression that was carefully blank in the way that meant something significant was happening, and said: "He's here." I had been sitting at the small desk near the window attempting to read something for my thesis, which I had reopened two days ago in an effort to hold onto the version of myself that existed before all of this, the version that had a degree to finish and a future that involved internships and literary journals rather than mafia compounds and dinner with men whose names opened doors and closed throats. I put the book down. "How long do I have?" I said. "Ten minute

Chapter 13: Collateral

The study door opened forty minutes later. I know because I counted again, the way I had started counting things in this house, measuring time in minutes because minutes were manageable in a way that the larger shape of my situation was not. Selene and I had sat at the dining room table for all forty of them, not talking exactly but not in silence either, existing in the particular company of two women who have more in common than either of them planned for and are still deciding what to do about it. She had told me, somewhere around the twenty minute mark, that Don Adriano had been preparing for this visit since the morning after the twins were confirmed. That he had made calls. That people had been repositioned. That the machinery of the Vitale family had been quietly, efficiently rearranging itself around the existence of two children who were not yet born and already changing things. "He moves fast," I said. "He always has," she said. "It's how he built what he built." "And

Chapter 14: Midnight Truth

I found him in the study at midnight. Not intentionally. I had come downstairs because sleep had decided it was not interested in me tonight, which was becoming a pattern, and I had wanted water and possibly something to eat because the twins had opinions about 11pm that were becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. The study door was slightly open and the light was on inside and I almost walked past it, almost went to the kitchen and came back upstairs and let him have whatever he was doing in there alone. Instead I stopped. He was sitting at the desk with papers in front of him that he was not looking at, which told me he had not actually been working, that the papers were something to have in front of him while he thought about other things. He had taken off his jacket and rolled his sleeves up and he looked, in the particular light of that room at that hour, like someone who had put down a very heavy thing and was sitting with the absence of it. He looked up when I app

Chapter 15: Target

I did not sleep that night either. I went back upstairs eventually, when it became clear that Luca's phone call was not going to be brief and that standing in the doorway of the study waiting for it to end would have been both undignified and unhelpful. I lay in the dark with my hands on my stomach and listened to the compound and thought about everything that had happened in that room and what it meant and what Selene could possibly be saying to him at midnight that required a conversation that long. I told myself it was probably the arrangement. Don Adriano's declaration at dinner that it remained in place, Selene calling to discuss what that meant for her, for Luca, for the shape of things going forward. I told myself it was administrative. Political. The machinery of the Vitale family doing what it did, which was operate at all hours and regardless of what else was happening in the rooms it moved through. I told myself all of that and mostly did not believe it and lay in the d

Chapter 16: Inside Job

I did not go back to sleep. I sat on the edge of the bed with the photograph in my hands and looked at it until the image stopped being shocking and became something else, something I could examine without the fear getting in the way of the thinking. Me in the garden. Eyes closed. Hands on my stomach. The specific private posture of a person who believed, in that moment, that she was not being watched. The angle was from the east side of the garden. Low. Close. Someone who had been crouching, or positioned below eye level, with enough patience to wait for the right moment. Someone who knew the garden's layout. Someone who knew when I was out there and when the guards' rotations left that particular angle briefly unwatched. Not a visitor. Not someone who had gotten in and gotten out. Someone who had been here long enough to know the patterns. I went to Luca's door at 2am in the morning and knocked. He opened it in under ten seconds, which told me he had not been sleeping ei

Chapter 17: Closer

Marco found me in the kitchen at noon. I had been trying to eat something that was not toast, which had been my primary food group for the past week, and I was standing at the counter with a bowl of something warm watching the compound through the window, watching the new guards move through their new positions with the particular efficiency of people who had been briefed thoroughly and were taking their assignment seriously. Everything looked different today. Same walls, same gate, same glass and concrete house. But the air inside it had a different quality, tighter and more deliberate, like the compound itself had drawn a breath and not yet let it out. Marco sat at the island without being invited, which was new, and looked at me with the expression that had become familiar over the past weeks, the expression of a man who had more information than he was required to share and was deciding, in this particular instance, to share some of it. "You want to tell me something?" I as

Chapter 18: Bryan's Call

"Hey Nat," he said. "I just wanted to hear your voice." I sat very still on the edge of Luca's bed and let those words land one at a time, the way Bryan's words always landed, without drama or calculation, just exactly what they were. "Hey," I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected, which was either a sign of growth or a sign that I had become very good at functioning while internally coming apart at the seams. I was not sure which one I wanted it to be. "How are you feeling," he said. "The twins. Everything." "Good," I said. "Everything is on track. The doctor came again yesterday." I pressed my free hand flat against my stomach, the automatic gesture I had developed over the past weeks, grounding myself in the most real thing available to me. "They're getting big." "Good." A pause. The kind that had warmth in it rather than discomfort, because Bryan's silences had always been the comfortable kind, the kind that didn't require filling. "Maya made your mom's joll

Chapter 19: Bryan's Findings

Maya came the next morning. Not announced. Not with warning. She appeared at the gate at nine with her car and her expression and a coffee she had clearly been holding for too long because she did not trust the compound's coffee, which was fair, and she looked at the new guards with the specific Maya Rollins assessment that she gave everything she was not yet sure about, and then she looked at me when I came to the door and her face did the complicated thing it had been doing every time she saw me lately, the thing that was love and anger and worry all mixed together in proportions that shifted depending on the day. "Bryan called me," she said, when we were inside. Not in the kitchen this time. In the sitting room, away from Marco's quiet presence, the door pulled to. "Last night. After he lost the signal." I looked at her. "He told you what he found." "He told me what he found," she confirmed. She sat down across from me and put the coffee on the table between us and looked

Chapter 20: The Whole Truth

I woke up before he did. That was new. In all the weeks I had been in this house, in all the mornings I had come downstairs to find Luca already in the kitchen or already in the study or already somewhere that told me he had been awake for hours before I surfaced, I had never once beaten him to consciousness. But I opened my eyes in the grey light of early morning and the room was quiet and his breathing beside me was the slow even breathing of someone actually asleep, genuinely asleep, and I lay still for a moment and listened to it and thought about what Marco had said. He has not slept properly since the night you arrived. He was sleeping now. Here, in this room, with me beside him and the compound secured around us and the Caruso conversation sitting between us like something that had been laid on the table and not yet picked up again. He was sleeping, and I lay in the grey light and watched the ceiling and thought about everything I still did not know and everything I needed

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