Bryan came on a Thursday. He texted an hour before, short, careful, the way he had been texting since the honest phone call, not too much and not too little, the specific calibration of someone who has accepted a situation and is learning how to exist inside it without losing himself, and I read the text sitting in the garden with the afternoon sun on my face and felt the familiar warmth of it, the warmth that had been there for six years and was not gone, just different now, reshaped into something that fit the new edges of things. Luca was in the study when I told him. He looked up from whatever he was working on and held my gaze for a moment, doing the calculation I had watched him do every time Bryan's name came up, not jealousy exactly, or not only that, but the specific assessment of what it meant for the security situation, who knew Bryan was coming, which route he would take, whether the Ferrano intelligence had eyes on anyone connected to this compound. "I will tell
Last Updated : 2026-05-07 Read more