All Chapters of IT'S COMPLICATED: THE MAFIA'S HEIRS : Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Bryan listened to all of it without interrupting once. That was the thing about Bryan that I had always loved and occasionally found maddening, his capacity for stillness when it mattered, his ability to receive difficult information without making it about his reaction to it, to just sit with something and let it land before he decided what to do with it. Most people, when you tell them something significant, fill the silence with their response before you have finished saying the thing. Bryan had never done that. Not once in six years. He sat in the hospital bed with his broken arm in a sling and his bruised face doing its best impression of neutral and he listened to everything, the whole story. He listened to what Selene had told me in the hospital corridor. About Luca's mother being a Vitale. About thirty years of hidden history. About the twins whose claim to the family's legacy was not a courtesy but a constitutional right that superseded everything Don Adriano had been b

Luca left the hospital at 9:17 that morning. I knew because I watched him walk away through the long stretch of private corridor outside Bryan’s room, his jacket over one arm, phone already in his hand, Marco falling into step beside him with the quiet alertness of someone who knew exactly what kind of day this was about to become. The morning light coming through the hospital windows followed him partway down the hall, catching briefly against the dark fabric of his shirt before he disappeared around the corner completely. I stood there for a few seconds after he was gone, watching nothing and feeling the absence anyway. Hospitals existed outside normal time. Everything inside them felt suspended somehow, disconnected from the movement of the city beyond the windows. The world still turned outside. Traffic still moved. Meetings still happened. Coffee still got poured into paper cups in office buildings downtown. But inside hospitals, time stretched differently around fear and wait

The waiting room outside the emergency obstetrics unit did not feel like part of the same hospital. Everything about it was quieter. Not physically quiet, because hospitals were never physically quiet. There were still distant voices and rolling carts and machines beeping somewhere beyond the double doors. But the silence in this part of the building felt different. Heavier. Like everybody sitting there understood that the line between disaster and relief could change in a single sentence. I sat beside Luca on one of the grey chairs with my hands clasped so tightly in my lap that my fingers hurt. Dr Reyes had disappeared through the double doors twenty minutes ago after saying we are losing them. Twenty minutes. I had lived entire versions of my life in those twenty minutes. Luca had not moved once. He sat beside me in complete stillness, elbows on his knees, hands clasped together in front of his mouth, staring at the floor with an expression I had never seen on him before.

After the conversation between I and Luca that night, I dozed off without even realizing because I was already drained out from all the happenings in the last twenty four hours. I woke slowly to the sound of machines breathing around me. For a moment I did not remember where I was. Everything felt heavy and distant, my body wrapped in exhaustion so complete it almost felt peaceful. The room smelled like antiseptic and clean linen and the faint bitterness of medication. Morning light slipped through the partially opened blinds in pale streaks across the hospital floor, too soft for the violence of the last twenty four hours. Then memory came back all at once. The warehouse. The ropes around my wrists. The cold. Luca carrying me through the hospital doors covered in blood. Dr Reyes saying we were losing them. My hand moved to my stomach immediately. I closed my eyes when I felt the curve of it beneath the blanket and the tears burned unexpectedly behind my eyelids. The twins shifted

I don’t think either of us moved for a long time after that. Luca stayed leaning against the side of the hospital bed with his forehead resting lightly against mine, his hand still cradling my face carefully like he was terrified I might disappear if he let go too quickly. The monitors beside me continued their soft rhythmic beeping, steadier now, calmer, but the fear from earlier still lingered heavily in the room like smoke after a fire. I could still see it in him. In the tension sitting beneath his skin. In the way his shoulders had not fully relaxed. In the fact that every few seconds his eyes flickered instinctively toward the monitor beside my bed just to reassure himself the numbers were still stable. It hit me then just how badly I had scared him. Luca Wolfe did not frighten easily. I had seen men twice his age shake beneath a single look from him. I had seen him walk into rooms full of dangerous people with complete composure, cold and untouchable like nothing in the worl