HIS MAFIA HEIR SHE HID FOR SEVEN YEARS

a glass of scotch going warm and untouched at his elbow, the ice long since melted in

wing things before anyone thought to tell her.Dante's jaw tightened. "Who told you.""Doesn't matter who told me. What matters is whether it's true." A pause, deliberate, the kind she'd perfected over decades of making people wait for her next sentence. "Is there a child, Dante?"• • •He considered lying. He'd been considering it for six hours straight, sitting alone in the dark running through every version of denial that might buy him time to understand the situation himself before his family got their hands anywhere near it, before it became something managed instead of something felt."Yes," he said finally. There wasn't a version of this where lying to his mother bought him anything but a shorter runway and a worse conversation later.Silence stretched down the line, long enough that he could hear, faintly, the sound of her moving through her own house on the other end-a door, footsteps on hardwood, the particular quiet of a woman who never did anything without purpose, even at midnight. When Rosalind spoke again, her voice had shifted into something colder, more deliberate-the voice she used for business, not family, the one that had negotiated deals that made grown men flinch."A Marchetti heir has been walking around this city for seven years without a single person in this family aware of his existence," she said. "Do you understand what that means, if the wrong people find out before we do?""He's a child, Mother. Not a chess piece.""He's blood," Rosalind said, each word deliberate and precise, like she was laying stones across a path she'd already walked a hundred times in her head. "Which makes him both, whether you like it or not, whether that offends your sensibilities or not. The Castiglione family has been circling for an opening for three years now, ever since your father died and left a gap they've been trying to widen ever since. A grandson no one's