Page 179 of Double Trouble for the Mafia Prince

He didn’t need to, because when the fire rose from the earth and swallowed what was left of Operation Umber, the Salvatores rose too.

Not to claim what was beneath it, but to confirm what had always mattered: Nuova Speranza.

This city.

This house.

The blood they still had, not the ghosts they had buried.

Dante has made all of us proud.

He doesn’t give speeches.

He doesn’t bark orders.

He shows up.

Every day.

Every meeting.

Every decision.

His name no longer floats at the edge of things.

It is sewn into the fabric of the family, steady and inevitable.

There are men who used to roll their eyes when he walked into a room.

Those men now rise when he enters and keep their voices low when he passes.

He doesn’t demand it.

He earns it.

He comes home every night, and every night he finds his daughters asleep beside me or under the stars by the fountain or halfway through a book they made him promise to finish reading.

He never breaks the promise.

Not once.

Tonight, he brings wine.

We sit on the southern terrace where the rosemary climbs the wall and the cicadas hum between breaths.

The girls are asleep.

The estate is quiet.

My legs stretch across his lap, and his thumb traces circles along the curve of my ankle.

The moon is full.

I sip the wine and watch the garden stretch into shadows. "You should take a vacation," I tell him.

He smiles, not looking at me.

"We just dismantled a regime. This is the vacation."