Page 86 of Double Trouble for the Mafia Prince

"I’m not asking anything." He backs off, palms raised. "I’m only saying this—be smart. Watch how they move. Don’t let their charm convince you this place is unshakable. And if you start to feel like the ground’s moving under your feet, I need you to tell me."

I meet his gaze for a long time.

There’s no threat in it.

No hint of violence or fear.

Just that grim determination I’ve seen before, the one he wears like armor when things are beginning to go wrong.

The worst part is, I'm afraid he’s right.

"I’ll think about it," I say quietly.

He accepts that. "Good. That’s all I came for."

He walks toward the door, pauses, and looks over his shoulder.

"You’re doing better than I thought, Gianna. I mean that. You’ve always had the sharpest instincts in the family."

I don’t respond.

Because there’s nothing I can say that won’t sound like a lie.

After he leaves, I stand there for a long time, hands at my sides, wondering what Rafa saw in this room that I haven’t.

Wondering how deep the cracks run—and whether I’m standing on one.

I find myself lingering by the glass-paneled doors that open into the private courtyard, where the twins’ laughter floats up in bursts.

The sky is beginning to shift—still too blue to be called dusk, but no longer bright.

A breeze stirs through the ivy that climbs the stone archways, and somewhere in the near distance, a gardener hums as he prunes back the hedges near the fountain.

Dante has returned from whatever he was doing since last night, and now kneels on the grass, a mess of curls clinging to his forehead and dirt streaked across one knee of his trousers.

Arietta has his hand caught in hers, clearly explaining the complicated rules of a game she just invented, while Alessia sits beside them, utterly absorbed in a drawing she’s making on a slate they’d found earlier.

Dante listens, really listens, and then laughs at something I can’t hear.

His shoulders shake.

His mouth curves into an expression that is unguarded and honest.

The way he lifts his eyes to the girls now is different.

He looks at them as if they belong to him, not in the possessive way mafia men mean when they say something is theirs, but in the way a man who never expected anything good in his life might look at the only two good things he’s ever been given.

I didn’t expect this from him, or the ease with which they took to him, either.

There was some distance at first, some hesitant smiles, but each day chipped away at it.

The way he knelt beside them at meals, pointing to the wrong forks and making up stories about how spaghetti should be eaten with a sword.

The way he insisted on learning the names of every stuffed animal they brought from the Rossi estate.

How he sat on the floor of their suite, assembling a bookshelf he claimed he could build faster than any professional, only to curse half an hour in and enlist the twins to hold the instructions.

They love him already.