Page 58 of Caterina
I just… never let myself think as far as the children.
That realization sits heavy and ugly in my stomach.
Because how could someone hurt children?
The thought feels obscene, even here, even in this family, even in the world I grew up in, where violence is never as far away as “respectable” people like to pretend.
Children.
Isabella, with her solemn little face and uncertain steps. Victoria, crawling after bread. Emma, with her soft cheeks andblond curls. Cristiano, still just an infant who can’t sleep through the night. Stephano with his spoon-sword imagination. The twins, Mia and Elio, and the way their parents still dress them alike. And even my own half-siblings, Alessandra and Sebastian. So far apart in age, but still part of my world.
The babies. The toddlers. All of them so small, so breakable, so vulnerable.
They are the only truly innocent things in the whole damn organization.
How could someone out there want to hurt them?
Or at the very least, use them as leverage?
And someone out there wants to hurt them.
Or would, if it got them what they want
How could someone decide that was a line they were willing to cross?
The answer, of course, is that anyone who would send a threat to Luca Conti’s children has already crossed every line that matters. I know that. I do.
Still, knowing something and really letting yourself believe it are not the same.
I didn’t let myself go that far.
Adrian did.
That’s what he brought into Regalia. Not just procedures or risk assessments or some tidy professional system. He forced everyone at that table to look directly at the ugliest possibility and stop turning their faces away from it.
Was he overreacting?
I want the answer to be yes.
I want it so badly it hurts.
Yes, he’s good at what he does, yes, he sees danger everywhere because that’s his job, yes, maybe men like him are trained to assume the worst and build everything outward from that.
Maybe that is all this is. Maybe he is a man with military instincts and a security business and a brutal way of speaking, and maybe he is pulling every thread tight because that is what keeps him employed and respected and indispensable.
Maybe.
But then I think about the route change with Erica and Emma. The vehicle positioned to force a stop. The garage accessed with the correct code on the first try. The message.
The way Papà’s face looked when he said there were not many people he trusted with my safety right now. The way Vito accepted, however grudgingly, that Adrian was right about how badly they handled my side of this.
And the ‘maybe’ gets thinner.
I pull the foil back from one of the containers. Pasta. Something slow-cooked and beautiful under melted cheese, the sauce still bubbling slightly at the edges from the oven’s heat. The smell deepens, richer now. My stomach reminds me abruptly that annoyance and fear do not count as dinner.
I should plate it.
I should sit down and eat and pretend this is normal, or at least survivable.
