Page 57 of Caterina
Partly because I needed a few minutes behind a locked bathroom door to feel like myself again.
Now I’m in soft lounge clothes, dark cotton pants, and a loose long-sleeved top, my hair still damp and hanging loose down my back as I pad barefoot into the kitchen.
The overhead light is low, warm against the stone counters and dark cabinets. One of the under-cabinet lights is on too, throwing a softer glow over the island. The oven hums quietly where Bianca’s food is keeping warm.
The whole kitchen smells like roasted garlic, herbs, tomato, bread, and slow-cooked meat. Comforting and familiar enough to make my chest ache in a way I was not expecting tonight.
I stop in front of the oven and just stand there for a moment.
The smell takes me straight back to earlier. Straight back to Regalia after lunch.
With Isabella tottering unsteadily across the floor, Victoria crawling enthusiastically toward abandoned bread, Stephano orbiting the table like a tiny tornado. Bianca’s face changing when Adrian laid out, in calm precise terms, how easy it would be for harmless-seeming scraps of information to become a map that could put us, or the children, in danger. Olivia pulling Isabella closer. Giovanni deciding in one moment that the children wouldn’t be brought in anymore for the time being.
And Adrian standing there in the middle of it all, not cruel, not trying to be dramatic, not even trying to be right in the self-satisfied way a lot of men do.
Just laying the truth on the table and letting everyone take it in. More like choke on it.
I resented him for it then.
I resent him for it now.
Maybe even more now.
Not because he frightened them.
Because he frightened them, and I could not convince myself he was wrong.
That is the part I really hate.
I pull the oven open, and the heat rushes out over my face. Bianca packed enough for five, of course. She always does. Neatcontainers covered in foil, bread wrapped separately in a kitchen towel so it won’t go hard. Efficient and generous in a way that makes me feel ten years old and cared for by my mother again. And completely intolerable right now.
I set the containers on the island and close the oven again.
My family has always been under threat.
That is the truth of it.
Not every day in some obvious way. Not always with notes and messages and last-minute route changes and the cold, sick knowledge that somebody close might be feeding information out.
But threat has always been threaded through the life I come from. It is part of the air. Part of the rules. Part of the things you learn not to say, and the things you learn not to ask, and the things you are taught to notice from such a young age that you eventually stop realizing they are strange.
Because of that, I think, maybe I stopped letting the idea of danger take up so much space.
Not that I ignored it.
I didn’t.
I knew this one was different. I knew Papà was taking it more seriously. I knew Vito was wound tighter than usual, knewAntonio’s mood when he reset my systems was not normal, knew there was a real possibility of a mole somewhere close. I knew all of that.
But some part of me still thought it would turn out all right.
The way it always does.
Or the way we tell ourselves it does after the dust settles and everybody who matters is somehow still standing.
I rest my palms on the cool stone of the island and stare at the closed containers.
I knew people were in danger.
