Sienna POV
Three years had bled into the limestone walls of the estate.
The heavy silence Luca left behind had been filled with the clockwork precision of new routines.
I knelt in the foyer, smoothing the collar of Mia’s navy uniform.
She was six now, her eyes sharp and unsettlingly observant.
"Mommy," she asked, her gaze drifting to the oil portrait of her grandfather hanging in the hallway. "Where is my daddy?"
I didn't flinch.
I had rehearsed this answer in the bathroom mirror a thousand times, studying the micro-expressions of my own face until they were flawless.
"He abandoned his post, Mia."
I didn't say he was dead.
I didn't say he was working.
I used the brutal language of the world she was born into.
"A soldier who deserts his post is never allowed to return," I said softly, but with finality.
She nodded solemnly.
She understood rules.
Outside, the heavy honk of the armored private school transport echoed against the gates.
Two guards, hands resting near their holsters, waited by the wrought iron.
I watched her march out, her backpack bouncing rhythmically against her shoulders.
She was safe.
I turned back to the house.
Don Carlo was in the sunroom, the morning light catching the thin pages of his newspaper.
Nonna was in the garden, pruning her roses with a specific kind of violence that suggested she was imagining necks.
They were happy.
They finally had the child they deserved—a daughter who managed their investments, who transmuted their old-world blood money into clean tech stocks and commercial real estate.
I checked my phone.
I had a strategy meeting with the board of the logistics firm we used as a front.
I was the Vice President of Operations now.
My salary was three hundred thousand a year, and I had earned every single cent in blood and ink.
Before I left, I opened the encrypted browser on my phone.
Old habits died hard.
I checked the forum.
RatKing88 had been silent for years.
But today, a red notification pulsed on the screen.
Update: The mistress was a bore. The money ran out. Thinking of going back to claim what's mine.
My blood ran cold, then instantaneously hot.
I want my property back, he wrote.
Property.
That’s what I was to him.
A placeholder.
I looked at the Don in the sunroom, frail but peaceful.
I looked at the life I had constructed from the ashes of Luca's arson.
He thought he could just waltz back in?
He thought the door was still unlatched?
I typed a reply, my thumbs flying across the glass.
Ghosts don't own property.
I stared at the words, then deleted them.
He didn't deserve a warning.
I got into my car and drove to work.
If he wanted to come back, let him try.
He would find that the locks had been changed, and the canary had grown talons.
