(Leonardo POV)
The question landed like a crack in glass. Small, sharp, irreversible.
Why do you keep my mother's locket?
For a second, the words didn't sound like hers. They sounded like someone else's. Like my mother's voice years ago, soft and certain. Leonardo, promise me you'll protect what's left of me when I'm gone.
I blinked once, steadying my breath. The past was a thing I'd trained myself to lock away. Yet here she was, this girl, this collateral, dragging it back into the light.
"It's mine," I said finally. My voice came out rougher than I wanted.
Her gaze didn't waver. "It belonged to her. You could've thrown it away. You didn't."
I set the wine glass down, careful not to let it tremble in my hand. "You ask a lot of questions for someone who's still breathing by my choice."
"That's not an answer."
The flicker of defiance in her tone scraped against something buried deep. Most people knew how to step back when they hit a wall. She pressed harder.
I looked at the locket sitting on the table between us. Gold dulled with time, the hinge slightly bent. My mother's initials carved in a hand that trembled the day she died. I hadn't touched it since I took it from Marco's blood-soaked hand.
I should've told her the truth. That it was the last thing I had of a woman who'd taught me mercy before this world burned it out of me. That the sight of it both steadied and destroyed me.
But honesty was weakness, and weakness got people killed.
So I let my face go blank. "It's a trophy. A reminder that everything has a cost."
Her lips parted. I could see her trying to decide if she believed me. Her eyes didn't blink, didn't soften.
"You're lying."
It wasn't accusation. It was fact.
For a heartbeat, I couldn't breathe. The air between us thickened, too close, too aware. She shouldn't have been able to read me. No one did.
I pushed the chair back. The legs scraped against the floor, loud and final. "Dinner's over."
Her voice followed me as I turned toward the door. "You keep it because you can't let her go."
I stopped but didn't turn around. The flicker of the candle caught the gold of the locket, and something inside me twisted.
Without a word, I stepped into the shadows and let the door close behind me.
The hallway stretched before me, marble floors gleaming under dim lights. Guards stood at their posts, eyes forward, pretending they hadn't heard anything from the dining room. Good. They knew better than to acknowledge weakness in their Don.
My study was at the end of the east wing, past the library and the music room no one used anymore. The door was heavy oak, reinforced with steel. Inside, the air smelled of leather and old paper and the whiskey I kept in a crystal decanter older than Isabella.
I poured myself three fingers. Drank it in one swallow. Poured another.
The locket sat in my pocket, a weight I'd carried for three days since I'd reclaimed it. I pulled it out, set it on the desk. The gold caught the lamplight, threw shadows across the wood grain.
My mother had worn this every day of my childhood. I could remember the sound it made when she leaned over to kiss my forehead goodnight. The soft click of metal against metal. The faint scent of her perfume caught in the chain.
She'd died when I was sixteen. Cancer, slow and brutal, eating through her until there was nothing left but bones and pain and the locket she refused to take off.
My father had tried to sell it. Said we needed the money for the war that was coming, the families circling like sharks. I'd stolen it from his desk the night before he planned to pawn it.
Two weeks later, someone put three bullets in his chest.
I'd kept the locket hidden through the years that followed. Through the blood and the bodies and the slow climb to power built on other men's failures. Kept it locked away in a safe no one knew existed, behind books in my private office.
Until Marco Rossi broke in looking for cash and found something worth more than money.
The door opened behind me. I didn't turn. Only one person would dare enter without knocking.
"You let her see too much." Rico's voice was low, careful.
"She saw nothing."
"She saw enough to ask questions. Dangerous questions."
I picked up the locket, let it dangle from my fingers. The chain was delicate, meant for a woman's neck. My mother's neck.
"She's perceptive. That's all."
"She's dangerous." Rico moved into the room, closed the door behind him. "The men are talking. Saying you're distracted. Saying you're going soft."
My hand closed around the locket. "The men can say whatever they want. As long as they remember who gives the orders."
"And what orders are those? Keep the girl? Use her against her father? Or something else?"
I looked at him then. Rico had been with me for fifteen years. Saved my life twice, took bullets meant for me. He'd earned the right to question, within limits.
"What are you asking?"
"I'm asking if you know what you're doing. With her." He gestured vaguely toward the dining room. "Because from where I stand, it looks like you're keeping her for reasons that have nothing to do with the debt."
The words hung between us. True. All of it true.
I should've sent her back the moment I got the locket. Should've taken Marco's fingers as payment and called the debt settled. Should've forgotten about the girl with dark eyes who looked at me like she could see past the monster to whoever used to live underneath.
"She stays until I say otherwise."
"And when will that be?"
"When I decide she's no longer useful."
Rico studied me for a long moment. "Useful. Right."
He left without another word, the door clicking shut behind him.
I sat alone in my study, the locket in one hand, whiskey in the other. Through the window, I could see the east wing where Isabella's room glowed with lamplight. She was awake. Probably pacing, probably thinking, probably planning whatever move came next.
You keep it because you can't let her go.
The words echoed in my head, spoken in Isabella's voice but carrying the weight of my mother's. Two women, decades apart, both seeing through me like glass.
I opened the locket. Inside, the photograph was faded almost to nothing. My mother, young and smiling. My father before the violence made him hard. And me, maybe five years old, before I understood what my last name meant.
Before I knew that loving anything made you weak.
But looking at that photograph now, I wondered if weakness was keeping the locket or throwing it away. If strength was building walls or letting someone see past them.
Dangerous thoughts. The kind that got men killed in my world.
I snapped the locket shut, locked it back in the safe behind the bookshelf. Out of sight. Where it belonged.
But even after I'd hidden it away, I could still feel the weight of it. Could still hear Isabella's voice asking why I kept it.
And I knew, with a certainty that chilled me, that she wouldn't stop asking. Wouldn't stop pushing. Wouldn't stop trying to see the parts of me I'd buried under blood and violence and twenty-seven years of survival.
The question was whether I'd let her.
Or whether I'd destroy her before she got too close.