Demetrio's POV
I have been running the DeLeon operation since I was nineteen years old.
I took my first life at fourteen, my first territory at sixteen, and my father's throne at nineteen when it became clear to everyone in the outfit, including my father, that I was better suited to hold it than any man he might have chosen instead. I had never, in all of that time, put myself in a position I could not get out of. I had never lost control of a situation, a negotiation, a room, or myself.
And yet.
I was sitting in my car outside a bodega on the north side of Chicago at ten in the morning on a Tuesday, watching my stepsister buy coffee.
I would like to say there was a strategic reason for this. A security concern, perhaps, or a family obligation, some thread of rational justification I could follow back to a decision that made sense. I had spent the better part of three days constructing exactly that justification, telling myself that she was a liability now, that her presence in my family's orbit meant she needed to be assessed, monitored, managed the way any new variable was managed.
I was aware that this was not the real reason.
The real reason was that I hadn't slept properly since the wedding. The real reason was that her voice had taken up residence in the back of my skull and refused to leave. The real reason was that she had stood in that bathroom corridor and looked at me like I was a problem she had already solved, and something about that had gotten under my skin in a way I had no framework for, because nothing got under my skin. Nothing. That was not a personality quirk. That was a professional requirement.
She stepped out of the bodega with a coffee cup in one hand and a brown paper bag tucked under her arm, a loaf of bread visible at the top of it along with what looked like a bottle of wine. She was calling something back through the door to the barista inside, some familiar goodbye that got a laugh in response, and she was grinning when she turned toward the street, the kind of grin that took up her whole face and didn't consult the rest of her expression before arriving.
The barista.
I had been watching this particular transaction for three days now. Same bodega. Same order, oat milk flat white, which the barista rang up at the price of regular milk every single time, a fact I had confirmed by watching his hands on the register through the window. He laughed at everything she said. He leaned on the counter when she spoke. He had, on one occasion, leaned over the counter to brush something off her shoulder that I was nearly certain had not actually been there.
I tapped my fingers against the steering wheel once and looked away.
This was not my business.
She was my stepsister, technically, and she was a liability in the abstract sense that all new family connections were liabilities until they were understood and managed, but who she talked to and who laughed at her jokes in a north side bodega was not something I needed to be sitting outside a coffee shop monitoring at ten in the morning.
I was going to leave. I had already decided to leave. I reached for the ignition.
Then she stopped on the steps of her building.
There was a man coming down those steps, heading out just as she was heading in, and he stopped when he saw her and his entire face rearranged itself in the specific way that faces rearranged when they saw something they were very pleased about. Blonde, clean-cut, the kind of easy confidence that came from never having had anything difficult happen to him. He said something and she laughed, and then he reached out and touched her hair, just one curl that had fallen across her cheek, tucking it back with the casual familiarity of someone who had done that before and expected to do it again.
I was out of the car before I had made a conscious decision to be.
The door closed behind me harder than necessary. The morning air was warm and thick, summer pushing through the city the way it did in July, and I crossed the street with my hands in my pockets and my eyes on the back of her head, watching her shoulders tense the exact second she registered my presence, some instinct in her identifying me before she had even turned around.
She turned around.
The scowl was immediate and impressive. She had a truly excellent scowl, full commitment, no hedging.
"Well," she said, her chin coming up, "if it isn't my fratello."
I stopped two feet from her and watched the word sit in her mouth. Italian on her tongue sounded new, like she was trying it on, but she had said it deliberately and with full awareness of what she was doing, and dark amusement moved through me despite myself.
I stepped closer and dropped my voice so it didn't carry. "Do brothers usually know what their sisters taste like?"
She flinched. Controlled it immediately, but I caught it, and the blue of her eyes went cold and furious.
"Your brother?" The blonde man was looking between us with the confused expression of someone whose pleasant morning had taken a turn.
"Stepbrother," she said, clipping the word firmly, and then she turned to him with a smile that was warmer than anything she had aimed at me. "I'll see you later, Tony. Don't you dare start that movie without me."
He nodded, glanced at me once more with an expression that landed somewhere between wariness and something more territorial, and then he continued down the steps and onto the sidewalk. I watched him go. He didn't look back, which was the correct instinct.
Cellie shifted her grocery bag to her other arm, pulled her keys from her pocket and turned toward her door without a word to me. She pushed the key into the lock, twisted it, and walked inside. At the last second, before the door could swing shut behind her, she glanced back over her shoulder.
"You coming in or are you just going to stand there on my steps all day?"
It was not an invitation. It was a dare.
I followed her inside.