I smiled back.
Good.
Let's see how long that smile lasts.
Then everything changed.
My father, who had been standing there, forced to watch them revel in their victory, forced to watch a family legacy forged over five generations of blood and silence slip into the hands of a man who had once begged to carry his luggage, suddenly coughed.
Violently.
Once. Twice.
And then he collapsed.
Blood spilled from his mouth, staining the marble floor in a horrifying instant. The old Don of the Valente Family, the man who had once commanded the Commission of the Five Families with a closed-eyed pause and a single word, crumpled like something hollow had finally given way inside him.
"Papa!" I screamed, my voice breaking as I rushed toward him.
"Salvatore!" my mother cried out, dropping to her knees beside him, her hands shaking as she tried to hold him up. Her fingers found the crucifix at her neck and closed around it so hard the chain bit into her skin.
The room erupted into chaos. Relatives surged forward from every direction. Someone lifted his head. Someone else tried to pour water into his mouth. Another pressed desperately at his pressure points, calling out instructions that no one could fully follow. Two of the old guard soldiers who had served my father for thirty years pushed through the crowd without asking permission, their faces grey.
Panic spread like wildfire, swallowing everything.
I looked at him. His face pale, his lips trembling, his breathing shallow and uneven. His heart had always been weak. Fragile. He had nearly suffered a stroke when I chose to undergo the hysterectomy for Nico, when the family doctor had told him his daughter would never produce a blood heir and the Valente line would end with her.
This… this might be the moment that finally broke him.
And Nico?
He just stood there, watching.
No urgency. No concern.
As if none of this had anything to do with him. He tugged the cuff of his left sleeve down over his wrist, a gesture so small and so automatic that only someone who had watched him for eighteen years would catch it. I caught it. I always caught it.