Chapter 61: The Weight of Everything

Chapter 61: The Weight of Everything
Isabella couldn't sleep later that night. She lay on her side facing Luca who had insisted on staying and fallen asleep, watching him breathe, and thought about how easy it would be to just reach over and shake him awake.
She believed him now. About her father, about the execution order, about all of it being his father's doing and not his. That part had settled somewhere in the last few hours. What hadn't settled was everything she still hadn't told him.
The deal with Dante was still open. She hadn't given him anything real yet, but she also hadn't ended it. There was a listening device behind the curtain across the room, small enough to miss unless you knew where to look, and she'd known about it for days. Sofia's eyes seemed wrong whenever Isabella reached for something too fast… And Riccardo kept talking to Marco and Paulo in that low, patient voice of his, planting doubt about her one sentence at a time.
She hadn't told Luca any of it.
She lifted her hand and held it over his shoulder, close enough to feel the warmth off his skin. She tried out the words in her head. ‘I made a deal with Dante. There's a bug in this room. I think Sofia's reporting on me. I think Riccardo's working against you and I don't know who for.’
Said like that, all at once, it sounded less like honesty and more like a confession to a crime. She thought about two nights ago, the way his face had shut down for a second when he saw the way she refused to pick up the call in his presence. If that was what one unknown secret did to him, she didn't know what four would do.
She put her hand back down.
Not tonight. She wasn't going to dump them on him in the dark with no warning. She told herself that was a strategy and not cowardice, but she didn't fully believe it either way.
She drifted in and out for the rest of the night. Twice she woke up, certain she'd heard something downstairs, and both times it was nothing…a door settling, one of the dogs shifting in its bed by the kitchen. By the third time she gave up trying to sleep and just lay there watching the window go from black to gray.
Luca was already awake when the light changed, moving around the room fast and quiet, pulling clothes out of the closet that she recognized without needing to be told what they meant. Nothing bright, nothing loose enough to catch on anything. Boots instead of the shoes he usually wore around the house.
"You're up early," she said, propping herself up on one elbow.
"Tonight," he said, not looking up from tying the laces. "Vazquez's place in the Bronx. We’ll be making our move after dark."
She remembered the meeting… him laying out three phases of an operation from memory, not a single note in front of him, the whole room going quiet just from the way he carried himself into it. It had scared her a little then, and it was scaring her a little now too, but for a different reason. She understood better now what it cost him to be that calm about something like this.
"How long will it take?"
"As long as it takes." He stood, checked something in his jacket pocket, patted it once like a habit. "I won't be back until it's done. Could be tonight or in the morning."
"And what if it goes bad?" She asked, hoping she didn't sound as concerned as she looked.
"Then Marco will stay here with you, and you don't leave this house for any reason."
She almost told him then. The words were right there, close enough that she could feel the shape of them in her throat. But he was already halfway to the door, already somewhere else in his head, running through whatever he needed to run through before walking into a building full of armed men. It wasn't the night for it. She let herself believe that, mostly.
He stopped by the bed on his way out, kissed her forehead, one hand resting at the back of her head the way he did when he wanted her to feel safer than he looked.
"Rest," he said. "You and the baby. That's the only job you have today."
"Luca."
He turned back.
She wanted to say all of it. What came out instead was smaller. "Be careful, please."
He almost smiled. "Always."
Then he was gone, and she was alone in a bed that suddenly felt too big, listening to his footsteps go down the stairs to the men already waiting for him.
She got up eventually, showered, and dressed in something plain, and by the time she came downstairs the house already felt different. There were fewer voices in the hallway, and even fewer footsteps overhead. She passed two guards near the east stairwell she didn't usually see posted there, both of them nodding at her without a word, and she understood without asking that they'd been pulled off other duties to cover whatever gaps tonight's operation was going to leave behind.
Rosa was in the kitchen, humming something under her breath while she worked through a stack of dishes, and she looked up when Isabella came in.
"You should eat something, signora. You look pale."
"I'm fine, Rosa."
"You always say that." Rosa dried her hands on her apron and pulled out a chair anyway. "Sit. I'll make eggs and bacon."
Isabella sat, mostly because arguing took more energy than she had, and watched Rosa move around the kitchen with the ease of someone who'd worked in it long enough to do everything without looking. She thought about asking her something, anything, just to hear an ordinary voice talk about ordinary things for a few minutes. Instead she found herself watching the doorway, half expecting Sofia to appear the way she usually did around this hour, and feeling something tighten in her chest when she didn't.
"Where's Sofia today?" she asked, trying to keep her voice light and conversational.
Rosa shrugged without turning around. "Given the day off, I think. Something about her brother."
Isabella held that information in her head without saying anything. A day off, today of all days, the one day the house would be short-staffed and half its usual security pulled toward the Bronx. It could mean nothing… Sofia indeed had a brother, and brothers had problems, and problems didn't always happen on convenient schedules. But it could also mean Dante already knew what tonight was, and had told her to make herself scarce for it.
She ate the eggs Rosa put in front of her without really tasting them, and by the time she was done, the sound of engines starting up outside had already begun, one after another, cars pulling out of the drive toward whatever waited for them across the river. She didn't go to the window to watch. She'd watched him leave enough times now to know it never made the waiting any easier.
Marco found her not long after, standing near the study with his hands folded in front of him the way he always stood when he was about to say something he'd rather not have to say.
"Just you and me holding down the fort tonight," he said, with the kind of forced ease men used when they were trying not to sound worried. "If you need anything, I'm not far."
"I know, Marco. Thank you."
He nodded and didn't leave right away, lingering a little longer than the moment called for, and she wondered whether Luca had told him to keep a closer eye on her than usual, or whether Marco had simply decided that on his own. Either way, she understood the house had shrunk down to a handful of people she could actually trust, and an equal number she very much couldn't.
She thought about the curtain upstairs. About the drawer in the study that wasn't quite fully closed the last time she'd noticed it. About how much easier all of this would be to sort through with half the household gone for the night and nobody paying close enough attention to what she did with the hours in between.
She went back upstairs slowly, in no hurry, the way a woman with nothing on her mind might walk, and let the door to her room click shut quietly behind her.