Chapter 183 Isla

Chapter 183 Isla
Isla

The men lingered at the table after dessert in the way men did when the conversation had been good and nobody wanted to be the first to break it. I slipped out to the kitchen, partly to help Maria and partly because I needed ten minutes of quiet after three hours of paying attention to everyone in the room simultaneously.

I was at the sink when Sofia appeared in the doorway.

She came in and leaned against the counter beside me and looked at the kitchen with the comfortable ease of someone who had decided a room was safe.

"Can I ask you something?" she said.

"Of course."

She was quiet for a moment, choosing the words. "Does it get easier? The world he lives in. The things that come with it."

I turned the question over honestly, the way it deserved.

I thought about the first weeks,  the terror of the car chase, Enrico carrying me out of Marco's penthouse, the specific shock of a world I hadn't known existed opening up around me like a trap. I thought about the warehouse, and Adrianna, and the photographs of my own hallway taken without my knowledge. I thought about three AM perimeter walks and the ring of a phone at two in the morning that always meant something had changed.

"It doesn't get easier," I said. "The things that are hard stay hard. The fear is real. The risk is real." I looked at her. "You get more capable. That's different. You learn the shape of it, you develop the skills to navigate it, you build…I don't know, a kind of fluency. But easier isn't the right word."

Sofia was quiet, considering this with the same focused attention she'd given Ivan's legal questions and Dmitri's anecdotes. Not managing the information. Actually taking it in.

"Is it worth it?" she said.

I thought about Enrico on the terrace in the mornings, arriving with coffee he'd made exactly right without being asked, sitting beside me in the cold and watching the grounds with the steady presence of someone who had decided to be exactly where he was. I thought about his hand finding mine in the car. About sixteen hours of closing security gaps in the dark because someone had looked at me without my knowledge, because the idea of me being watched without knowing was something he couldn't leave unaddressed. About the way he said my name, specific, weighted, like it meant something particular to him that he didn't use other words for.

"Yes," I said. "Completely."

Sofia nodded slowly. She looked at the kitchen door, through which the sound of the men's conversation still filtered,  Marco's laugh, Dmitri's measured response, Ivan apparently still working through Sofia's question about prosecutorial jurisdiction.

"He's different with you," she said. "Marco. Than he is in other rooms."

"How so?"

"In other rooms he's the Don." She said it without drama, just accurate description. "He's composed and deliberate and very, very careful about everything he reveals." She paused. "With you he's just Marco. He forgets to be careful." She looked at me sideways. "He's more himself in a room with you in it."

I felt something warm and tight in my chest. "He's always been my brother," I said. "Even before I knew what that meant for us."

"I know," she said. "He talks about you constantly. Every story about the last year has you somewhere in it." She smiled, small and genuine. "I think I knew I liked him when I realised that the woman he talked about most wasn't a romantic interest. It was his sister."

I looked at her, this woman who had walked into a dining room full of organised crime figures and handled all of them with the specific competence of someone who had decided that competence was more useful than fear, who had asked Marco the right questions and let him be wrong about fishing and told him he looked terrified in the doorway and made him laugh by being simply, precisely herself.

"Sofia," I said.

"Yes?"

"He's going to fall completely in love with you."

She looked at the door again. At the sound of Marco's voice through it.

"I know," she said quietly. "I'm working on being ready for that."

"Are you?"

She considered it honestly, which was, I was learning, what she did with everything. "Getting there," she said. She straightened up from the counter. "Okay," she said. "Good."

She went back to the dining room.

I stood in the kitchen for a moment longer, listening to the sound of my family through the wall , all of them, the whole improbable, assembled, chosen collection of people who had found each other through violence and grief and the specific stubbornness of people who refused to stop.

Maria appeared from the pantry. She looked at me standing in the middle of the kitchen doing nothing practical.

"The one he brought," she said. "Sofia."

"Yes?"

"Good," Maria said, with the authority of someone who had watched this family for twenty-two years and knew what good looked like. She handed me a dish towel. "Now make yourself useful."

I laughed.

And went back to work.