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Greco reached for the drive. Her fingers closed around it with sudden finality.

“The dead-man’s switch will be active within the hour,” she advised us. “After that, anyone who comes for me only releases the evidence faster.”

Raze watched the drive disappear into her hand.

“And if someone reaches you before then?”

Greco closed her folder and looked in Demitri’s direction.

“Then I hope your brother is as violent as he looks.”

35

DEMITRI

Dinner had ended more than an hour earlier, and the children were asleep upstairs.

Evidence of them remained throughout Raze’s house. A wooden horse lay on its side beneath the hall table, abandoned in the middle of some forgotten battle. One of Marigold’s ribbons hung from the arm of the sofa. Rose’s bottle waited beside the staircase, measured and ready for the moment she woke.

No one had cleared any of it away.

This was not the house I remembered. In my father’s time, the rooms had been orderly, guarded and built around men conducting business behind closed doors. Now toys lay beneath furniture, children slept above armed guards, and women filled the house with their laughter.

The adults had divided between the kitchen and the adjoining sitting room. The women were gathered around the kitchen island, their conversation carrying through the open doorway beneath the clatter of bowls and cupboard doors. From what I could hear, Samira had decided to bake a cake despite the hour, and everyone else had surrendered to the decision without pretending they had a choice.

Raze sat in an armchair with a glass of whisky near one hand and an encrypted phone near the other. Even at home, he never placed himself beyond reach of either comfort or violence.

Archie occupied the chair closest to the door. His attention drifted toward the kitchen whenever Tone’s voice rose above the others, as if he needed constant proof that she remained where he had last seen her.

I still had not grown accustomed to Archie’s obsession with my sister. It consumed him without apology. There was nothing restrained or reasonable about it. Tone existed at the centre of every calculation he made, and anyone who threatened her would learn how quickly his devotion could turn violent.

Marcello stretched across the sofa and examined the cigar Raze had given him as though it might contain poison. “Why does this taste like burnt grass?”

Raze looked personally insulted. “That cigar cost more than your first car.”

Marcello turned the cigar between his fingers.

Gianni laughed into his whisky while Raze muttered something about Marcello’s memory deteriorating with age.

I sat near the old fireplace and listened to them tear one another apart over cigars, stolen cars and incidents none of them remembered clearly.

Ten years had passed, but the rhythm remained. The insults had sharpened. The faces had aged. There were wives in the kitchen, children upstairs and scars none of us had carried the last time we sat together. I had spent a decade telling myself that leaving was the right thing to do. Yet the family had continued without me, building lives around the space I abandoned. They had learned to laugh again. They had married, become fathers and carried one another through losses I had not been present to witness.

No one accused me of missing those years. They didn’t need to. I felt every one of them while sitting among the people who had survived my absence.

Through the open doorway, Adriana stood at the kitchen island with the women. Her sleeves were pushed to her elbows, and a streak of flour marked one cheek. She broke chocolate into a ceramic bowl while Samira whisked eggs and sugar beside her. Tone stood at the stove, stirring milk for hot chocolate, while Izzy leaned against the counter with a bowl of pistachios and offered opinions no one had requested.

Adriana laughed at something she said. The sound reached into the sitting room and pulled my attention away from the men around me. I watched her without meaning to. She looked different beneath the warm kitchen lights. The fear that usually tightened her shoulders had eased. Her hair had slipped forward as she worked, and she kept pushing it back with the back of her wrist to avoid smearing chocolate across her face.

She belonged among the women too easily. The thought lodged beneath my ribs. Belonging created attachments. Attachments created weaknesses.

Adriana looked up. Her eyes found mine through the doorway. The laughter faded from her mouth, but the warmth remained in her face.

Her gaze dropped briefly to my mouth.

Heat tightened low in my body.

Then Samira handed her another bowl, breaking the moment.