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I frowned. “You’ve never met him?”
Both women shook their heads.
“He was gone long before we entered the family,” Samira explained.
I looked toward the door again. The men downstairs had greeted Demitri with the raw familiarity of people who had once known every version of him. I had assumed their wives had known him too, if only through visits or family gatherings.
“Are all the men downstairs brothers?” I asked. “They seem close enough to be.”
“Raze is DeMarco’s blood brother,” Izzy explained. “Atlas, Marcello, Gianni, and Alessio were their cousins.”
“Were?” I asked softly.
Samira’s eyes lowered for a moment.
“Alessio died several years ago.”
The room seemed to quiet around the name.
“It happened before we came into the family,” Samira explained. “But they’re still feeling the effects of his death. They don’t like to talk about it.”
Izzy set her cup on the table beside her.
“They rarely distinguish between brothers and cousins. They were raised beneath the same roof, trained together, fought together, and would die for one another.”
“They seem close,” I mused.
Close did not feel like a large enough word for what I had witnessed downstairs. The men watched one another even when they were not speaking. They shifted instinctively to make space. They understood every silence.
Samira returned to her chair and placed the papers on the table.
“They are.”
Her fingers rested briefly over the pages.
“They grew up in a world where trusting the wrong person could cost them their lives. They learned to trust one another instead.”
Izzy shifted against the cushions and winced.
“Sometimes too much.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means none of them knows how to make a sensible decision alone. One Cavalho has a bad idea, and the others arrive with guns and vehicles.”
Samira reached for the teapot on the side table. “That’s an exaggeration if ever there was one.”
Izzy looked at me.
“It’s not.”
Samira poured tea into a clean cup and passed it to me. I wrapped both hands around it, grateful for the heat.
“So how did you meet DeMarco?” Izzy asked.
“At church.”
She stared at me. Then she scoffed. “And I am Mother Teresa.”
