“I’m not going to collapse.” He took one step and nearly proved himself wrong. Sienna caught him around the waist before he hit the floor.
For three years he had refused to let anyone close enough to touch him. Her arm around him now felt entirely different — it didn’t ask him to forget Elena. It only reminded him that he was still, somehow, alive.
Milo crept closer, cautious. “Are you Dante?”
Dante lowered himself despite the pain screaming through his side. “Yes.”
“Sienna said you’re my dad.”
He looked at her. She nodded.
The boy studied his face with the unbearable honesty only children seem to manage. “Were you lost?”
The question undid something in Dante that three years of grief and violence hadn’t touched. He had rehearsed how to explain death, betrayal, stolen time. He had never once prepared for his son to ask, so simply, whether he had merely lost his way home.
“Yes,” he said, voice raw. “I was lost.”
Milo pressed the red toy car into his father’s palm. “You can keep this so you don’t get lost again.”
Dante closed his fingers around it. Then his son’s arms wrapped around his neck, and for half a second he didn’t move at all — before he pulled the boy in and held him like the whole world was still trying to take him away.
Sienna turned her face and wiped her cheeks. Sirens climbed the hill from every direction.
Bruno approached. “We need to move.”
“No,” Dante said.
“The documents tie us to everything.”
“I know.”
“If the police take them—”
“They’re going to.”
Nico lifted his head from where he knelt on the marble floor. “You’d burn the family down over this?”
“You burned it down,” Dante said, “the day you helped plant that bomb.”
“I didn’t know Salvatore meant to kill her.”
“You knew enough.”
Nico’s eyes dropped in shame. “What happens to me?”
Dante glanced at Elena’s name carved into the coffin. “You tell the truth for once in your life.”
“And if I refuse?”
“Then you live the rest of your life knowing you murdered the only person who ever believed there was something worth saving in you.”
Nico lowered his head and said nothing more.
When federal agents entered the mausoleum, Dante handed the ledgers over himself.
The weeks that followed hit the city like a controlled demolition. Salvatore’s records exposed a corruption network stretching across the entire state — judges resigned in disgrace, police commanders were led out in handcuffs, business fronts collapsed overnight. Nico agreed to testify in exchange for leniency. Dante surrendered every financial record he controlled and accepted responsibility for what his signature had touched, even when he hadn’t understood, at the time, exactly what he was signing.
Sienna stayed close to Milo through all of it. She visited Dante once, in the secure medical wing where he recovered under guard, sitting near a barred window in a plain gray shirt. Without the suit, the men, the weapons, he looked less like a feared name and more like a tired man finally sitting still.
“Where’s Milo?” he asked.
“With my aunt. He’s safe.”
“Does he ask about me?”
“Every morning.”
Dante studied his own hands. “I don’t know how long this is going to take.”
“The prosecutor says your cooperation matters.”
“I signed orders without asking where the money went. I let men use fear in my name and looked away every time. I’m not innocent just because Salvatore turned out worse.”