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He’s wearing scrubs. Hospital blue. The sleeves shoved past his elbows — the same way he shoves every sleeve, every cuff, every piece of fabric that dares to cover the forearms he’s used to charm rooms and break men and hold a woman’s face at midnight while asking her to marry him on a kitchen counter. His hands need to be free. They have always needed to be free. Even now — especially now — his hands are bare and open at his sides, and there is something on them that catches the dawn light through the windows.
Blood. Not violence. Birth.
His eyes are red. His hair is destroyed — wrecked from his fingers raking through it the way they rake when the world hits him with something his charm can’t deflect. The green of his irises is bright against the bloodshot whites, and he looks like he hasn’t slept in thirty hours, and like he’s never been more awake in his entire fucking life.
And his face.
His face is wearing the grin.
Not the charming one. I’ve seen that grin — watched it deployed at the dining table, watched it disarm Santino’s fury and redirect Dante’s silence and make every person in a room believe that Romeo Rivas has everything under control. That grin is a weapon. Polished. Loaded. The smile of a man who learned before he could drive that if he made people feel good, they’d let him survive.
Not that one.
The small one. Crooked. Lopsided. The one that sits on his mouth, arrived without permission, and he’s too wrecked to send it away. The grin Nova cataloged — the real one, the one she saw through the charmer’s mask, the one she told him to stop hiding behind the performance.
The grin of a man stripped of every layer by something too big to perform through.
“It’s a girl.”
His voice breaks on the second word. A clean fracture — the sound splitting down the center of girl the way a bone splits under weight it wasn’t designed to hold. I hear it crack and I feel it in my sternum, and my eyes are wet again, and I don’t care. I don’t fucking care.
Marisol’s hand covers her mouth.
Guido’s knuckles go white on the counter.
Fabio bows his head. One second. The old soldier absorbing the news the way old soldiers absorb everything — silently, with the weight pressing down through his shoulders into the chair that has held him for twelve hours.
“She’s perfect.” Romeo’s voice is shaking. The charmer. The man who has talked his way out of every room he’s ever entered, who deployed language like currency, who made words do whatever he needed them to do since he was old enough to understand that words were the sharpest weapon in Giovanni’s house. That man stands in a doorway, tears running down his face, his vocabulary reduced to two words.
She’s perfect.
“Nova?” Guido’s voice. Rough.
“Tired. Strong. Already told me to stop hovering.” Romeo laughs. The sound is wet and broken and beautiful. “She told me to come tell you and then bring her coffee. She just — she just pushed a fucking human being into the world, and she wants coffee.”
“That’s Nova,” I say. My voice comes out cracked. I don’t fix it.
“That’s Nova.” Romeo’s grin widens. Tears still fall, and the grin stays crooked; together, they’re the most devastating thing I have ever seen on a man’s face. The will sits on the counter behind me — Giovanni’s signature, the succession protocol, the dead King’s architecture executing its final sequence. The empire restructuring. The game finishing.
And Romeo doesn’t look at any of it.
He looks at Guido. At the boy standing at the center of the counter, where Romeo had stood for two years, carrying everything Giovanni left behind.
“Come meet your niece,” he says. “When you’re ready.”
Guido’s jaw locks. His throat works. His hands press flat against the marble — the same marble that held Romeo’s weight, that held Giovanni’s weight before that, that has absorbed every decision this family has made since the night they buried Giovanni.
“Give me ten minutes,” Guido says. His voice is steady. His eyes are not.
Romeo nods. Turns. He walks back down the hallway toward the sound of his wife’s voice, asking where her fucking coffee is.
The room exhales.
The Pen
The elevator chimes.
Guido’s head lifts from the screen. My hand moves to his forearm — instinct, the touch brief, a signal: someone’s coming. Fabio’s fingers already move to pull up the security feed, but his shoulders drop before the image loads.
