Witness Protection

# Chapter One: The Last Normal Tuesday

October in Chicago carried the scent of wet leaves and diesel.

Olivia Lombard tucked a stray strand of platinum blonde hair behind her ear, the motion automatic after three months of working the dinner shift at Giuseppe's. The restaurant's warmth pressed against the window glass where she stood, fogging the view of Taylor Street outside. Late afternoon rain had slicked the sidewalk, and the lowering October sun—already sinking toward the rooftops by half past five—caught every puddle in sheets of copper light. Her section spanned six tables, all empty for the moment, the pre-dinner lull settling over the dining room like a held breath.

She used the quiet to restock her apron. Forks. Knives wrapped in burgundy napkins. The little electronic ordering tablet that still felt foreign in her hand after years of paper tickets at her last job in Springfield.

"You're doing that thing again."

Olivia glanced up. Marco, the floor manager, leaned against the bar with a rag slung over his shoulder. Gray-haired, sixty-something, with the kind of belly that came from thirty years of tasting his own sauces.

"What thing?"

"Looking like you're waiting for the other shoe to drop." He wiped down a highball glass, the squeak of cloth on glass carrying across the empty room. "Relax. It's Tuesday. Tuesdays are dead until seven."

"Dead until seven," she repeated, tucking the last fork into its napkin. "Got it."

Dead until seven. The word dead would stick in her mind later, an accidental prophecy she'd turn over and over like a smooth stone in her pocket.

The front door opened.

A gust of damp October air swept through the dining room, carrying the mineral smell of rain-soaked asphalt and the distant rumble of the Kennedy Expressway. Two men entered. Not the after-work crowd, not the young couples from the university who came for the seven-dollar house wine. These men wore suits that cost more than Olivia's semester of textbooks, their shoes gleaming with a fresh shine that had somehow survived the wet sidewalk outside.

She knew who they were before Marco straightened up and sucked in his gut.

Romano men.

Not Don Tomasso—she'd seen his photograph in the Tribune enough times to recognize the silver-haired patriarch with the cold smile. These were soldiers, lieutenants, whatever the proper word was for men who did business in the back booth while everyone else pretended not to notice.

Olivia averted her eyes, a survival instinct she'd developed fast after starting at Giuseppe's. The restaurant was a front. Everyone knew it. The Health Department knew it, the neighborhood knew it, probably even the alderman who ate linguine in the corner booth every other Thursday. But knowing and acknowledging were two different things in Little Italy, and Olivia had bills to pay and a neuropsychology textbook waiting at home that cost two hundred and forty dollars used.

She busied herself with the napkin dispenser at table six.

The two men settled into the back booth. Marco himself brought them drinks—no order taken, no menu offered. Just two glasses of something amber, neat. The older of the two, a heavyset guy with a scar bisecting his left eyebrow, barely glanced around the room before returning his attention to his companion.

The door opened again.

This time, Olivia felt the shift before she saw the cause. Marco's hands stilled on the highball glass. The two men in the booth straightened their spines like soldiers hearing a drill sergeant approach. Even the busboy, a kid named Leo who couldn't have been older than seventeen, stopped wiping down the salad bar and stared.

The man who entered was young. Twenty-something. Black hair slicked back from a face that might have been handsome if not for the nose—a boxer's break, flattened at the bridge, giving him a permanent look of casual menace. His suit was charcoal, cut so precisely to his shoulders that the fabric didn't ripple when he moved. No tie. Top button undone, revealing the edge of black ink climbing his throat.

Domenico Romano.

Nico, she'd heard him called. The youngest son. The wild card.

His eyes swept the dining room with the disinterested assessment of a man who owned every room before he entered it. They passed over Olivia without stopping—she was furniture to him, part of the décor—and landed on the heavyset man in the back booth.

"Nico." Marco's voice had gone tight. "Your usual table?"

"Later." Nico didn't slow his stride. "Business first."

He walked past her section.

Close enough that Olivia caught the scent of him—expensive cologne and something sharper underneath, like ozone after a storm. His jaw was set, tendons visible beneath the skin. Not angry, she thought. Focused. Like a man walking toward a foregone conclusion.

She should have looked away. Should have finished restocking her napkin dispenser and pretended she hadn't noticed anything unusual about a Tuesday evening in October.

Instead, she watched.

Nico stopped at the back booth. The two men rose, but only halfway, an awkward crouch that suggested deference without submission. The heavyset one—Scar Eyebrow—gestured toward the seat across from him.

"Tommy sends his regrets," Nico said, not sitting. "He won't be able to make your sister's wedding."

Scar Eyebrow's face drained of color. "What?"

"Car accident." Nico's tone was flat, almost bored. "Very tragic. Black ice on the Kennedy."

"There wasn't any ice last night—"

"Sure there was." Nico pulled a small envelope from his inside jacket pocket. He placed it on the table, sliding it toward Scar Eyebrow with two fingers. "The Don sends his condolences. And a gift. For the wedding."

The heavyset man's companion—younger, thinner, with a nervous tic in his left eye—reached for the envelope. His fingers trembled. The paper rustled loud in the silent dining room.

"I didn't—" Scar Eyebrow started.

"Tommy," Nico said, cutting him off, "was skimming from the family for eighteen months. The Don has documentation. Receipts. Wire transfers. Photographs of Tommy shaking hands with Alberto Fiore in a parking garage in Evanston." He paused, letting the words settle. "You knew about this."

A denial formed on Scar Eyebrow's lips. Olivia saw it happen—the way his mouth opened, the way his shoulders squared for righteous indignation. Then something flickered in his eyes. A calculation. The recognition that arguing with Domenico Romano in a restaurant full of witnesses was not the same as arguing with a reasonable man.

"I didn't know," he said finally. "But I suspected."

"Then you understand the position you're in."

"What position is that?"

Nico smiled. It was the first expression Olivia had seen on his face that wasn't flat assessment, and it was worse than the blankness. The smile belonged to something cold-blooded. "The position," he said, "where you walk out of this restaurant, get in your car, drive to O'Hare, and take the first flight to anywhere that isn't Chicago. You don't call your wife. You don't pack a bag. You don't pass Go. You don't collect two hundred dollars."

"And if I don't?"

"Then we revisit this conversation in a different location." Nico tapped the envelope. "Take the gift. Consider it severance."

Scar Eyebrow's companion was already standing, already reaching for his coat. But Scar Eyebrow—Tommy's brother, Tommy's ally, Tommy's co-conspirator—was slower. Pride or stupidity or simple disbelief kept him rooted to the spot.

"I've been with the family thirty years," he said. "My father knew Don Alessandro. My grandfather—"

"Your grandfather is dead." Nico's voice dropped. "Your father is dead. And in about three minutes, you're going to be dead if you're still sitting in that booth."

The restaurant held its breath.

Olivia's hands had stopped moving somewhere during the exchange. She stood frozen at table six, a napkin clutched in her fingers, watching the scene unfold with the detached horror of someone who understood—too late—that she was witnessing something she should not be witnessing.

Scar Eyebrow rose.

For a moment, it seemed like compliance. His knees unlocked. His palms pressed flat against the table. He straightened to his full height, which was considerable—six-two, maybe six-three, with the bulk of a man who'd done physical work before he'd graduated to whatever white-collar crime kept him in three-thousand-dollar suits.

Then he lunged.

Not at Nico. At the door.

He moved fast for a big man. Shouldered past his companion. Past the salad bar. Past Leo the busboy, who dropped a stack of plates with an explosive crash that made Olivia's eardrums ring. Past table six, where she still stood, still frozen, still holding that stupid napkin like it might shield her—

Nico's hand shot out.

Not to grab. Not to stop. Just a gesture, casual as hailing a cab, and Scar Eyebrow's legs buckled. He went down hard, his knee hitting the tile with a sound like a baseball bat hitting wet concrete. The cause—a dart, Olivia realized, a small tranquilizer dart buried in the meat of his thigh—became visible only when he tried to rise and his arms wouldn't cooperate.

"You should've taken the envelope," Nico said.

He stepped over the fallen man with the indifference of someone stepping over a puddle. Nodded to the younger companion, who was already backing toward the door with both hands raised in surrender. Then he turned toward the back booth, where his own men were rising to deal with the body.

And his eyes met Olivia's.

Not a sweep this time. Not an assessment. Eye contact. Direct and unblinking, the way a predator watches prey that's wandered too close to the den.

She dropped the napkin.

"Boss." Marco's voice cut through the silence, strained and desperate. "She didn't see nothing. She's just a kid. College student. Works Tuesday and Thursday nights. Doesn't talk to anyone, doesn't—"

"Shut up, Marco." Nico didn't look away from her. "What's your name?"

Her tongue had glued itself to the roof of her mouth. She pried it loose with effort. "Olivia."

"Olivia what?"

"Lombard."

"You saw something just now, Olivia Lombard?"

The correct answer was no. She knew this the way she knew that touching a hot stove would burn her fingers. The correct answer was no, I didn't see anything, I was restocking napkins and thinking about my neuropsych midterm and I absolutely did not witness a man get tranqued in the thigh by the heir apparent of Chicago's most powerful crime family.

But she was a terrible liar. Always had been. Her face broadcast every thought like closed-captioning for the socially inept.

"I—" she started.

"Don't lie to me." Nico's voice was soft now, almost conversational. "I hate liars. I really do. Lying wastes everyone's time, and I have a busy evening."

The heavyset man—not dead, just unconscious, she could see his chest rising and falling—lay on the floor between them. His companion had fled. Marco stood frozen behind the bar, and Leo was crouched beside the shattered plates, and the kitchen door had swung shut as the cooks retreated to safer ground.

Olivia was alone.

"I saw something," she said.

Nico studied her for a long moment. Then he laughed—a short, humorless sound, more surprise than amusement. "Honesty. That's refreshing." He gestured at one of his men. "Take Tommy's brother out back. Clean up this mess."

The man moved immediately, hauling the unconscious body toward the kitchen with practiced efficiency. Nico straightened his cuffs. Walked toward Olivia with the unhurried confidence of a man who had all the time in the world and no one to answer to.

"Marco," he said, not looking away from her. "Call my father. Tell him we have a situation."

"A situation," Marco repeated. "Nico, she's a good kid. She's not going to say anything. Right, Liv? Tell him you won't say anything."

"I won't say anything," Olivia said. The words came out steady, which surprised her. Inside, her pulse was a timpani drum.

"I believe you." Nico stopped two feet from her, close enough that she had to tilt her head back to meet his eyes. He was taller than she'd realized—five-ten, maybe, but he towered over her five-foot frame. "Unfortunately, belief isn't the same as certainty. And my father is a man who values certainty above all else."

"What does that mean?"

Instead of answering, he reached out and brushed a strand of hair from her face. The gesture was almost gentle. His fingers didn't touch her skin—just the hair, just the platinum strands that had escaped her ponytail during her shift—but the intimacy of it made her stomach clench.

"It means," he said, "that I'm going to make a phone call. And you're going to sit right here until I'm finished."

---

The next two hours passed in a blur of whispered conversations and sidelong glances.

Marco closed the restaurant early. Posted a handwritten sign on the front door—CLOSED FOR PRIVATE EVENT—though there was no event. Leo swept up the broken plates and disappeared into the back. The kitchen staff filtered out one by one, none of them looking at Olivia, all of them moving with the practiced avoidance of people who'd learned not to ask questions.

Nico made his phone call from the back booth. She couldn't hear the words, but she watched his face—the set of his jaw, the occasional nod—and understood that her fate was being decided by someone who wasn't even in the room.

At seven-thirty, a black Escalade pulled up outside.

Two more suits entered. Younger than the others, mid-twenties, with the blank expressions of men who'd been hired for muscle rather than management. They spoke briefly with Nico, then positioned themselves by the front door like sentries.

At eight-fifteen, Don Tomasso Romano arrived.

Olivia recognized him immediately from the newspaper photographs—silver hair swept back from a face that had aged into distinguished cruelty, a charcoal suit that made Nico's look off-the-rack. He moved through the restaurant like a man who'd built empires with his bare hands and had never once doubted his right to do so. Behind him walked an older man she didn't recognize, thin and stooped, with the same Roman nose as the Don but kinder eyes.

"The girl," Don Tomasso said. Not a question.

"Over there." Nico gestured toward table six, where Olivia had been sitting in increasingly numb silence for the better part of two hours. "She saw everything."

"I heard." The Don pulled out the chair across from her and sat down. Up close, the resemblance to his son was unmistakable—same deep-set eyes, same prominent nose—but where Nico radiated volatile energy, his father projected absolute control. "Your name?"

"Olivia Lombard."

"You work for my brother." He nodded toward the thin man, who had taken up a position by the window. "Pietro owns this establishment. Has for twenty-two years. He tells me you're a good employee. Never late. Never complains. Picks up shifts when someone calls in sick."

Olivia glanced at Pietro, who offered a small, sad smile. "I try."

"Pietro also tells me you're an orphan." The Don's voice held no pity. Just observation. "Foster care until you aged out. Full scholarship to UIC. Neuro-psychology, is that right?"

"Yes, sir."

"Ambitious. Unusual." He leaned back in his chair, studying her with the same unblinking assessment she'd seen in his son. "Most girls your age would be studying business. Marketing. Something practical."

"Most girls my age didn't watch their parents die in a car accident and spend eight years being shuffled between strangers' houses." She hadn't meant to say it. The words escaped before she could catch them, driven by exhaustion and fear and the lingering adrenaline of the past two hours. "I wanted to understand what happened to my brain afterward. Why I remember some things and not others. Why certain sounds make me—" She stopped. Swallowed. "Sorry. That's more than you asked for."

Don Tomasso's expression didn't change. But something shifted in the air around him—a reassessment, maybe. The recognition that this small blonde waitress wasn't quite as ordinary as she appeared.

"My son tells me you were honest with him," he said. "When he asked what you saw, you told him the truth instead of lying. Do you know how rare that is?"

"Stupidity, probably. Not bravery."

The corner of his mouth twitched. "Self-awareness. Even rarer." He folded his hands on the table—thick fingers, a gold signet ring on the left pinky. "Here's the situation, Miss Lombard. You witnessed something tonight that could create... complications for my family. My son acted impulsively, as he often does, and now there's a witness who isn't blood. Do you understand what that means?"

"You're going to kill me."

The words hung in the air. Across the room, Nico stiffened. Pietro closed his eyes. But the Don simply tilted his head, considering her statement with the same detachment she might bring to a research question.

"Normally," he said, "yes. That would be the simplest solution. Clean. Final. No loose ends." He paused. "But my brother likes you. And my son, for reasons I don't fully understand, seems impressed by your honesty. So I'm going to offer you an alternative."

Olivia's hands were trembling beneath the table. She pressed them flat against her thighs, willing them still. "An alternative."

"Marry my son."

The restaurant tilted. Or maybe that was just her equilibrium, the floor shifting beneath her feet like a funhouse attraction. She could hear her own heartbeat, loud in her ears, and the distant sound of traffic on Taylor Street, and the hum of the refrigerators in the kitchen.

"Marry," she repeated. "Your son."

"Nico needs to settle down." The Don said it like he was discussing stock options. "He's thirty-one years old—"

"Twenty-eight," Nico corrected from across the room.

"—and he's never shown the slightest interest in responsibility. Family. Legacy. The things that matter." Don Tomasso's eyes never left Olivia's face. "His mother thinks a wife would ground him. Give him something to protect. Something to lose." He smiled, thin and humorless. "I think she's romanticizing, but she's been right before."

"This is insane." Olivia heard herself say the words before she could stop them. "I'm eighteen. I'm in school. I'm—this is insane."

"Insanity is a matter of perspective. From my perspective, I'm offering you a choice between two outcomes. In one outcome, you leave this restaurant in the trunk of a car, and no one ever hears from Olivia Lombard again. In the other outcome, you marry my son, produce an heir, and live a life of extraordinary comfort and protection."

"Produce an heir." The phrase tasted like ash. "You want me to have a baby."

"A son. Specifically." The Don spread his hands. "Nico is the youngest. His older brothers have all daughters. The family name requires continuation. You, Miss Lombard, are young, healthy, and clearly intelligent. Genetics matter to me."

She should have been terrified. She was terrified. But alongside the fear—underneath it, woven through it like a vein of ore—was something else. Anger. Not at the Don. At the universe. At the random cruelty of fate that had orphaned her at ten and delivered her to this booth, this moment, this impossible choice.

"You're asking me to trade my life for my body."

"I'm offering you a future." Don Tomasso's voice was calm, unbothered. "Most people don't get offers. They get consequences. You've been given a choice. I suggest you consider it carefully."

Pietro spoke for the first time. "Olivia." His voice was gentle, the first kind sound she'd heard in hours. "I've known my brother for fifty-one years. He doesn't bluff. And he doesn't make offers like this to just anyone." He stepped closer, laying a hand on the back of her chair. "Whatever you decide, I'll do what I can for you. But you need to understand the weight of what's being offered here."

"The weight." She laughed—a brittle, near-hysterical sound. "I witnessed a crime I shouldn't have seen, and now I'm being sold into marriage to a man I just watched tranquilize someone. That's the weight."

"You're being offered survival," Nico said from his post by the bar. His voice was flat, unreadable. "Take it or leave it."

She looked at him. Really looked, for the first time since he'd walked through the door. At the tattoos climbing his neck, disappearing beneath his collar. At the broken nose and the hard jaw and the dark eyes that had watched her with something between amusement and annoyance since the moment they'd met. He was handsome in a brutal sort of way, the way a piece of industrial machinery might be handsome—all function, no decoration. And he was looking at her now with an expression she couldn't parse.

Not desire. Not exactly. Something closer to curiosity.

"If I say yes," she said, not breaking eye contact with him, "what happens to my scholarship? My classes? My degree?"

"You'll finish your education." Don Tomasso said it like it was obvious. "The Romano family doesn't produce uneducated wives. Your schedule will be accommodated. Your expenses covered. Your protection guaranteed." He paused. "The only non-negotiable element is the child. Within eighteen months of the wedding, I expect a pregnancy. Within two years of that, I expect a son. If you can't produce one..." He shrugged. "Medical science has come a long way."

Eighteen months. A pregnancy. A son.

Olivia thought about her dorm room, the single with the cracked window that let in the cold October air. She thought about her textbooks, stacked on the desk with their highlighted passages and dog-eared corners. She thought about Dr. Harrison's lecture on memory formation, how trauma rewired the hippocampus, how the brain protected itself by forgetting.

She thought about her parents. The ones she barely remembered—her mother's laugh, her father's cologne, the way the car had spun on black ice and then nothing, just a void where memories should be. She'd spent eight years trying to understand that void. Eight years of foster homes and social workers and the grinding loneliness of being a charity case.

If she died tonight, none of it would matter.

If she lived...

"How do I know you'll keep your word?" she asked. "You've already admitted you'd kill me if I refused. What's stopping you from killing me after I've given you what you want?"

Don Tomasso smiled. It was the first genuine expression she'd seen on his face, and it was terrifying. "Nothing," he said. "Absolutely nothing. But I give you my word, as the head of this family, that I will honor our agreement. My word is the only currency that matters in our world, Miss Lombard. Once it's given, it can't be rescinded."

"And if I refuse?"

"Then this conversation ends, and so do you."

Simple. Brutal. Honest, in its own twisted way.

Olivia looked across the room at Nico. He was leaning against the bar now, arms crossed, watching her with that same unreadable expression. His father's son. His mother's favorite. The wild card who'd started this whole nightmare by being too reckless to wait until the restaurant was empty.

"Is he going to hurt me?" She directed the question at Don Tomasso but kept her eyes on Nico. "If I agree to this—is he going to hurt me?"

"No." Nico answered before his father could. His voice was rough, almost offended. "I'm an asshole, not a monster. There's a difference."

"How reassuring."

Something flickered in his eyes—annoyance, maybe, or grudging respect. "You've got a mouth on you for someone who's supposedly terrified."

"I am terrified. I'm just not letting it stop me from speaking."

A muscle in his jaw twitched. For a moment, she thought he might say something else—something sharp, something cutting—but instead he just shook his head and looked away.

"Pietro," Don Tomasso said, "take Miss Lombard into the office. Give her ten minutes to think. No more. I have a dinner meeting at nine."

Pietro's hand found her elbow, gentle but insistent. She rose from the chair on legs that felt like water. Let him guide her through the kitchen, past the stainless steel counters and the industrial stoves, into a small office cluttered with receipts and old menus and the smell of garlic.

"Olivia." Pietro closed the door behind them. His face was pale, his eyes wet. "I'm so sorry. This is my fault. I should've warned you about Tuesdays. Nico always comes on Tuesdays, and I should've—"

"It's not your fault." She sank into the desk chair, suddenly exhausted. "None of this is your fault."

"Say yes." He crouched beside her, taking her hands in his. "Please, Olivia. Say yes. My brother is many things, but he keeps his promises. If he says you'll be protected, you'll be protected. If he says you'll finish your education, you'll finish it." He squeezed her fingers. "Marriages like this happen all the time in our world. My wife and I—we were arranged too, did you know that? Forty-three years we've been together. It's not always a tragedy."

"You love her?"

"More than anything." Pietro's voice cracked. "She's my whole world. My children, my grandchildren—all of it started with a decision I didn't want to make." He released her hands. "That doesn't make this right. But it makes it possible. Survivable. You're a survivor, Olivia. I've seen it in you since the day you started here. Don't stop surviving now."

Ten minutes. She had ten minutes to decide whether her life was worth the price being asked.

She thought about the void where her parents' faces should be. The gap in her memory that no amount of studying could fill. The way she'd always felt like she was living on borrowed time, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Maybe this was the shoe. Maybe this was the thing she'd been waiting for her whole life—not a car crash, not a tragedy, but a choice. A terrible, impossible choice that would determine everything that came after.

"Okay," she said. The word scraped past her throat. "Okay. I'll do it."

Pietro closed his eyes. A tear tracked down his cheek. "Thank you," he whispered. "Thank you, thank you—"

"Don't thank me." She stood up, straightening her apron with hands that had finally stopped trembling. "I'm not doing this for you."

She walked back into the dining room.

Nico and his father were exactly where she'd left them—the Don seated at the table, Nico leaning against the bar. Both of them looked up when she entered, and she saw the flicker of surprise cross the Don's face. He hadn't expected her to agree. He'd been ready for her refusal, ready to give the order.

"I have conditions," she said.

The Don raised an eyebrow. "Conditions."

"Six. Take them or leave them." She stopped in front of the table, her five-foot frame dwarfed by the two men but somehow filling the space anyway. "One: I finish my degree. No interruptions, no delays, no family emergencies that just happen to coincide with finals week. I graduate on schedule, or the deal is off."

"Agreed."

"Two: I'm not dropping out of my life. I keep my friends, my routines, whatever normalcy I can maintain. You don't get to isolate me just because I'm wearing your son's ring."

"Agreed."

"Three: I choose when I get pregnant. You said eighteen months—fine. But if I need all eighteen of those months to adjust to this situation, I take them. No pressure. No coercion. When I'm ready, I'll tell you."

Don Tomasso's eyes narrowed. "That seems... generous."

"Take it or leave it."

A long pause. Then: "Agreed."

"Four: Nico doesn't bring his work home. Whatever he does—the tranqs, the bodies, the intimidation—it stays outside the house. I don't want to see it, hear it, or know about it. I'm not going to be a witness to anything else." She met Nico's eyes. "And if you ever raise a hand to me, I walk. Deal or no deal, I walk, and you can explain to your father why his investment didn't pan out."

Nico's expression flickered—surprise again, and something that might have been respect. "Deal."

"Five: I get my own room. My own space. We're not playing house just because there's a ring on my finger. If this is going to work, it happens on my timeline."

The Don glanced at his son. "Nico?"

"Whatever she wants." His voice was rough, almost bemused. "She's negotiating for her life like she's buying a used car. I'm not going to argue with it."

"And six?" Don Tomasso asked.

Olivia took a breath. "I want to know what he did. The man Nico took down tonight. I want to know what Tommy did that was worth my entire life changing in the span of two hours. If I'm paying this price, I deserve to understand the transaction."

The dining room went silent.

Pietro shifted behind her. Nico's jaw tightened. But the Don—the Don smiled again, that genuine expression of surprised approval.

"Tommaso Esposito," he said, "was stealing from our family and selling information to our rivals. His brother, the man you saw tonight, handled the logistics. Together, they cost us nearly six million dollars and the lives of three of our men. The tranq dart was mercy, Miss Lombard. If any of my other sons had been here, Tommy would be dead on the floor and you'd be cleaning brains off your apron."

Olivia processed this information in silence. Three dead men. Six million dollars. And she was worried about her scholarship.

"I see," she said.

"Then we have an agreement?"

She looked at Nico. He was watching her with those dark, unreadable eyes, his arms still crossed, his posture still relaxed. But something had shifted in his expression. The curiosity was still there, but now it was tinged with something else.

Anticipation.

"We have an agreement," she said.

Don Tomasso rose from his chair. Extended his hand. She took it—his grip was dry and firm and utterly impersonal, like shaking hands with a statue. "Welcome to the family, Olivia Lombard. I hope you survive it."

He released her hand and walked toward the door. "Nico, take your fiancée home. Pietro, clean up this mess. We'll announce the engagement tomorrow evening at the house."

And then he was gone.

Olivia stood in the middle of the dining room, surrounded by the detritus of her old life—the napkins she'd folded, the forks she'd polished, the table where she'd been sitting when her future was rewritten. Nico pushed off from the bar and walked toward her, his expensive shoes clicking on the tile floor.

"Congratulations," he said. "You're the first person I've ever seen negotiate with my father and walk away breathing, let alone with a better deal than he offered."

"Maybe he respects honesty as much as you do."

"Maybe." He stopped in front of her, closer than was comfortable, his height forcing her to look up. "Or maybe he just wanted to see what happens when you throw a civilian into the deep end and watch her swim." He tilted his head. "I know I do."

"You wanted him to kill me."

"I wanted him to make a decision." Nico's voice was unreadable. "He made one. Now we both have to live with it."

He gestured toward the door, where the black Escalade was still idling at the curb. Rain had started falling again, streaking the windows and patterning the sidewalk with dark spots.

"Come on, fiancée. Let's go home."