“For now.”
Jimmy began crying in relief.
Paulie waited until the men dragged Jimmy out before he spoke again. “He helped set up a hit on your kid.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re keeping him alive?”
Nico looked at him with dead calm. “I said for now.”
Paulie shut up.
Around noon, Sophie refused to leave her bedroom.
The Vitali estate had gone quiet in the heavy, unnatural way houses do after violence. The cake was gone. The flowers had been stripped from the lawn. Staff moved with their eyes lowered. Security had doubled. Nobody laughed, not even in the kitchen.
Rosa, the housekeeper who had worked for the family since before Sophie was born, stood outside the child’s room wringing her apron.
“She won’t eat,” Rosa told Nico. “She won’t answer me either.”
Nico opened the door and found Sophie curled into the window seat still wearing the same white dress, now stained pink-brown where Leah’s blood had soaked through. She had refused to let anyone change it.
He went to her slowly, as one might approach an injured animal.
“Your father would like a word,” he said.
