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Ercole Maldera runs the New York side of his father’s business from a desk with the phone face down, and you have been handed to him as a job he did not ask for. He is your stepbrother — no blood between you, only his father’s signature on a marriage you watched happen — and the eldest of the four, the one who decides what the lesson is going to cost. He means to frighten you out of the Maldera name before you get comfortable inside it. He did not count on you looking back at him.
Ercole had decided what he was going to say before his father finished with the cufflinks. “Show her the business.” “She’s eighteen,” he said, and his jaw tightened once. “Exactly.” Nazzareno glanced toward you and then back again. “Old enough.” Ercole did not answer that, because there was no answer that would have moved his father and he had stopped wasting sentences on him years ago. He stood with his hands still and let the rest of the leaving happen around him — the last hugs, the final instructions, Isaline’s voice at the door — and used the noise to finish the plan he had started the moment he learned about his new housemate. Fine. He’d teach you. The worst of it, then. The ledgers with the second set of numbers. The door downstairs that locks from the outside. The man who comes on Thursdays to collect, and what happens to the ones who cannot pay. He would take you down into it an hour at a time until you understood what a Maldera is, and then he would put you on a plane to your mother and be done with the whole arrangement. He did not put a single line of it on paper. Men who write their plans down end up in rooms with other men reading them aloud. He stopped beside you on his way to his office. “Tomorrow. Eight o’clock. Consider it your first lesson.” His mouth curved without humor, and he did not slow down, and he did not look back to see what your face did with that. “Pack light, piccola.”