Chapter 36: Nonna Visited Them

POV: EVE

Nonna arrived at eleven in the morning with a canvas bag full of groceries, a string of rapid Italian directed at the nearest housekeeper, and absolutely zero warning.

Eve was in the kitchen nursing her second coffee when the elevator opened and Sophia Marchetti swept in like she owned the place....which, Eve was beginning to suspect, she essentially did. The older woman moved through the penthouse with the ease of someone who had walked these floors a thousand times, pausing only to press a firm kiss to Eve’s cheek before depositing her grocery bag on the marble counter.

"You look tired," Nonna announced, studying Eve’s face with the clinical precision of a woman who had raised one of the most dangerous men alive and had learned to read people the way others read weather. "Did you sleep?"

"A little."

"Hmm." Nonna’s dark eyes swept over her, missing nothing. "Sit. I’m making lunch."

"You don’t have to...."

"Sit, cara."

Eve sat.

There was something deeply comforting about Nonna’s presence. She didn’t perform warmth the way some people did.....the careful smiles, the polite questions, the surface-level interest. Sophia Marchetti’s warmth was something older and more solid. It moved through a room the way heat moved through a house in winter. Quiet. Thorough. Impossible to ignore.

Dimitri had emerged from his office thirty minutes earlier, kissed Nonna’s head with a gentleness that still made Eve’s chest ache every time she saw it, murmured something in Italian that made the older woman swat his arm, and disappeared back down the hallway with his phone pressed to his ear.

Business. Always business.

Eve watched Nonna work....efficient, practiced hands moving through the kitchen like she’d designed it herself....and tried to untangle the knot that had been sitting in her chest since Mike’s call yesterday.

"You’re thinking too loud," Nonna said without turning around.

Eve blinked. "Sorry?"

"I can hear it from here." Nonna glanced over her shoulder, her expression soft but knowing. "The call with your brother upset you."

It wasn’t a question. Eve wasn’t even surprised that she knew.

"He was angry," Eve said carefully.

"Of course he was." Nonna set a knife down and turned to face her fully, leaning against the counter with her arms folded. "He is a man who loves his sister and trusts his best friend, and he feels that both of those things have been used against him. That kind of anger is not simple. It has layers."

"Did Dimitri tell you about it?"

"He told me enough." A pause. "He is worried. He does not say so, but I know him. He is afraid that your brother’s anger will push you away. That you will eventually decide the cost is too high."

Eve’s throat tightened. "I told him I’m not going anywhere."

"I know. He told me that too." Nonna’s lips curved. "He did not know what to do with it, I think. Being loved frightens him more than being hated. Hated, he knows how to handle."

The words landed somewhere soft and bruised in Eve’s chest.

"Can I ask you something?" Eve said.

"You can always ask. Whether I answer is a different matter."

Eve turned her coffee cup in her hands, choosing her words carefully. "His mother. He’s mentioned her a few times, but never... he never really talks about her. And I don’t want to push him on it directly." She looked up. "What happened to her?"

The kitchen went quiet.

Nonna was still for a long moment, her dark eyes moving over Eve’s face with an expression Eve couldn’t fully read. Assessment, maybe. Or something older than that.....the weighing of trust, of readiness, of whether this particular truth would help or harm.

Then she pulled out the stool across from Eve and sat down.

"Her name was Claire," Nonna said. "Claire Ashworth, before she married Antonio Valentino. American girl. Beautiful....not in the way this world expects its women to be beautiful, not polished or calculated, but genuinely, quietly beautiful. The kind of woman who lit up a room without trying."

Eve stayed very still, not wanting to break whatever had opened.

"She was twenty-three when she married Antonio. Too young, too good, too trusting. She did not fully understand what she was marrying into." Nonna’s voice was measured, but Eve could hear something underneath it....old grief, carefully managed. "Antonio was charming then. Powerful. He made her feel safe. She did not realize until it was too late that the safety he offered came with a cage."

"Did she love him?"

"In the beginning, yes. Enough to give him a son." Nonna’s eyes softened. "Dimitri was everything to her. You must understand that. From the moment he was born, that boy was her entire world. She used to carry him through the gardens at the estate and point out every bird by name. She taught him English lullabies. She was the only person on earth who could make Antonio Valentino hesitate."

Eve felt the present tense shift to past and braced herself.

"What happened?"

Nonna folded her hands on the counter. "Antonio had enemies. All men in his position do. One of those enemies decided the most effective way to wound him was not through his business or his pride." She paused. "It was through his wife."

"They took her."

"When Dimitri was eight years old." Nonna’s voice didn’t waver, but her jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. "She was returning from the market....she liked to go herself, refused to send staff, said it was the one ordinary thing left in her life. They took her from the street in broad daylight."

Eve’s hands had gone cold around her coffee cup.

"Antonio... he tried to negotiate. I will give him that, though it is perhaps the last generous thing I will say about him. He tried. But the men who took her were not interested in money or power or negotiation." Nonna’s eyes dropped briefly to the counter. "They wanted to make a point. They injected her with something. A virus, the doctors said. By the time Antonio’s men found her, she had been ill for three days."

"She didn’t survive."

"She survived another week. Long enough to come home. Long enough for Dimitri to see her." Nonna’s voice thinned slightly on the last words. "He sat beside her bed for six days and held her hand and told her about the birds he’d seen in the garden. The ones she’d taught him to name."

Eve pressed her lips together hard.

"He was eight years old," Nonna continued, "and he watched his mother die, and then he looked at his father and understood....in the way that children sometimes understand things with a terrible clarity that adults lose.....that Antonio’s choices had killed her. That the life Antonio had built, the empire, the power, the enemies that came with all of it, had taken the only person who made that life bearable."

The penthouse was very quiet. Somewhere down the hallway, Eve could faintly hear Dimitri’s voice....low, clipped, business Italian....and she thought about an eight-year-old boy sitting beside a sickbed naming birds, and something inside her cracked clean open.

"He never forgave his father," Eve said. It wasn’t a question.

"Never. And Antonio..." Nonna’s mouth pressed into a thin line. "Antonio grieved, in his way. But he also moved on. Another woman. Another son. Enzo." She said the name without warmth. "And he expected Dimitri to move on too. To be grateful for what the family had given him instead of mourning what it had taken."

"But Dimitri couldn’t."

"Dimitri was not built for convenient grief." Nonna looked at Eve steadily. "He is built for absolutes. He loved his mother absolutely. He lost her absolutely. And he blamed his father absolutely. There is no middle ground in him, cara. There never has been."