Chapter 45: Enzo Is Coming To Town

POV: DIMITRI

The call came at half past ten on a Tuesday morning.

Dimitri was in his office, three floors of city noise below him and silence above, working through the Rotterdam problem with Marco when his personal phone lit up on the desk. Not the business phone. Not the secure line he used for operations.

The personal one.

The number that only seven people in the world had.

He saw the name on the screen and went very still.

Marco, who had spent fifteen years learning to read Dimitri Valentino the way sailors read weather, stopped mid-sentence and stood up without being asked.

"I’ll wait outside," he said.

The door closed.

Dimitri looked at the phone for two more seconds....long enough to arrange his face into something that felt nothing, which was the only appropriate expression for this particular caller....and answered.

"Antonio."

"Dimitri." His father’s voice was exactly what it had always been. Smooth. Measured. The voice of a man who had never needed to raise it because the weight of his name did the work for him. "It’s been a while."

"Four months," Dimitri said. "Since the quarterly review."

"Has it been that long?" A pause that was not actually a pause....Antonio Valentino did not pause accidentally. Everything he did was deliberate, including his silences. "Time moves differently when you’re no longer running things day to day. You’d be surprised."

"What do you want, Antonio?"

A soft sound that might have been amusement. "Straight to it. You always did prefer efficiency." Another manufactured pause. "I’m calling as a courtesy. I thought you should know that Enzo is planning a visit. To the city. To you."

Dimitri’s hand tightened slightly on the phone.

"When."

"Soon. Within the week, perhaps. He has business interests he wants to discuss. Territory questions." A beat. "And he’s heard certain things. About changes in your... personal situation. He wanted to see for himself."

The words were perfectly neutral. They were also, beneath the neutrality, a weapon....precisely aimed, casually deployed, the way Antonio had always operated. Not threats. Never threats. Just information, delivered with the particular gentleness of a man who wanted you to understand that he knew things and had chosen, for now, to do nothing about them.

"I appreciate the courtesy," Dimitri said, keeping his voice equally neutral.

"Of course." Antonio’s tone warmed by exactly one degree.....the warmth of a man performing fatherhood rather than feeling it. "How are you, son?"

"Well."

"Good. That’s good." A pause. "The girl. Eve, is it? I hope she’s settling in comfortably."

The temperature in the room dropped several degrees, though nothing changed physically. Dimitri stood at his desk with the phone at his ear and felt the old familiar cold move through him....not fear, he had not felt fear since he was eight years old, but something adjacent to it. The particular alertness of a man who has just been told, in the politest possible terms, that his enemy knows exactly where to find the thing he values most.

"She’s fine," he said.

"I’m glad." The warmth in Antonio’s voice remained precisely calibrated. "Family is important, Dimitri. I’ve always believed that. Whatever our differences." A final pause. "Give my regards to Sophia, would you? I imagine she’s been spending time with you lately."

"I’ll pass it along."

"Good. We’ll speak soon."

The line went dead.

Dimitri set the phone down on the desk with extreme care, the way you set down something you were resisting the urge to destroy, and stood very still for thirty seconds.

Then he picked it back up and called Nonna.

She answered on the second ring, the way she always did....as though she’d been expecting the call, which she probably had. Nonna had an unnerving ability to anticipate when she was needed.

"Dimitri." Her voice was warm but immediately alert. She heard something in his voice, he knew, that he hadn’t put there intentionally. She always did. "What happened?"

"I need you to move in," he said. "To the penthouse. I want you here full time, starting today if possible."

A silence.

"Tell me," she said.

"Antonio called."

Another silence, this one heavier.

"And?"

"Enzo is coming." He moved to the window, the city spread below him grey and indifferent. "Within the week. Antonio says it’s business. Territory questions."

"Antonio says." Nonna’s voice had changed. The warmth was still there but underneath it now was something older and harder...the voice of a woman who had spent forty years inside the Valentino world and had no illusions left about any of its members. "And you believe him?"

"I believe he told me exactly as much as he wanted me to know."

"Yes." A short exhale. "That is always how it is with your father." A pause, and then she said, in Italian, low and certain:

"Enzo che viene qui non è una buona cosa, Dimitri. Quella ragazzo porta il caos ovunque vada, proprio come suo padre."

(Enzo coming here is not a good thing, Dimitri. That boy brings chaos everywhere he goes, just like his father.)

Dimitri said nothing. There was nothing to say. She was right.

"He’s heard about Eve," he said instead.

The silence that followed this was the longest yet.

"Of course he has," Nonna said finally. "Antonio made sure of it. You understand that? Your father did not call you out of courtesy, caro. He called to tell you that he is watching. That Enzo is watching. That whatever you have built quietly in that penthouse with that girl, it is no longer quiet."

"I know."

"Do you know what Enzo will do when he sees her?"

"I have a reasonable idea."

"He will test her," Nonna said flatly. "Because testing what belongs to you is how he tests you. It has always been how he operates....he cannot challenge you directly, he is not foolish enough for that, so he finds the edges. The soft places." Her voice tightened slightly. "Eve is a soft place, Dimitri. Not because she is weak...she is not weak, I saw that immediately....but because she is new. She does not know all the rules yet. She does not know Enzo."