Chapter 6
The Dinner With the Family
Dante told her about the dinner while she was still deciding whether to confront him about the text.
"You need to come with me tonight."
Mia laughed once, without humor. "Absolutely not."
"Yes."
"I just found out my mother may have worked for your family, my brother is missing, and your cousin is apparently somewhere between suspicious and homicidal. Why would I sit at a dinner table with all of them?"
"Because they need to see you."
That stopped her.
He continued before she could recover. "If the traitor is inside the family, they already know I have you. If I hide you now, the wrong people get comfortable. If I bring you openly, they start reacting."
"Openly as what?"
He set a black dress box on the counter between them.
Mia stared at it.
"No."
"It's a dress."
"I can see that."
"Then you're progressing."
She had to look away because he was almost smiling and that made it worse.
The Romano family dinner took place in a private room above a restaurant that was pretending very hard not to be a front. Lucia Romano sat at the head of the table like the room had been built around her. Silvio sat two seats down and looked up the second Mia entered, as if he recognized the shape of her fear before he recognized her face.
That was not a good sign.
"Mia," Dante said, his hand at the small of her back. "This is my mother."
Lucia rose just enough to make the gesture sharp. "So you're the reason he stopped taking phone calls."
Mia almost answered honestly.
Instead she said, "I am sorry for the trouble."
Lucia's eyes warmed by one degree, which somehow felt like a verdict. "At least she knows what trouble looks like."
Silvio stood when Dante introduced him. He was all polished restraint and smooth hands, the kind of man who looked harmless until you noticed how carefully everyone else watched him.
"We met?" Mia asked.
Silvio's smile was thin. "I don't think so."
He was lying.
She knew it the moment he said it.
Dante took the seat beside her and ordered wine she did not want. Conversation moved around the table in clean, coded fragments that sounded like family and behaved like strategy. Mia caught pieces: shipments, permits, port delays, the charity board, a name that kept surfacing and disappearing when she tried to catch it.
Then Dante put his hand over hers on the table.
The room shifted.
"I asked Mia to marry me," he said.
Silence dropped like a blade.
Mia's head snapped toward him. "You did not."
"Not formally."
"You said it on a piece of paper."
"That's formal enough for some families."
Lucia leaned back, studying them both with the patience of someone who had buried too many men to be shocked by one more foolish decision. "And what did she say?"
Dante kept his hand over Mia's. "She hasn't decided yet."
Silvio's eyes narrowed, not at Dante, but at Mia. The look was quick, barely there, but it hit her with the force of recognition.
He knew her.
Not from tonight. From before.
Mia's skin prickled.
"I think," Silvio said lightly, "that if Dante is serious, we should all know who she is first."
Lucia turned her attention to Mia. "Then tell us."
Mia opened her mouth, but Dante answered first.
"She's the woman I trust."
The words should have sounded strategic. They did not.
Silvio's gaze flicked to the ringless hand on the table, then back to Mia's face.
And then he said her mother's name.
"Elena Hart," he murmured, like he was testing whether the room would crack.
Mia went cold.
Dante's hand tightened once over hers.
Silvio smiled as if he had just found the first loose stone in a wall he meant to bring down.