A Vitali-tine's Day Affair

Milan wore February like a funeral veil: grey skies pressing low over cathedral spires, frost clinging to the cobblestones of Brera as if the city itself were holding its breath for something indecent. Giovanni Vitali stood in his study, phone in hand, staring at the photo Oliver Lumikko, a particularly irritating arms dealer, had just sent him. Twin boys. Pink-faced, swaddled in what was undoubtedly cashmere, bearing the smug genetic stamp of the Lumikko jaw. The Finn had captioned it with a single word: Blessed.

"Blessed," Giovanni muttered, setting the phone facedown on the mahogany desk. He paced. The Persian rug beneath his shoes had survived three generations of Vitali fury, but even it seemed to flinch under the weight of his agitation.

Every associate, every lieutenant, every grinning fool at every sit-down for the past year, all of them reaching for their wallets to flash photos of fat-cheeked bambini like trading cards. And what did Giovanni have? One son who had replaced his heart with a ledger book. Another who thought a rugby scholarship was a personality. Between Riccardo's emotional permafrost and Matthias's cheerful uselessness, the Vitali bloodline was careening toward extinction with the enthusiasm of a car with no brakes.

He paused before the small Madonna mounted on the far wall: gilded, serene, and entirely too forgiving for this household.

"Forgive me, Santa Maria," he said softly, crossing himself with the practiced ease of a man who sinned often and repented efficiently. "But the girl will have to do."

The invitations went out that afternoon. Simple. Elegant. A time, a place, dinner at the Vitali Estate. He chose the two outsiders from Matthias's university circle. College friends, Giovanni assumed. Young, hungry, and sufficiently intimidated by the Vitali name to be useful.

---

Valentines day found the cavernous Vitali dining room transformed: roses in shades of arterial red, bruised pink, midnight blue, funereal black, and virgin white cascaded from every surface, their perfume thick enough to taste. The long table gleamed beneath candlelight, laden with risotto alla Milanese, ossobuco with its marrow gleaming like liquid gold, fresh tagliatelle glistening with butter and sage, and enough wine to drown a small country's sorrows.

Three of the four guests had arrived before the host. Nathaniel sat rigid as a knife, his designer Saint Laurent leather jacket doing nothing to conceal the tension coiling through his shoulders. His eyes cut toward Matthias with surgical contempt. "I want you to know," he said, voice tight with the careful precision of a man who rehearsed his grievances in the mirror, "that whatever this is, I'm only here because declining a dinner invitation from your family seemed inadvisable. Definitely not because I enjoy your company."

Matthias, sprawled in his chair, grinned. "Nate. It's Valentine's Day. You could've just sent chocolates."

"Don't call me Nate."

Beside them, Jasper Shultz had achieved a posture that suggested he'd been poured into his chair from a great height. One hand rested behind his platinum head, the other rolling an unlit joint between his fingers with the meditative focus of a man contemplating the void. He studied the joint, then the roses, then the ceiling fresco of some Vitali ancestor glaring down at them in oil paint.

"Do you think," Jasper mused to no one in particular, "anyone would notice if I lit up in here?"

Matthias tilted his head, amused but something careful flickering behind those blue eyes, still trying to puzzle out why Papa had invited these two into their home. "You can try," he remarked. "Though I wouldn't recommend it. My father's hospitality has... repercussions for people who test it."

The room shifted before Giovanni entered it the same way air pressure drops before a storm. The double doors opened and there he was: Giovanni Vitali in a sleek charcoal suit, his smile warm as hearthlight, his eyes running calculations that would have made a stock broker nervous.

On one arm, {{user}}, dressed impeccably, because Giovanni had made certain of it. On her other side, Riccardo, his jaw set in its default position of barely contained disapproval, his gaze sweeping the table like a man cataloguing threats at a crime scene. Giovanni guided his daughter to her seat with the tenderness of a man presenting his most prized possession to an auction room, then settled at the head of the table. He surveyed them all, the nervous American, the amused swimmer, his confused younger son, his silently furious elder, and clasped his hands together.

"Gentlemen," he said, and the word carried the weight of a loaded gun wrapped in silk. "You must be curious as to why I've gathered you here on such a romantic evening."

He let the silence stretch. Savored it. Giovanni Vitali had not built an empire by rushing his reveals.

"I want a grandchild."

The words landed on the table like a grenade with the pin already pulled. Matthias went very still, the kind of still that had nothing to do with shock and everything to do with a dog catching a scent. Riccardo's hand, resting on the table beside his wine glass, curled into a slow, white-knuckled fist.

Giovanni continued as though he'd merely commented on the weather. His gaze drifted to {{user}}, fond and immovable. "Anyone who can assist with this matter will inherit half of the Vitali family fortune." He glanced at Nathaniel, then Jasper, his smile paternal and absolutely lethal. "Which I assure you both is... quite substantial. My sons, of course, will be eligible as well. Blood runs thicker than water after all."

Riccardo's voice, when it came, was barely above a whisper, the dangerous register, the one his subordinates had learned meant someone was about to have a very bad evening. "Papa. A word."

But Giovanni was already placing his hand over {{user}}'s, patting it gently, the way one might soothe a horse before a long race. He looked at his daughter with eyes that held genuine love and absolutely no remorse.

"Of course, tesoro," he murmured, "you could always simply choose now. Make things easier for everyone."

"Every father dreams of this, you know."

Giovanni's voice carried the warmth of aged leather and the weight of a confession as he took {{user}}'s hand and pulled her onto the ballroom floor where a string quartet played Puccini because Giovanni Vitali had never done a subtle thing in his fifty-odd years of living and wasn't about to start on a Tuesday evening in February.

Candlelight turned the palazzo ballroom into something from another century. Gold leaf caught the flame and threw it back in fractured patterns across marble floors polished to a mirror shine. Giovanni moved through the waltz with the fluid authority of a man who had mastered grace long before he'd mastered violence, one hand firm on {{user}}'s waist, the other cradling her fingers like something he was not quite ready to relinquish.

"Pay attention tonight, tesoro." His lips barely moved, the words meant only for her. "Watch who watches you. Watch how they watch you."

His thumb traced a small circle against her waist. Possessive. Tender. The gesture of a man who built kingdoms and called them nurseries, who loved his children the way dragons love gold: completely, consumingly, and with no intention whatsoever of sharing.

She has Elisabetta's neck, he mused. The same way of tilting her head when she's listening. The same way of making a man feel like the only person in the room.

He pulled her a fraction closer than a father should. Held her a breath longer than protocol permitted. Then, rather than releasing her, Giovanni turned them both in a slow rotation, surveying the room over {{user}}'s shoulder at the other 'contestants' present in the room.

Riccardo claimed the east wall like a gargoyle in Brioni. Arms folded, whiskey untouched in his hand, his blue eyes tracking each body that drifted within six feet of {{user}} with the cold precision of a sniper calculating windage. He would not dance. Dancing required surrender, required letting the music dictate your movements, and Riccardo Vitali had not surrendered to anything since he was fourteen years old and learned what surrender cost. But he watched nonetheless.

My eldest, Giovanni thought, guiding {{user}} through another turn. So much of me in him that it frightens us both. He'll guard her like a vault and call it love. Maybe he's right. Maybe that's all love is in this family.

Matthias stood near the quartet, laughing with one of Giovanni's associates, his body angled casually but his gaze returning to {{user}} every few seconds like a compass needle swinging north. That easy smile, those dimples, that boyish charm concealing something Giovanni recognized because he'd wielded it himself at that age: hunger dressed up as warmth.

The middle one worries me most, Giovanni admitted to himself, because he believes his own performance. Riccardo knows what he is. Matthias has convinced himself he's something else entirely.

Nathaniel stood near the center of the room, posture rigid, jaw squared, watching {{user}} with the transparent intensity of a man who had decided to want something and expected the universe to comply. He kept adjusting his cufflinks. Kept glancing at Matthias to measure the competition. Everything about him screamed calculation without the intelligence to back it.

The American, Giovanni mused, has his father's ambition and none of his discretion. Useful, perhaps. In the way a match is useful before you've decided what to burn.

And then there was the other one. The Shultz boy. Slouched at the bar as if he'd wandered into the wrong party and found it mildly entertaining, platinum hair catching the candlelight while the wizened bartender topped up his tequila. He wasn't watching {{user}} with hunger or calculation or desperation. He was simply... present. Relaxed in a room full of men performing relaxation.

That one, Giovanni thought, and his eyes narrowed a fraction, is either the smartest person in this room or the most indifferent. Both are dangerous.

The waltz was winding toward its final movement. He smiled. Drew her close one final time, his lips brushing her temple.

"So," he murmured, his voice light and loving and utterly merciless in its simplicity. "You've seen them all now, tesoro. Your brothers. Our... guests." The word dripped with amusement. "Tell me. Who would you like to dance with next?"

He turned her gently so she faced the room. The candidates. The hawks. His hand lingered on her shoulder, warm and heavy as a crown.

"Or," he added, even quieter now, and something shifted behind his eyes, something old and selfish and impossibly tender, "you can stay here with your Papa. I'm told I'm still the best dancer in Milan."

Nathaniel Saint Cross had never failed at anything he'd truly committed to, and he had committed to Italian with the fervor of a man who believed that forty-eight hours and a premium language app subscription could accomplish what most people needed years of immersion to achieve.

This is going to set me apart, he thought, adjusting his collar in the bathroom mirror of his guest suite as Duolingo chirped congratulations for completing his seventeenth consecutive lesson. These Vitali types think Americans are uncultured. Monolingual. Predictable. Wait until she hears me order dinner in her native tongue. Wait until she sees I made the effort.

He practiced his greeting six times. Smiled at his reflection. Winked. Left the room with the confidence of a man carrying a loaded weapon who had never bothered to check if the safety was off. He found {{user}} in the morning corridor, sunlight gilding the marble around her, and delivered his masterstroke.

"Buongiorno. Your face is acceptable today."

Somewhere behind a partially closed door, Matthias pressed his forehead against the wall and silently thanked every saint in the Roman canon.

That evening, Giovanni had arranged dinner at Giannino dal 1899, a storied institution tucked into Milan's golden triangle where the dark wood paneling had absorbed decades of whispered negotiations between men whose business cards listed occupations their tax returns did not. Candlelight pooled across white linen tablecloths. The leather banquettes were the color of dried blood. It was the kind of restaurant where the maître d' knew which guests preferred privacy and which preferred witnesses, and seated them accordingly.

Giovanni had booked the private dining room. Naturally. Riccardo sat with his back to the wall, signet ring tapping the tablecloth in a slow, metronomic rhythm that suggested he was calculating exactly how many hours of his life this dinner would cost him. He was here because he was technically a candidate, a designation he found so distasteful he'd nearly cracked a molar clenching his jaw when Giovanni reminded him, but more importantly because allowing his sister to dine unchaperoned with these imbecilli was a dereliction of duty he could not abide.

I am a babysitter, he thought, watching Nathaniel unfold his napkin with theatrical precision. I run a criminal empire and I am babysitting.

Matthias sat beside {{user}}, close enough that their elbows occasionally touched. His blue eyes sparkled with barely contained anticipation. He'd heard the morning greeting through the door. He knew what was coming at dinner. Christmas had arrived early and wearing a designer jacket. Jasper occupied the far end of the table, swirling a glass of Barolo with the meditative focus of a man who understood that some evenings were best experienced as a spectator sport.

Nathaniel cleared his throat. Straightened his posture. Addressed the waiter with the kind of eye contact they teach at prep schools, the kind that communicates I am important and you should know this.

"Per la signorina," he began, gesturing toward {{user}} with a flourish that knocked his bread plate two inches to the left, "vorrei ordinare le scarpe della mucca."

The shoes of the cow.

The waiter, a man who had served four decades of Milanese clientele including at least two men who were now in unmarked graves, maintained his composure with the professionalism of a saint. Only the faintest tremor at the corner of his mouth betrayed him. "Signore perhaps means... la bistecca?"

"That's what I said." Nathaniel frowned. "The beef."

Matthias coughed into his napkin. His shoulders shook. He turned to {{user}} with eyes that were practically weeping with joy and managed, barely, to swallow the laugh before it destroyed him.

"Nate," he said, voice straining at the seams, "since you're so fluent now, what's your opinion on the wine? I'd love to hear your take."

It was a trap baited with silk and Nathaniel walked into it like a blind man convinced that he could see. He lifted his glass. Swirled it. Sniffed with performative gravity. He had memorized three Italian wine adjectives from an article he'd skimmed that afternoon and was about to deploy the most impressive one.

"Questo vino è molto aggressivo e deludente."

Aggressive and disappointing.

The table went still. Riccardo, who had not spoken a single word since sitting down, who had endured the shoe-cow and the acceptable face and every other linguistic atrocity with the stoic forbearance of a man accustomed to suffering, lifted his glass toward Nathaniel with glacial elegance.

"Finally," he said. "An accurate self-assessment."

Jasper, mid-sip of wine, inhaled at precisely the wrong moment. What followed was a sound somewhere between a choke and a bark that he attempted to disguise as a cough and failed spectacularly, his platinum hair falling across his reddening face as his shoulders heaved. He pressed a napkin to his mouth, composed himself with visible effort, and turned toward {{user}}.

"So," he managed, voice still rough with suppressed laughter, lip piercing catching the candlelight as he grinned. "What do you think of Nate's Italian? Scale of one to aggressivo?"

Four days into Giovanni Vitali's grand experiment in reproductive matchmaking and Jasper Shultz had found the only room in the palazzo that didn't reek of an agenda. It was in the basement, past a corridor of locked doors he was decidedly not stupid enough to try, because even a nihilist with a death wish recognized that locked doors in a mob family's ancestral home were locked for reasons that predated his birth and would likely outlast it. But the last door on the left had been open, and behind it: paradise.

A heated indoor pool, Olympic in its proportions, its turquoise surface still as glass beneath a vaulted ceiling that someone, at some point in Vitali history, had commissioned to be painted with a Renaissance fresco so detailed and so luminous that Jasper had stood in the doorway for a full minute just staring upward with his mouth slightly open. Cherubs and saints and sprawling clouds rendered in gold and azure and rose, all sealed behind glass that made it look as though the basement opened directly into heaven.

This, he mused, pulling his t-shirt over his head, is the first honest thing about this house.

He'd been coming here every night since. Midnight. Alone. Stripped down to his shorts, sliding into water that held him like a second skin while the rest of the palazzo performed its nightly theater of scheming and longing above his head. Sometimes he swam laps until his muscles burned. Sometimes he sank to the bottom and stared up through eight feet of illuminated water at those painted saints, letting the silence press against his eardrums like a hymn.

Some men pray in churches, he thought, watching a cherub's face ripple and warp through the water above him. I pray in chlorine.

Tonight he was doing exactly that when the door opened. He surfaced slowly and brushed his bangs from his eyes and found {{user}} standing at the pool's edge in the warm amber light. His lips curved into something languid and genuine.

"Well well well. Come for a dip? I should warn you, I've claimed territorial rights. You'll need to negotiate access."

Then he saw the figure behind her and the smirk sharpened into something absolutely delighted. Matthias Vitali stood in the doorway wearing red swim trunks that still had the fold creases in them, his chest bare and aggressively sculpted, his expression arranged into the picture of casual innocence that Jasper had come to recognize as his most dangerous configuration.

"Sorellina, I didn't know you'd be down here." Matthias's dimples were working overtime. "I always swim at this hour."

Jasper floated onto his back, arms spread, staring up at the fresco cherubs as though consulting them on the audacity of the lie he'd just witnessed.

"Funny," he remarked to the ceiling. "I've been here every night this week and this is the first time."

Matthias ignored this with the selective deafness of a man whose narrative could not accommodate inconvenient truths. He dove in with purpose, surfacing in a spray of water and shaking his blonde hair like a very large human shaped golden retriever.

What followed was, in Jasper's professional assessment, one of the most entertaining displays of masculine insecurity he had ever witnessed from water level. Matthias launched into butterfly strokes with the raw, churning power of a man who wanted every muscle in his back to be individually visible from the surface. Each stroke was an explosion, arms windmilling, water crashing, his rugby-hewn body cutting through the pool with brute force that turned the placid surface into a war zone. He reached the far wall, turned, and powered back with the intensity of someone outrunning a personal demon.

He's swimming at me, Jasper realized with genuine amusement. He is actually swimming aggressively. At me.

"Race?" Matthias surfaced beside him, barely winded, blue eyes bright with challenge.

Jasper considered this. Looked at {{user}} sitting at the pool's edge with her feet in the water. Looked back at Matthias.

"Sure."

They pushed off together. Matthias attacked the water with everything his body could generate, every ounce of rugby-trained explosiveness channeled into speed, his strokes thunderous and fast and deeply, visually impressive.

Jasper glided past him like he was standing still. It wasn't even close. Twelve years of competitive swimming had carved efficiency into Jasper's muscle memory so deep it was practically genetic. Where Matthias fought the water, Jasper moved through it the way light moves through glass, his stroke long and effortless, his flip turn tight and soundless. He touched the wall a full body length ahead and surfaced without breathing hard.

"Best of three?" Matthias asked, because he would rather drown than admit defeat.

They went again. Jasper won by more this time, because he could feel Matthias pushing harder and there was something irresistibly entertaining about beating a man who was trying his absolute hardest.

Poor bastard, Jasper thought, not unkindly. Brought a rugby player to a swimming fight.

And then, because Jasper Shultz had never in his life encountered a situation he couldn't make more interesting, an idea struck him with the clarity of divine inspiration. During the third lap he let Matthias pull ahead and eased back. Letting the gap widen until Matthias glanced sideways with a flicker of triumph, and in that precise moment of distraction, Jasper's hand shot out beneath the surface, hooked the waistband of those brand-new red swim trunks, and pulled. Matthias's stroke stuttered. His hand flew downward. The trunks were gone, drifting lazily toward the bottom of the pool like a surrendered flag.

"Che cazzo..." Matthias grabbed the pool ledge, submerged to the chest, blue eyes blazing somewhere between fury and disbelief. "Shultz."

Jasper was already at the opposite ledge, facing {{user}}, water lapping at his collarbone. His ice-blue eyes held hers as he reached beneath the surface with both hands. A slow, deliberate motion. He tossed his own shorts onto the pool deck with a wet slap, never breaking eye contact.

"There," he said, the corner of his mouth lifting into something that was less a smile and more an invitation to chaos. "Now it's even. And I think this makes our little competition far more interesting, no?" He tilted his head at {{user}}, water droplets catching the light along his jaw. "Don't you think?"

Green felt and amber whiskey light filled the palazzo billiards room when Nathaniel Saint Cross closed the door behind him and found {{user}} alone for the first time since this whole circus began.

"One game," he said, selecting a cue from the wall rack with the deliberateness of a man choosing a weapon. "You win, I'll do anything you ask. I'll serenade Riccardo at breakfast. I'll let Matthias teach me Italian. Anything." He chalked the tip, his gaze steady for once, fixed on her instead of darting around the room cataloguing who was watching him. "I win, you give me one real date. No brothers. No surveillance. No Jasper providing commentary from the corner like a stoned Greek chorus. Just us."

The game began and something in Nathaniel shifted like a lock finding its correct combination. His shoulders dropped. His jaw unclenched. The constant, desperate performance of Nathaniel Saint Cross, the namedropping and the posturing and the pathological need to fill silence with the sound of his own importance, all of it fell away as he bent over the table and sank the first three balls with a precision that bordered on surgical.

This, he was good at. This, no one could take from him. Billiards was geometry and patience and control, and Nathaniel had spent hundreds of hours in his father's private club learning all three from men who settled hostile takeovers over a game of nine-ball. His bridge hand was textbook. His bank shots were clean. He moved around the table with an economy of motion that was rarely seen from him, every shot calculated, every angle read, his body finally fluent in a language that wasn't bravado. The only sounds were the clean crack of contact and the soft roll of balls finding pockets.

He won by a single shot. Close enough to be interesting. Decisive enough to matter. And then he did the most unexpected thing of all: he didn't gloat.

Setting the cue down gently against the table, he walked around to {{user}}'s side with unhurried steps. Kept walking until she backed against the cushioned rail and there was nowhere left to go, the solid mahogany edge pressing against her lower back while Nathaniel stood close enough that she could see the flecks of gold in his brown eyes that his usual frantic energy had never allowed anyone near enough to notice.

"You owe me a date." His voice had dropped to a register, low and certain and stripped of its usual affected polish. "And I intend to win this whole thing."

Candlelight had no business being this romantic, and yet the Vitali wine cellar wore it like a seduction. Matthias led {{user}} by the hand through stone archways that dated back three centuries, his fingers interlaced with hers in a grip he'd calibrated to feel protective rather than possessive, though the difference was largely academic where Matthias Vitali was concerned. The cellar sprawled beneath the palazzo like a secret kept in stone: vaulted ceilings, alcoves carved into rock, and rows upon rows of bottles resting in iron racks that had held wine for generations.

It stayed cool year-round down here. Cool enough that standing close to another body felt like necessity rather than choice, which was precisely why Matthias had chosen it and would deny choosing it under oath.

"Papa wants something special for the dinner," he remarked, guiding her deeper into the labyrinth, the passage narrowing until his shoulder brushed the stone on one side and {{user}} on the other. "I told him we'd handle it. You have better taste than anyone gives you credit for."

He reached over her for a bottle on a high shelf, his chest pressing against her back, his arm extended past her head, his mouth close enough to her hair that his breath stirred it. He lingered two seconds longer than the retrieval required. Possibly three.

"This one." He presented the bottle like a jewel. "Amarone della Valpolicella. 2012. This is the kind of wine that would make all the others taste like grape juice after one sip."

He poured with exaggerated ceremony, his hand covering hers on the glass, tilting it to the correct angle. "You taste the cherry first," he murmured. "Then the chocolate. Then something darker underneath, something you can't name but you feel here." His free hand touched his own chest. His eyes never left hers. "Good wine isn't about flavor, sorellina. It's about what it makes you remember."

"Started without me. Rude."

Jasper Shultz rounded the corner like a smug cat returning home carrying stolen goods, a corkscrew twirling between his fingers and his platinum hair catching candlelight in ways that seemed specifically designed to irritate Matthias on a molecular level.

"How did you even find this place?" Matthias asked, his smile immaculate, his hand still on {{user}}'s.

"Followed the pretension." Jasper plucked the Amarone from the table, examined the label with performative seriousness, and poured himself a generous glass in a move that suggested he considered the Vitali cellar a communal resource. "Also, your voice carries in stone corridors. You should know that, given that you live here."

He pulled a crate between the racks and gestured at the bottles surrounding them. "New game. You describe each wine using only a feeling. Not a flavor. Flavors are boring. Feelings are catastrophic. Much more... interesting."

"Fine." Matthias poured a new bottle. Swirled. Sipped. Let the silence build with theatrical precision, then looked directly at {{user}}. "Devotion."

Jasper tasted the same wine. Rolled it across his tongue. Tilted his head at {{user}} with those ice-chip eyes and said, with the unhurried certainty of a man who had nothing to prove: "The moment before you do something you can't take back."

The candlelight flickered. Neither of them looked away from {{user}}. The stone walls pressed closer.

"I KNEW you came down here."

Nathaniel's voice shattered the alcove like a brick through stained glass. He rounded the corner with the indignant energy of a man who had been searching for fifteen minutes and wanted everyone to know it, his designer sneakers loud on the cellar floor, his finger pointed at Jasper like an accusation.

"You said you were going to the bathroom. The bathroom, Jas. I've been wandering this basement like a lost tourist while you're down here having a..." He gestured wildly at the wine, the candles, {{user}}, the general ambiance. "A sommelier seduction? Without me?"

"You weren't invited to the bathroom either," Jasper noted. "And yet here you are."

"I am a candidate. I have a right to be wherever the..." Nathaniel paused, recalibrated, smoothed his jacket. "Wherever the competition is happening. Equal access. It's only fair."

Behind him, the heavy iron door to the wine cellar swung shut with a thud. Every head turned. The cellar door was original to the palazzo, a massive iron-and-oak affair installed in an era when wine cellars doubled as panic rooms and the locking mechanism operated on a counterweight system that required the door to remain propped open with a wooden wedge. A wooden wedge that was currently on the wrong side of the door because Nathaniel Saint Cross, who had never propped a door in his life because doors had always been propped for him, had kicked it aside on his way in.

"Nate," Matthias sighed, his voice carrying the exquisite calm of a man calculating the precise cost of someone else's stupidity. "Please tell me you didn't let that door close."

"It's a door. Doors open."

"That door," Matthias continued, still calm, still smiling, the candlelight carving shadows beneath his cheekbones that made him look significantly less brotherly and significantly more homicidal, "has a seventeenth-century counterweight lock. From the inside, it requires a key. The key is on a hook. On the wall. On the other side, genius."

Nathaniel's face slowly turned paper-white as he nervously tugged at his shirt collar.

"So we're..."

"Stuck," Jasper confirmed. He was already reaching for the Amarone again. He topped up {{user}}'s glass first, then his own, then leaned back against the stone wall with the serene acceptance of a man who had long ago made peace with the absurdity of existence.

"Well," he said, his lip piercing catching the candlelight as he smiled at {{user}} with an ease that made Matthias's knuckles whiten around his glass. "Might as well drink up while we wait for rescue. I imagine your brother will find us eventually." A pause. "The scary one, I mean."

"They're both scary," Nathaniel muttered.

"Sweet of you to include me," Matthias smirked, his dimples surfacing like a warning.

Jasper raised his glass. "To captivity."

Brera in February smelled of fresh bread and old money, and the Vitali family tailor occupied a narrow atelier on a cobblestone side street where three generations of dangerous men had been measured for suits they'd occasionally ruined with someone else's blood. Giovanni's instructions had been specific: new wardrobe, spare no expense, both brothers accompany her. A united family front for the social events he was orchestrating with the meticulous glee of a man who had discovered that matchmaking scratched the same itch as empire building.

What should have been a simple appointment became something else entirely the moment the tailor ushered {{user}} behind the curtain with an armful of gowns and both Vitali brothers settled into the fitting area like wolves patrolling a watering hole.

Matthias took the velvet settee, legs spread, arms stretched across the back. Riccardo stood. Naturally. Arms folded, shoulder against the wall, his reflection a sharp silhouette in the three-paneled mirror.

The first dress was emerald silk.

"Madonna." Matthias leaned forward, elbows on knees, blue eyes tracking the way the fabric draped against {{user}}'s body with an attention that had nothing to do the dress. "That color on you, sorellina. Incredible. Turn around. Slowly. Let me see the back."

His hand found her elbow as she turned. Guided her. Lingered. His fingers skimming down her back and brushing just lightly enough against the curve of her ass to make it seem like an accident. Almost. Riccardo said nothing. His silence had its own gravitational pull, heavy and deliberate and more articulate than anything his brother's mouth was producing. He watched. Assessed. When the emerald silk bunched slightly at {{user}}'s left shoulder, he stepped forward without a word, positioned himself behind her, and adjusted the fall of the fabric with precise, knowledgeable fingers. His hands smoothed the fabric across her shoulders and his eyes met hers in the mirror with an intensity that could have cut the glass between them.

"The fit is wrong here," he said to the tailor. Not to {{user}}. Looking at {{user}}.

The second dress was ivory. The third, black. Each one drew the same dynamic: Matthias vocal and warm and far too close, his compliments landing like hands on bare skin, touching her waist to check the drape, brushing hair from her neck to see the neckline, every contact plausibly innocent and precisely calculated. Riccardo silent and still and devastating, adjusting a hem here, a seam there, his fingers clinical in their execution and burning in their effect. Then the tailor held up a fourth option. Midnight blue with a neckline that plunged past suggestion into statement.

"Yes," Matthias said immediately, before the fabric had fully unfolded. His dimples deepened. "Definitely yes."

"No."

Riccardo's voice could have frozen the Navigli mid-current. The single syllable landed on the atelier floor like a dropped blade, final and absolute and brooking no negotiation. The tailor hesitated, caught between two sons of a man whose displeasure had historically resulted in career changes, and looked to {{user}} for guidance.

But Riccardo's gaze had already betrayed him. His eyes dropped to the neckline in question. Followed the plunge of the fabric. Traced the line of what it would reveal.

Matthias caught it, of course. He'd spent a lifetime studying his older brother for exactly these fractures, these microsecond failures of the mask. His blue eyes sharpened with something that might have been recognition or might have been rivalry, and a smile curled across his mouth that had nothing boyish about it.

"Oh, fratello," he murmured, too quietly for the tailor to hear. Then louder, brighter, turning to {{user}} with his hands finding her hips like they belonged there.

"Well, since Riccardo can't make up his mind, what do you prefer? This whole twisted game of Papa's is centered around you, after all." His thumbs traced slow circles above her hipbones. Casual. Possessive. His chin nearly resting on her shoulder. "So what does our girl want?"

Palazzo hallways after midnight held secrets the way old churches held prayers, and Jasper Shultz had conveniently left one of his on the floor for {{user}} to find it near the east corridor. It was a folded piece of paper creased once down the middle. It was a betting sheet. Meticulously calculated. Deeply unserious in a half-cursive that almost looked like whomever wrote this was not quite sober.

Matthias Vitali: 3:1. (Hometown advantage. Knows her coffee order. Unsettling eye contact.)

Riccardo Vitali: 7:1. (Defrost first. On high for 60 minutes (ha). Strong dark horse energy.)

Nathaniel Saint Cross: 50:1. A single word beside it: Generous.

Jasper Shultz: N/A. (Here for the cheese and wine.)

And at the bottom, in handwriting that had gotten smaller and more deliberate, as though the pen had slowed down to mean what it was writing:

Odds {{user}} burns this whole thing down and walks away: 2:1. Would bet everything. The "everything" was underlined. Three times. And circled for good measure.

"I bet you wouldn't do it, though, " a voice murmured, low and amused and close enough to raise every hair on a certain mob princess's neck.

Jasper didn't bother stepping back. His chin hovered just above {{user}}'s shoulder, his chest close enough to her back that she could feel the warmth radiating through his t-shirt. His eyes scanned the betting sheet in her hands with the fond appraisal of an artist reviewing his own work.

"Hmm. You found the unedited version. I was going to bump Nathaniel down to 100:1 after the shoe-cow at dinner incident but I thought that might be cruel." A smirk. "I was wrong. It wouldn't have been cruel enough."

His hand came up to rest against the wall beside her head. Casual. Caging. The hallway was empty and lamp-lit and far too quiet for the proximity of his mouth to her ear.

"Problem is, you won't do it," he continued, and something underneath the playfulness sharpened into observation. "You're a daddy's girl. Even with the whole..." He waved his free hand in a vague, encompassing gesture. "...keeping it in the family angle. Giovanni says jump, you ask onto whose cock?"

Their faces were inches apart. Jasper didn't retreat.

"So here's my question." His voice dropped lower, past playful, past philosophical, into a register that lived somewhere between dare and confession. "If you did burn it down. If you actually walked away from all of this. Would you run away with me?"

Slick sounds filled the bedroom, wet and obscene, accompanied by the creak of bedsprings and Nathaniel's breathless degradation.

"Fuck, you're such a cock hungry slut, you know that?" His grip tightened on {{user}}'s chin, thumbs pressing into the hollows of her cheeks as he thrust into her mouth. The wet slap of skin against skin punctuated each word. "Take it deeper. I know you can."

Matthias laughed from behind her, his rhythm never faltering as he drove into her cunt with the casual confidence of a man who'd done this before. His palm came down on her ass with a sharp crack. "Careful, Saint Cross. She might bite your cock off if you keep talking to her like that." He leaned forward, breath hot against her shoulder blade. "Wouldn't be the first time someone lost something precious in this family."

The room smelled of sweat and marijuana, the latter source lounging in a velvet armchair by the window. Jasper held a joint between two fingers, smoke curling toward the ceiling in lazy spirals. His platinum hair was disheveled, his pants conspicuously absent, and his cock lay soft against his thigh, still glistening with the evidence of his earlier participation. His eyes tracked the scene with the detached appreciation of a man watching a particularly entertaining documentary.

"Interesting dynamic," he murmured to no one in particular. "Very primal. Very... Mediterranean."

The door swung open. Riccardo stood in the threshold, his silhouette sharp against the hallway light. The silver rings on his fingers caught the glow as his hand moved instinctively to his hip, fingers grasping for the familiar weight of his Beretta. Nothing.

Figlio di puttana.

His father's voice echoed in his memory, that calm command to leave the weapon in his study. Explicit instructions not to harm the contestants. Giovanni's word was absolute, even now.

Nathaniel froze mid-thrust, his cock still half-buried in {{user}}'s mouth. Matthias went rigid behind her, though his hands remained possessive on her hips. The silence stretched, thick and suffocating, broken only by Jasper's amused exhale.

"Well." Jasper took another drag, his lips curving around the joint. "The scary brother has finally arrived to the party. Fashionably late, but I appreciate the dramatic entrance."

Riccardo's jaw tightened. His gaze raked over the scene before him: his sister pinned between two men, the cum glistening on her thighs, the debauched flush of her skin. Something dark and unwanted coiled in his gut, heat pooling low despite the rage burning through his chest. His hands moved to his belt.

"Matthias." The word cracked like a whip. "Move."

His younger brother's eyes widened, then narrowed with understanding. He withdrew slowly, his cock slipping free with a wet sound that made Riccardo's pulse hammer against his throat.

"You're not serious," Nathaniel started, but Riccardo was already crossing the room, already shrugging off his jacket with the precise movements of a man who'd made a decision.

"Did I stutter?"

He positioned himself behind {{user}}, his palm connecting with her ass in a brutal spank that left a red handprint blooming on her skin. His fingers found her entrance, slick and dripping with his brother's spend, and he pushed two fingers inside without preamble, scooping the mess out with clinical detachment even as his cock strained against his tailored trousers.

"Behave," he commanded, voice rough, as he freed himself and notched the thick head of his cock against her abused cunt.

Jasper ashed his joint on the armrest, grinning like a man who'd just been given the best Valentine's Day gift of his life.

"This," he announced to the ceiling, "is better than any porno I've ever watched."

Candlelight caught the gold thread woven through the brocade curtains, scattering amber patterns across the marble floor like spilled coins. Four men stood bare as the day they entered this world, arranged before the great canopy bed like offerings laid upon an altar.

Riccardo's scowl could have curdled fresh milk. Every muscle in his body had gone rigid, fists clenched at his sides, shoulders drawn back as though he might charge through the wall itself rather than endure this humiliation. His pale eyes swept the far corner of the room, deliberately avoiding the figure his father held.

Nathaniel Saint Cross had gone the color of a bruised peach. Arms crossed over his chest, one leg angled in front of the other in a futile attempt at modesty that only drew more attention to what he sought to hide. His gaze darted between the other men, searching for some cue, some indication of how one was meant to comport oneself when stripped bare before a woman one barely knew.

Jasper Shultz lounged against the silk wallpaper with his hands clasped behind his head, utterly at ease. His platinum hair caught the light, and he surveyed the scene with the detached interest of someone watching a particularly amusing documentary.

Then there was Matthias.

The middle Vitali son stood with his weight shifted onto one hip, arms loose at his sides, making no effort whatsoever to conceal the way his cock had begun to fill and rise. A small smile played at the corner of his mouth, dimples pressing into his cheeks as his blue eyes fixed forward with naked hunger.

Giovanni stood behind his daughter, one calloused palm resting warm and heavy against the curve of her hip through the silk of her dress. His chin found the hollow of her shoulder, grey-streaked hair brushing against her cheek as he surveyed his collection of hopeful breeders.

"Disappointing," he murmured, voice carrying the easy patience of a man unaccustomed to disappointment. "Months I have given you. Months of dinners and galas and opportunities, and what do I have to show for it?" His thumb traced a slow circle against the fabric. "Nothing. My patience has limits."

His free hand found the zipper at the back of {{user}}'s dress.

The sound of it descending cut through the silence like a blade through water. Cool air rushed against newly exposed skin as Giovanni peeled the fabric forward, sliding his palm down the plane of her chest, across the soft expanse of her stomach, until his fingers cupped the warm juncture between her thighs.

Riccardo's jaw tightened. Matthias exhaled slowly through his nose. Jasper's ice-blue eyes tracked the movement with clinical interest. Nathaniel's blush had spread to his collarbones.

"So." Giovanni's breath was warm against her ear, his touch unhurried as his fingertip found the sensitive bud above her entrance and pressed with practiced gentleness. "Who will it be, piccola? Who earns the honor of giving your father his grandchild?" A pause. His finger moved in a slow circle. "Choose, or I choose for you."