HIS DARK OBSESSION

POV: Giuliana Vitale

This Venetian place just always made you forget the outside world existed.

Six months ago, when I first walked through those doors, I had to remind myself to breathe. To not stare. To not let the sheer size of this room make me feel small and give my whole identity away.

Now I barely noticed any of the grandeur.

My name here was Giuliana Fiore. I had a locker with that name on it, a uniform ironed so well it could stand on its own, and my reputation as the most reliable server on the floor.

I made sure I came in early, never complained, remembered how the guests preferred their wine, which ones didn't like eye contact and so on. I had become exactly what this place needed me to be, and I had done it so completely that some nights I had to sit alone in my car after a shift to remind myself who I actually was.

Giuliana Vitale. Twenty five years old. Daughter of Paulo and Rosa Vitale, both murdered in their Miami home three years ago while I was asleep in my school dormitory 800 miles away.

That's who I was. Everything else was just a costume, a façade.

I pushed through the door to the private dining room at exactly 8:57pm. Three minutes before I was scheduled to pour. I had chosen the timing myself, down to the second. The 1998 Barolo was already breathing on the sidebar, deep and dark and perfect. I had spent two weeks selecting it. Another two days preparing it in ways that no one would ever be able to explain.

Every detail had been planned.

I just needed to pour the wine.

Salvatore Romano was already seated at the head of the table. Seeing him in person stirred up that cold demon of vengeance in me. I wasn't scared of him, not anymore.

He looked quite old which really suited him because he was about to go meet his own maker. Seventy one years old and responsible for more deaths than I would ever be able to count, including the two that mattered most to me.

I had carried his face in my head for three years and tonight?

Tonight I was finally going to pull it out.

Marco sat beside him, talking loudly with his hands flying everywhere. He was the louder brother, always desperate to be taken seriously.

Then I looked at Vincenzo, and something made me look a second longer than I should have.

He sat across from Marco and said nothing. He didn't need to. There was a particular quality to his stillness. His dark eyes moved slowly around the room, unhurried and taking note of everything. And when they passed over me briefly, my stomach knot tightened.

I filed him away somewhere in my head and kept moving.

I lifted the Barolo and began to pour. Marco’s first, then the empty glass beside Salvatore. My hands were perfectly steady. Three years of training had made sure of that. Nico used to make me practice pouring water while he stood behind me and said the most horrific things he could think of, testing whether my hands would shake. They didn't anymore. They hadn't for a long time.

I was almost done. I was so close. The glass in front of Salvatore was full, dark, waiting for him to drink.

"Mr. Salvatore."

The voice came from the doorway and my hand stilled on the bottle for just a fraction of a second. The family doctor. He was approaching the table with that particular expression that told me his news wasn't good.

"You haven't forgotten what we discussed."

Salvatore didn't even look up from the papers in front of him. He just lifted one hand and waved it slowly through the air.

"No wine tonight."

The words nearly took out the breath from my lungs.

No wine tonight.

I finished the pour, set the bottle down and picked up my tray. My body kept moving. But inside me, something had just lurched so violently that for a moment I genuinely could not feel my feet on the floor.

Three years. I kept thinking it over and over. Three years, three years, three years!!!

Marco was still talking. He reached for his glass without even pausing his sentence. He lifted it toward his father with a wide, easy smile. The smile of a man who had no idea. Who would never have any idea…

"Then I'll toast for both of us." He paused, savoring it. "To the future."

He tilted the glass back and drank. Not a sip. Not a taste. The whole thing, in one long, deeply satisfied swallow, like it was the best wine he'd ever had in his life.

I watched him set the empty glass back down on the table.

And then I walked to the door.

I don't fully remember crossing the room. I don't remember the door handle. I don't remember the corridor on the other side of the door. I don't remember the door swinging shut behind me with a soft, final click.

I only remembered my back hitting the wall and I just stood there.

It felt like my lungs were failing. I pressed one hand flat against the wall beside me and focused on the texture of it, cold and slightly rough under my palm,

I counted my breaths. In. Out. In. Out.

My whole body was shaking and I hadn't even noticed until now. Three years of grief that I had compressed into this purposeful mission was suddenly pushing against every wall I had built around it, looking for a way out.

My father used to hum while he made breakfast. He couldn't cook to save his life but he always tried, and he always hummed. I hadn't let myself think about that in two years.

I thought about it now, standing in this corridor, and it nearly finished me.

I pressed the heel of my hand against my sternum and breathed until the shaking slowed. Until Giuliana Fiore came back online and Giuliana Vitale went back to the place I always kept her, quiet and contained and safely out of the way.

Then I pushed off the wall.

Marco Romano had just swallowed enough poison to stop his heart, while Salvatore Romano was going to ask for a glass of water and sleep perfectly tonight.

F*CK!

I had a window for my alibi that was getting smaller by the second.

I walked out the back exit quickly. But I couldn't stop that one thought from following me all the way out into the cold night air.

I had given three years of my life to this moment.

And I had just poured it into the wrong man.

POV: Marco Romano

The wine was exceptional.

I knew good wine. I had been drinking it since I was sixteen years old, sneaking bottles from my father's cellar while Vincenzo sat in the study being groomed for greatness.

So when I lifted that glass and let the Barolo sit on my tongue for a moment before swallowing, I meant it when I decided it was one of the finest things I had tasted all year.

I set the empty glass down and smiled at my father.

"Then I'll toast for both of us," I said. "To the future."

And I meant that too.

Because the future, as far as I was concerned, belonged to me.

I smoothed my jacket and turned back to the presentation materials spread across the table. Three months of work. Three months of quietly building something that would finally make my father look at me the way he looked at Vincenzo. I was sick of that careful, measured approval he reserved for me, it always felt like a consolation prize. I just wanted the