“DON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU, SIR,” THE MAID’S TODDLER WHISPERED—THE MAFIA BOSS FROZE IN FEAR

## CHAPTER 4

The next morning, Gabriel asked Rosa to bring Matteo into his study again. Rosa looked nervous as she walked in, unsure why her employer wanted to speak with her son, her hands twisting slightly at the hem of her apron in a gesture Gabriel recognized as the particular anxiety of someone whose livelihood depended entirely on staying in good standing with a man she didn’t fully understand. She held Matteo’s small hand tightly as they stood before Gabriel’s desk. “Rosa,” Gabriel said gently, trying to sound calm so as not to frighten her. “Yesterday, before Danny came in, Matteo said something to me. Do you remember him saying anything unusual?”

Rosa shook her head slowly, looking down at her son with confusion. “I did not hear him say anything, sir. He was just standing by the window. I thought he was watching the birds outside like he usually does.” Gabriel studied the boy carefully. Matteo stood quietly beside his mother, his eyes wandering around the room the way any curious toddler would, drawn to the light fixtures, the patterns in the rug, the small collection of framed photographs on a side table. There was no sign of the strange stillness from the day before. He looked like an ordinary child playing with the hem of his mother’s uniform, humming softly to himself, entirely unaware that he was the subject of the room’s tense attention.

“Matteo,” Gabriel said softly, kneeling down slightly to be closer to the boy’s height, an unfamiliar posture for a man more accustomed to towering over the people in his orbit. “Do you remember what you saw yesterday by the window?” Matteo looked up at him with wide eyes, then simply smiled and pointed toward a small toy car sitting nearby. “Car,” he said happily, clearly more interested in his toys than in answering questions about the day before.

Gabriel tried once more, gentler this time. “Was there a man outside, Matteo? By the trees?” The boy tilted his head, considering the question with the serious, slightly baffled expression small children get when adults ask them things beyond their vocabulary. “Trees,” he repeated, as if testing the word, then lost interest entirely, wriggling to be put down so he could retrieve his car from across the room. Gabriel sat back, unsure what to make of it. Perhaps the boy truly did not remember. Perhaps it had been nothing more than a strange coincidence, a child’s random words landing at exactly the right moment, the kind of pattern-matching the human mind does naturally when it desperately wants an explanation for something inexplicable. But deep inside, Gabriel could not shake the feeling that something more had happened, something he could not fully explain, something that sat uneasily alongside everything he understood about the world and how it worked.

Rosa hovered nervously near the door, watching this exchange with the particular helplessness of a parent who wants desperately to understand what’s happening but has no way to make sense of it. “Sir, if he did something wrong—” “He didn’t do anything wrong,” Gabriel said, cutting her off, aware of how his questions must have looked from her side of things, a powerful man interrogating a toddler in a locked study the day after armed guards had swarmed the property. “Quite the opposite, Rosa. I think your son may have done something rather remarkable yesterday, whether he understands it or not.” Rosa’s confusion only deepened, but she didn’t press further, gathering Matteo back into her arms with the protective instinct of a mother who sensed, even without full understanding, that something significant had shifted in her employer’s regard for her family.