“DON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU, SIR,” THE MAID’S TODDLER WHISPERED—THE MAFIA BOSS FROZE IN FEAR
## CHAPTER 7
Matteo grew older, more talkative, more like any other curious child running through the halls and gardens of the estate, his vocabulary expanding week by week until he was chattering constantly about dinosaurs and clouds and the particular shape of shadows on the garden wall. He played with the guards sometimes, who had grown fond of him over the following year, letting him examine their radios with solemn curiosity and teaching him, against Rosa’s mild protests, how to salute properly. Ellis in particular took to spending a few minutes of his break each afternoon crouched beside Matteo on the lawn, patiently answering an endless stream of questions about why guards carried radios and what the crackling static meant and whether birds ever landed on the security cameras.
He learned to ride a small bicycle along the garden paths, training wheels wobbling beneath him, laughing loudly as Rosa chased after him, calling for him to slow down, her voice carrying across the lawn in a way that had become one of the mansion’s more welcome new sounds, replacing what had once been a near-permanent atmosphere of watchful, careful quiet. Gabriel, watching from his study window one afternoon, found himself smiling at the sight, an expression that felt unfamiliar on his own face, rusty from disuse. For a man who had spent his life surrounded by danger and distrust, the innocent laughter of a child running through his garden felt like something rare and precious, a sound that belonged to a different kind of life than the one he had built for himself, and yet here it was, unfolding in his own backyard.
One evening, several months after the incident, Gabriel found himself sitting on the porch steps near the guest house, an unusual place for him to linger, while Rosa put away groceries inside and Matteo built an elaborate, wobbling tower out of wooden blocks on the steps beside him. The boy worked with total concentration, tongue poking slightly from the corner of his mouth, occasionally glancing up at Gabriel as if checking whether the adult beside him found the project as important as he did. The evening air carried the particular softness of late summer, crickets beginning their nightly chorus somewhere beyond the garden wall, the security lights along the fence line clicking on one by one as the light faded. “Big tower,” Gabriel offered, and Matteo nodded seriously, adding another block with the exaggerated care of a surgeon, his small hands moving with a precision that seemed to matter enormously to him even though the blocks were simple painted wood, the kind of toy that could be replaced a hundred times over without denting Gabriel’s considerable fortune.
“You’re not scared of me anymore,” Gabriel said, more to himself than to the boy, surprised by the observation as it left his mouth. Matteo, of course, had never seemed scared of him at all, not even in the earliest days, something that had struck Gabriel as unusual even then — most people, adults included, carried a certain wariness in his presence, a carefulness that came from knowing, even vaguely, what kind of man he was. Even Rosa, for all her professionalism, still occasionally flinched at unexpected sounds when Gabriel entered a room too quickly, a reflex built from months of tiptoeing carefully around a man whose temper she’d never actually witnessed but whose reputation preceded him everywhere. Matteo had never carried that wariness. He’d simply treated Gabriel the way he treated everyone, with the same open, unguarded curiosity, entirely unaffected by reputation or fear.
Perhaps that was simply the nature of very young children, too new to the world to have learned yet who deserved fear and who didn’t. Or perhaps, Gabriel thought, watching the boy carefully stack another block, there was something in Matteo that simply saw people as they were rather than as the stories told about them, and had decided, on some instinctive level, that Gabriel was safe. The tower wobbled dangerously as Matteo added a final block, teetering for a long, suspended moment before finally settling, and the boy let out a triumphant sound, small hands raised in victory. “Ta-da,” he announced, looking to Gabriel for approval with the unselfconscious hopefulness of a child certain that the adults in his life would care about his small accomplishments. “Very impressive,” Gabriel said, and meant it more than the words probably suggested, something in his chest loosening slightly at the sight of that precarious, ordinary little tower standing intact in the fading evening light.