“And she believes he’s dead,” Atlas surmised.
“Yes.”
“And you have not adjusted that misconception,” I pointed out.
Gianni angled uncomfortably in his seat.
“She’s pregnant.Emotional.Stable.Happy.Why would I introduce unnecessary complications?”
Marcello smirked slightly.“Maybe because the man keeps walking into family operations like a recurring guest star.”
Gianni glared at him.
“I don’t know why I’m even bothering,” he shot back.“His own people will kill him eventually anyway.”
I leaned back in my chair and studied my cousin in silence.
Gianni’s irritation suddenly made a lot more sense when you looked at the history he preferred not to discuss.
Mikayla had once been engaged to Archie.Not by choice.By arrangement.
Then Gianni met her.Or, more accurately, collided with her—literally—when he hit the runaway bride on her own wedding day and decided, in typical Gianni fashion, that the situation was now his responsibility and his problem to solve.
What followed had been less of a romantic triangle and more of a controlled disaster.
Gianni fell for her quickly.Intensely.Predictably.
Archie, inconveniently, was still the man she had been promised to.
There had been a confrontation.Loud.Violent.Personal.The kind of altercation that stopped being about a woman halfway through and became about pride, territory, and who would concede first.
That was how Archie got knee-capped.
Gianni had not missed.And he had not intended it as a warning, either.He had intended to kill him.
The situation would have ended there, permanently, if Atlas hadn’t stepped in at the exact moment Gianni raised the gun for the kill shot.One intervention.One command.And a decision that kept a bullet out of Archie’s head.
Not out of mercy, but out of necessity.
At the time, the “crazy Russian,” as Gianni so fondly called him, possessed information Atlas needed badly enough to justify keeping him alive.Strategic value outweighed personal grievances.It was simple math, really.
Since then, Archie had done what very few men in his position ever managed to do.
He stayed.
He didn’t retaliate.Didn’t disappear.Didn’t attempt to sever ties after nearly being executed by the very family he now worked alongside.Instead, he embedded himself into our operations with consistency, providing intel that proved accurate often enough to make his continued presence less of a question and more of an inevitability.
Somehow, despite the history, the knee-capping, the attempted execution, and the ongoing hostility from Gianni, he had become a fixture.An uncomfortable one.But a permanent one nonetheless.
I still couldn’t fully explain his loyalty.A rational man would have walked away.A sane man certainly wouldn’t keep showing up to meetings where one of the attendees had once tried to put him in the ground.And yet Archie continued to return, cane and all, calm, cooperative, and useful in ways that made eliminating him impractical and trusting him complicated.Go figure.
“You have nothing to worry about,” I finally addressed Gianni.
He narrowed his eyes.
“Oh?”
“You did a very thorough job,” I drawled, “of knocking your wife up.Twice.She has given you two beautiful daughters and is currently carrying a third child.”