Chapter Three: The Overprotective Mafia Uncles
Elle would return home on Friday to discover that her entire extended family had, over the course of a single school day, apparently conducted a full background investigation into a sixteen-year-old boy whose worst documented offense was a single overdue library book from the seventh grade, complete with a photograph, a timeline, and, inexplicably, a handwritten note rating his handshake potential.
That was just past four in the afternoon. First, there was the folder.
She found it on the kitchen table, thick and neatly organized, tabbed sections labeled in Dante's precise handwriting: FAMILY, ACADEMIC RECORD, EXTRACURRICULAR, ASSOCIATES. Elle stared at it for a long moment, torn between horror and a strange, helpless urge to laugh, before flipping it open to find an actual photograph of Jasper's soccer team from freshman year paperclipped to a page of neatly bulleted notes.
Subject appears to be exactly what he claims: unremarkable, well-liked, no criminal associations, parents run a small hardware store on Fifth Street. Grades solidly above average. Coaches describe him as "a good kid, hardworking." No red flags identified.
Beneath that, in different handwriting, someone — Elle strongly suspected Marco — had added a single additional line: Still recommend surveillance continue. One cannot be too careful.
"You have got to be kidding me." Elle's voice came out somewhere between a shriek and a laugh as she stormed into the den, where Dante sat with three of the younger cousins watching television with the unbothered ease of a man who had done absolutely nothing wrong in his own estimation. "You investigated him. You actually investigated a sixteen-year-old boy's library record."
The youngest cousin, Sofia, all of eight years old and entirely unbothered by the general tension of the household, glanced up from the cartoon long enough to ask, with great interest, "Is this about Elle's boyfriend?"
"He is not my boyfriend."
"Uncle Dante said he's your boyfriend."
"Uncle Dante," Elle said, rounding on him fully now, "said what?"
"I said no such thing." Dante's expression remained perfectly, infuriatingly placid. "I said the file suggested he was a suitable young man for you to associate with. Sofia has simply drawn her own conclusions."
"It was an overdue library book, Elowen, not a crime spree." Dante didn't even have the grace to look sheepish about it, waving one hand dismissively toward the folder still open on the coffee table. "Though I will say, a young man who returns his books three days late does show a certain lack of discipline that concerns me."
"It was Charlotte's Web. In sixth grade."
"Discipline is discipline at any age."
Elle threw the folder onto the coffee table with as much dramatic force as she could manage, which admittedly wasn't much given how thick and unwieldy the thing was. "This is insane. This is completely, certifiably insane, and I need you to understand that no other sixteen-year-old on the entire planet has to deal with her family running background checks on someone she talked to a total of maybe six times."
"No other sixteen-year-old on the entire planet has your particular circumstances," Dante said, not unkindly, setting down his coffee mug with careful deliberation. "You understand why we are careful, Elowen. It is not about the boy specifically. It has never been about any specific boy, or friend, or teacher, or anyone at all who gets close enough to notice things about you that most people should not be permitted to notice."
Something in his tone, gentler now than the teasing from before, took some of the fight out of Elle's outrage. She sank onto the arm of the sofa, arms crossed, still simmering but no longer quite at full boil. "I know why you're careful. I've known why my whole life. I just — I want one thing, Uncle Dante. One normal thing that doesn't come with a surveillance file attached to it." Elle rubbed a hand over her face, exhaustion finally cracking through the outrage. "Just one."
"I understand." Dante's expression softened further, the particular gentleness he reserved almost exclusively for her, a stark contrast to the reputation Elle knew he carried outside these walls. "For what it is worth, the file found nothing troubling. That should count for something."
"It shouldn't have existed in the first place."
"No," Dante agreed simply. "It probably shouldn't have. I will tell your father I think we have been excessive."
It was, Elle understood even as she accepted the small concession, likely the most ground she was going to gain today, and she took it, retreating to her room with the folder tucked under one arm, fully intending to burn the whole thing in the fireplace the moment she found a private moment to do so without anyone asking follow-up questions about the smoke.
She didn't get the chance. Her father found her twenty minutes later, knocking with the particular, careful courtesy he always extended to her bedroom door despite technically owning the entire house, and Elle knew, the moment she saw his face, that Dante's promised intervention had either not happened yet or had not gone especially well.
"I understand you are angry," Vincent said, settling into the chair across from her desk with the unhurried precision of a man who never rushed into any conversation he considered important, his sharp eyes softening the moment they landed on her. "I would like to explain myself properly, rather than simply issuing rules you resent without understanding why."
"I know why, Papa. I've always known why."
"Perhaps. But knowing why does not always make a thing easier to carry, and I think you have carried this particular weight for a very long time without much room to simply be angry about it." Vincent studied her for a long moment, something unusually open moving behind his typically guarded expression. "When you were four years old, Elowen, I watched men who had feared nothing in this world for decades weep at the sight of you healing a wound that should have killed one of my closest friends. I watched a curse older than this family's entire recorded history simply... stop, the moment your small hands touched his chest. I did not understand it. I still do not, fully. But I understood, immediately, that you were the single most valuable and most vulnerable thing that had ever existed inside these walls, and I have spent twelve years since trying to hold both of those truths at once without ever quite managing to feel like I have gotten the balance right."
Elle felt something in her chest loosen slightly, old frustration softening into something closer to the ordinary ache of loving someone whose fear for you occasionally expressed itself as suffocating overcaution. "I'm not fragile, Papa. Whatever I am, I'm not that."
"I know." Vincent's mouth curved, faint and rare. "You have never once been fragile, not from the very first day. It is precisely your stubbornness that convinces me you are ready for more freedom than I have given you, even as it is the same stubbornness that occasionally leads you directly into situations I would very much prefer you avoided."
"So what does that mean? Practically?"
Vincent considered the question with visible care. "It means the surveillance file was excessive, and I have already told Dante as much. It means Marco will continue walking the school perimeter during lunch, because that much I am not prepared to negotiate away, not yet." He paused, weighing his next words with the same deliberate caution he brought to every genuine negotiation Elle had ever watched him conduct, whether over business or, apparently, over her. "And it means," he added, something almost reluctant in his voice now, "that if this boy continues to matter to you, I would like to actually meet him. Properly. At dinner. Rather than learning about him secondhand through folders and rearview mirrors."
Elle's stomach dropped and soared simultaneously, an unfamiliar, dizzying combination. "Dinner. Here. With you. And probably Dante. And probably several other extremely intimidating men who own actual weapons."
"I can ask everyone to be on their best behavior."
"Papa, Uncle Marco's best behavior involves interrogating florists." Elle folded her arms, unconvinced despite herself.
"That was one time, and the delivery truly was suspicious." Vincent's mouth twitched again, close enough to an actual smile that Elle felt her own outrage finally, fully deflate into something closer to helpless affection, the particular kind reserved only for family absurd enough to love this fiercely. "I am not asking to frighten him, Elowen. I am asking because you clearly like this boy, and because I would like, for once, to be included in something that makes you hum while unloading dishes, rather than learning about it through a report."
Elle sat with that for a long moment, turning the offer over carefully, weighing the very real possibility of catastrophic, terrifying disaster against the quieter, more surprising truth that her father — her cold, careful, universally feared father — was, in his own guarded way, asking to be let closer to this particular soft, ordinary corner of her life rather than simply controlling it from a careful distance.
She thought, too, about the very first memory she had of him — fragmented, impressionistic, more feeling than image, a tall figure kneeling in front of a small, terrified, half-starved child and asking, with a gentleness that seemed impossible given everything she would later learn about him, whether she was hungry, whether she wanted to stay somewhere warm. She had said yes. She had been saying yes to whatever careful, complicated safety this family offered ever since, even when that safety occasionally chafed like a coat two sizes too small.
"Okay," she said finally, exhaling slowly. "But everyone has to promise. No interrogations. No weapons on the table, visible or otherwise. No mentioning literally anything about what this family actually does."
"I believe we can manage a normal dinner, yes." Vincent said it with the calm certainty of a man who had, in fact, never once managed anything resembling a normal dinner in his entire adult life.
"You once made a plumber cry, Papa." She raised an eyebrow, daring him to deny it.
"He was overcharging us considerably, and the crying was entirely his own choice." Vincent rose from the chair, smoothing his jacket with the same unhurried precision he brought to everything. "I will speak with the others. Invite your friend for Saturday, if he is amenable."
Vincent left before Elle could fully process what she'd just agreed to, and she sat alone in her room for a long moment, phone in hand, trying to figure out exactly how to phrase a dinner invitation that wouldn't immediately send Jasper running in the opposite direction the moment he learned precisely how many uncles she actually had.
Hey, she typed finally, after four separate deleted attempts, this is going to sound really weird, but would you want to come to dinner at my place Saturday? Fair warning, my family is... a lot. Like, genuinely, unusually a lot.
The reply came back faster than she expected, and considerably braver than she deserved.
Sounds terrifying. I'm in. What time should I show up, and do I need to bring anything besides my will to live?
Flowers for my dad, maybe, Elle typed back, grinning at her phone screen despite the anxious flutter still sitting low in her stomach. He's weirdly sentimental about grand gestures. Also possibly a bulletproof vest, but I'm mostly kidding about that one.
Mostly. Cool. Very reassuring. See you Saturday, Elle Castellano.
Elle laughed out loud, alone in her room, and felt something warm and hopeful settle into her chest even as a smaller, more cautious part of her began, quietly, to worry about exactly how badly Saturday might actually go, and whether any amount of careful preparation could possibly be enough to keep a boy with a crooked smile and four older brothers from realizing exactly how much danger he'd just cheerfully agreed to walk directly into.