Lena Marchetti did not sleep that night. By dawn, Dante Varlli's file lay surrounded by color-coded sticky notes, three potential candidate profiles, and a creeping sense of professional dread. Finding a wife for a man like Dante was not matchmaking; it was assembling a diplomatic hostage.

Candidate number two arrived on Tuesday afternoon. Evangeline "Eva" Moreau was a portrait restorer from the Upper East Side whose family had lost everything except their pedigree and a very expensive art collection. She had fierce green eyes, paint-stained cuticles, and a sharp tongue that had gotten her fired from three major galleries.

"He wants real?" Eva asked, tossing her leather satchel onto Lena’s sofa. "I deal in chipped paint, faded canvas, and things people gave up on because they were too broken to fix. If the mafia boss wants authenticity, I'm his best bet."

"He is not a project, Eva," Lena warned, adjusting her glasses. "He is an institution."

"Institutions crumble when the foundation rots," Eva retorted. "Give me his address."

Lena arranged a private gallery tour for Thursday night. No public restaurants this time—just a closed exhibition space where Dante and Eva could walk among sixteenth-century Dutch masters. Lena watched from the security monitors in the back office.

Eva didn't talk about stocks or real estate. She walked Dante straight to a dark, somber canvas depicting a storm over a desolate coastline.

"Your father bought this piece in ninety-four," Eva said, her hand hovering inches from the frame. "Everyone thought it was a terrible investment because the dark tones depressed buyers. But he kept it in his private study."

Dante stood behind her, his hands clasped behind his back. "How do you know that?"

"My grandfather helped him acquire it. My family went bankrupt three years later, and your father bought two of our minor landscapes above market value so my mother could pay for my schooling." Eva turned to face him, her green eyes piercing through the dim light. "He didn't do it out of charity. He did it because he understood what it felt like to have a name that people only talked about in whispers."

Dante didn't move. For three agonizing seconds, the tension between them crackled like live wire. Then, Dante reached out and touched a smudge of oil paint on Eva’s cheek, his thumb brushing her skin with a gentleness that contradicted every violent headline ever written about him.

"You talk too much," Dante said quietly.

"And you listen too little," she fired back.

Lena watched the monitor, feeling a strange, hollow twist in her chest. It was working. Eva was everything Dante needed: sharp, fearless, and tied to his world by invisible threads of history.

That night, Dante called Lena at 1:15 AM.

"She’s too loud," Dante said into the phone, his voice rough with fatigue.