20. Salvatore
20
Salvatore
By end of day, someone has to die, and the sun is getting awfully low.
A procession forms in the front yard. Tessa and I lead, her hand curled into the crook of my arm. I found her waiting for me in my bedroom when I got back. There’s a strange relief to having someone waiting for you, especially on a day like today. This has been one of those days you just have to push through, dragging the weight of it all. No matter how heavy it gets, you can’t let it show.
Of all the day’s awful obligations, this is the one I can’t predict.
Tessa has never been to the cellar before. By the end of this, she will have seen two people die in just as many days. But she looks so calm next to me, almost cold, her head held high and eyes guarded like I’ve never seen them.
The phantom sensation of her lips ghosting across my knuckles returns to me.
Behind us, another uncertain variable. Ava walks like an automaton, responding to nothing and no one. She follows my orders when I tell her to come with us, but she doesn’t speak.
We enter the cold cellar. The light doesn’t reach the back of the room, where the wine rack hides the dungeon behind a makeshift wall. I push it open to reveal the series of divided iron-wrought cells.
Three of the six are filled.
Donny lies unconscious—maybe dead. That’s a coin-flip and I’m not in the mood to check which side it’s landed on.
Of the two who survived their suicide mission, Dario is the better off. We peeled a vest off him that took the brunt of the shots I put in him, but his face is a Picasso painting. He’s had at least one seizure—maybe a skull fracture—but he’s a persistent bastard.
Vinny’s killer is a mystery. The one who fired the first shot. But he’s not outsourced. I can tell just by looking at him, the boy is related to Contessa somehow. The dogs got to him before any of us, left him mangled and missing fingers, and infection is already setting in. His head lolls toward us as we enter.
I sprawl my hand on her back, but Tessa takes in the sight of her dying family without so much as flinching.
I move from her to Ava. I’ve seen dead eyes like that before—eyes that don’t have anything behind them. She doesn’t look anything like herself.
Leo opens the gate and drags the blood-stained man out against the wall. He tries to stand and fight, but his mangled leg collapses under him. Leo and Marcel get him hog-tied against the wall.
I put my hand on the tiny girl’s shoulder.
“This is the man who killed Vinny,” I say.
She lifts her head marginally.
I glance into Tessa’s face, but she gives me nothing. Her thoughts are buried behind her eyes, her expression cut from cold marble as her kin is manhandled in front of her.
Leo ties a blindfold over the man’s eyes as he spits and curses.
I take out the pistol.
“It’s our tradition, that closest kin is given the right to execute those that murdered a loved one—in your case, the family has decided that this right falls to you.”
“If you want it,” Marcel interjects, swiftly. “It’s a choice, and not one you have to make.
You don’t have to be here. He’ll still be dealt with. We’ll make sure Vinny gets justice—”
“I want to do it.”
The words are barely a whisper. She swallows around the raspiness in her voice, saying clearer, “I want to do it.”
If there were any warmth at all left in the room, it leaves with those words. Marcel looks stunned, as if he must have misheard somehow.
“Have you ever shot a gun before?” I ask.
The girl shakes her head.
“You have the right to appoint an executioner—”
“No,” she says, her voice deeper, emptier than I’ve ever heard it, but desperately urgent.
“ I want to do it.”
“Ava,” Marcel begs, falling to his knees in front of her. “Let me. Let me do this for you.”
She ignores him as though he isn’t even speaking. As I load the gun, Marcel staggers to his feet and rounds on me.
“Sal,” he says, his hand on my arm. Reality is soaking in quick. When I discussed this with him, neither of us thought Ava would want to pull the trigger. Not the Ava we knew. “Don’t let her do this. As your brother, I am begging you. She doesn’t know what she’s saying—”
“It’s her right, Marcel,” I tell him. I can’t deny her this. If it helps—if anything helps, then it’s my obligation to give it to her.
“She’s not even part of this family!” he yells.
“I would have been,” Ava whispers.
She holds out her hand for the pistol. Marcel steps in between us.
“Sal,” he says again.
I see the shock in his eyes. The disbelief. Marcel and I have done a lot for each other.
Looked the other way on traditions and rules, put our trust in the bond we share. I swore to him that I would help him protect Ava, and through the years, I’ve honored that. I still am. In anything else, maybe I could compromise for him. But not this.
“Stand aside, Marcel.”
“As if you haven’t killed anyone,” Ava says softly to his back.
“For you!” He yells at her. “I did it for you!”
I try to pull him back. He pushes away from us both, drawing his gun on the man on his knees. Leo springs forward and grabs Marcel’s arm before he can take aim. The shot strays. The bullet buries itself in the stone walls, inches away from the man. The prisoner’s stony resolve breaks, a terrified and furious yell ripping from his lips as death circles so close, unseen, but heard all around him. Sweat pours down his face, trying as he might to keep his composure in those final moments.
“Just fucking do it!” He roars.
The gun hits the ground as we wrestle Marcel away.
I shove him back. “Either you can be in here, with her, or you can be outside!”
His gaze shifts, hands clenching. Marcel is not the type to wear his emotions on his sleeve, but I see them now, etched clearly in the tension of his whole body. It’s as though Ava is pulling the trigger on herself. He finally steps up to her, takes her heart-shaped face in his hands.
He presses his forehead to hers.
“Tell me that you’re sure,” he whispers.
“I’m sure.”
I think it hurts him more than it comforts him.
“Marcel,” I say, trying my goddamn hardest to be easy with him. “I’ve seen grown men with less conviction when I’ve put a gun in their hand.”
“Just get it over with,” he finally relents, turning away from all of us.
I hand the pistol over. Ava takes it, adjusting her grip around its weight. I ease her up to the man on the ground. She levels the gun on him. In the resounding silence, he starts to curse and spit, flying between rage and horror, sobbing openly for his mother. Ava doesn’t flinch. She takes her aim.
“It’ll kick,” I warn her, steadying her wrist for her, showing her how to hold it with both hands. I brace her against me. “When you’re ready.”
She doesn’t hesitate.
The gun fires and buries the bullet clean between his eyebrows. His last yell is cut short in the ringing aftermath. The body slumps, silent and still. Blood rivers out of his nose. The room goes silent.
We all wait, as if something might happen, as if she might break down. She pulls the trigger again. The gun only clicks; it had only the single round. She squeezes the trigger again and again, as if she can kill him a dozen times over. Finally, she gives up trying. Her eyes burn, but not with tears.
“You did well,” I tell her.
When she offers the empty gun back to me, her hands are rock steady.
“It’s yours, Ava. You keep your first, and you never shoot it again.”
Marcel pulls her back. He clutches her to him, holding her desperately against him. She doesn’t cry.
“Come on,” he whispers, taking the gun from her and tucking her under his arm. He doesn’t look at me again as he leads her out.
Tessa stands at the opposite end of the dungeon, staring at the body. Two weeks ago, I had planned for her to stand in this very spot. I thought I could feed her the horror like it was poison, and I could make her immune to it, numbed the way the rest of us are. But a part of me understands Marcel. I want to scoop her up and protect her from all of it, even if I know it would do more damage than good.
Leo drags the body past us. Tessa turns away, pressing her hand to her mouth.
“I need to call him,” she whispers, without moving, her eyes trailing over the ones who remain. “I need to call my father again.”
“It won’t do any good, Tessa. Look how well he listened to you last time. Even if he agreed to terms, we’d never be able to trust him at his word—”
“They need a doctor,” she insists.
“I can’t do that.”
“You can’t or you won’t?” she asks, turning on me. “What good does it do anybody, keeping them like this?”
“If they want help, they have information they can exchange for it. Those are the rules.”
“What information?” she asks, a note of desperation filling her voice, as if she would happily trade anything for them.
“Anything useful and verifiable. Shipping routes and schedules. Government contacts. Safe houses.” The despair creeps into her face one deepening word after the other. Just like I suspected, Tessa doesn’t know any of that.
“Let’s go, Tessa.”
“Let me talk to them,” she insists.
“Why? So you can blame yourself when the next person gets hurt? What do you think I would do with the information even if you got it for me?”
She flinches and looks away.
“Stop it,” she whispers. “You already have Marcel upset with you.”
“I have hell of a lot more than just Marcel upset with me. You can’t help them,” I say, slamming the door shut on the conversation. I drag her out of the cellar, up the steep stairwell, toward the light.
“Call your father if that’s what you want. It won’t make a difference. It won’t change anything.”
“Maybe you can trade—”
“Tessa, I have the leverage here. I have you; I have the prisoners. There’s nothing your father can offer me that I would trade for.”
“Then what are you waiting for?” she demands, pulling out of my grip. The light above us buzzes angrily.
“For someone to break. When your family decides they’re done sending their sons into the ground for him, that’s how this ends. One of us will run out of men willing to die for us or break the heart of the wrong mother. You don’t have to wipe out families like ours. You just make it weak enough that it devours itself. What just happened with Marcel—it’s those little cracks in the foundation that bring families down.”
Her eyes lower.
She glances back down the steep stairwell. A trail of blood marks the path. Finally, she sighs and falls into step with me again, giving up the fight.
“Do you think you made the right call, letting her…”
“Second-guessing isn’t a luxury I have in my line of work,” I interrupt, “But if there’s any man on earth I don’t want to piss off, it’s Marcel.”
“Why him?”
“Marcel is a bad enemy to have. I’m like a blade. The threat of danger is always there with me.
You can see it. But Marcel, he’s a landmine. By the time you realize the danger, you’re already in pieces.”
I see the doubt in her gaze. It almost makes me grin. It is exactly that doubt that makes Marcel so efficiently dangerous. A powerful undercurrent beneath calm water, able to rip you down into the dark.
From the bottom of the stairs, one of the prisoners moans distantly. Pain and frustration flicker across Contessa’s face, as surely as if she feels his suffering herself. I pull her away from the cellar, out into the new night.
A dead man’s screams still ring in my ears. I’ve wondered who I would yell for in those last moments. I like to think I wouldn’t, but then, all men probably like to think that. I never had a mother to cry out for, and no father that would help if I did. I know whose name would be on my lips now. The light from the windows throws a dim halo around her hair as we approach the house.
Tessa does not head for her bedroom as I expect. She veers toward my office, her purposeful steps clicking against the marble. The broken light on the desk doesn’t turn on when she flips the switch.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
She ignores me as she finds the overhead light instead.
“What happened to this?” she asks, annoyed, tossing disorganized stacks of papers out of her way.
I ignore her question with the same conviction that she ignored mine. I bury my hands in my pockets, watching, trying to figure out her plan. She finds a pad of stationery and a fountain pen.
She takes a seat in my chair, at my desk.
“Tessa,” I say.
She does not glance up, head bowed over the paper.
“I’m writing to my family. Dario’s parents. Donny’s wife and kids. They need to know.
Everyone needs to know.”
The pen scratches slowly against the page as she chooses her words.
“They already know—”
“They know they’re not coming back from a job,” she interrupts. “But they don’t know why . If you want my family to turn on itself, they need to know the truth—that my father is the only thing standing between them and their dying loved ones. That I don’t want this, that none of this had to happen.”
I know that look. Scrambling for some kind of control, some action to take when your hands are tied.
“They’ll never believe you wrote this without a gun to your head.”
“Maybe,” she dismisses. “Or maybe it’ll make them doubt him, just enough. Cracks in the foundation, right?”
There’s no sense in stopping her. We have nothing to lose from a letter. I take a seat across from her, assuming the role across the desk, the seat so many men have taken with me. I haven’t been on this side of the desk in years. She glances up at me as our roles reverse, catching the amusement in my gaze.
“Shut up,” she mumbles, though I haven’t said a single word. I bite back my smirk.
She sighs as she stares at the page, struggling to find the words. I can tell from her expression alone that she isn’t happy with the letter.
“…It doesn’t feel like enough.” She looks at me, those troubled eyes searching my face.
She worries her lip, the way she does when she’s scheming to ask something of me.
“Sal, let me take care of the prisoners. I can help them, get them strong enough to move them.
Then we release one. Dario. He would tell the family the same story as this,” she says, brandishing the paper, “that he saw me with his own eyes, that I was okay, and that I’m begging my father to stop. No one could deny it then.”
I can hear the desperation. She’s scheming to save him—the man who came into my house and tried to take her from me. I have no sympathy for him. If he wasn’t suffering, I’d have already ended him, but there’s a satisfaction in knowing he’s down there, languishing.
“Or he says nothing, we end up down a prisoner, and Gio takes the credit for tricking us into releasing him. Just write your letter, Tessa.”
“It’s not a bad idea just because it happens to be merciful! Isn’t this how you told me you operate?
When you have the one thing someone wants, the thing only you can give them…”
I won’t indulge her. I can’t even entertain the thought.
“The family won’t agree. Even if I wanted to let them go, even if it was the smartest play there is, I couldn’t. Your father attacked us at the one place I swore to these people they would be safe. There’s no coming back from that. If I start letting our enemies go on top of that, they will never trust me again. That can’t happen. Cracks in the foundation,” I say, repeating her reasoning back to her.
She lowers her eyes, the frustration visible.
I feel it just the same, even if it can’t show. I know what it is, to walk that tightrope, with wrong choices on every side.
Tessa crumples the letter between her hands.
“What are you doing?”
“Making it perfect,” she sighs. She slides another blank paper toward herself. “If this is all I’ve got, then it has to be perfect.”
When she hands the letter over, it’s a passionate plea, I’ll give her that. Half condolences, half condemnation. I scan for leaks of information or dangerous confessions, but there’s nothing amiss. The way she talks about us—finding a place for herself at my side, wanting to be with me—it spikes my pulse something fierce, making me hyper-aware of my own heartbeat.
But it makes the ugly truth apparent: No one is going to believe this letter, no matter how Tessa pretties it up.
I barely believe it myself and I watched her write the damn thing.
Maybe it will give my girl a little peace, knowing that she tried.
“It’s not enough,” she sighs.
“It never feels like enough. Not until you have someone’s blood on your hands.
Sometimes, not even then.”
She frowns, bathed in the office light, her eyes trailing over the desk.
“Christ, if Gio could see you now, like this, the irony alone might kill him. So very close to what he wanted all those years.”
A faint blush touches her face.
She pushes away from the seat and comes to stand between me and the desk instead, as if the chair itself might corrupt her somehow. “Don’t say that. I’m not like him. Or you.”
I lift her up and sit her on my desk instead, crowding between her legs. I fantasize about what it would be like, spreading her out on it. Taking her right here, over the place where I’ve cut deals and ordered hits.
“You’re right. I like you better on the desk than behind it.”
She turns her head as I kiss against her neck, catching my mouth instead.
“Sal, I’m hardly in the mood—” she mumbles against my lips.
“I can change that. I won’t be here for a few days,” I tell her, drawing us hip to hip, running my hand over her belly, “I’m gonna leave you something to work on while I’m gone.”
She pushes me back suddenly.
“What do you mean gone ?” she asks, sitting straighter.
“You have your way of answering this kind of attack. I have mine. And I don’t write pretty letters.”
“You’re leaving? Sal, no—”
She searches my face as if she’s never seen me before. I don’t understand how this is a surprise for her. I’ve always come and gone when I needed to—and now, I need to more than ever.
“Somebody has to answer for it, Tessa.”
“They already did!” she cries, rising to her feet. “Someone just died for it, Sal! Right in front of us!” she half-whispers, as if it’s some horrible secret.
“…That’s not enough.”
Her face falls.
The way she looks at me, it tears through me like a bullet.
“Says who?” she asks. “Show them to me, Sal. I don’t see anybody beating down this door, calling for war. So where’s the outrage? Or is it just you that feels like they have to go out and get revenge?
Because you messed up?”
My jaw tightens around the words, struggling to swallow down my response. Anger coats the back of my tongue, tightens in the knuckles of my throbbing hand.
“That’s just the way it is—”
“Bullshit. You’re the head of this family, you decide what is and what isn’t! My father is never running out in the street with a gun. When he needs something done, he delegates like a leader!”
I scoff.
“Like a fucking coward.”
“A coward who’s alive! Who’s not covered in scars!” She pushes away from me. “And you let me sit here and pour my heart into that letter, knowing you were going to run off and do the exact same thing to someone else tomorrow—”
“They murdered Vinny. A fucking letter doesn’t change that, Tessa! You want me to sit here behind a desk, like it’s another day at the office?”
She backs away, squaring me up with a single look.
“I want you to stop thinking like a soldier and start acting like a don.”
The shot hits too close to something vital, sparking my anger like a goddamn reflex.
“What do you think you know about being don, Contessa?” I ask, taking her jaw in my grip.
“Daddy’s little failure. You ran from being the daughter of a don, but now you think you know what I should be doing? Sitting selfishly behind a desk, as my family dies for me? Maybe that’s your family, but that’s not us. Moris’s don’t run, and we don’t hide.”
She pulls away, glaring me down, the hurt flashing in her eyes.
“It’s not about hiding, it’s about leading . How can you talk about trying to get me pregnant, when you don’t even know if you’ll live to come back and be a father? I thought you were making me your wife, not just another widow—”
“ That’s enough .”
Silence rips through the room.
I swallow around the angry knot in my throat.
“You think I wouldn’t rather be here, with you—”
“I know you wouldn’t,” she cuts in with cold certainty. “Because you always get what you want.
If you wanted to be with me, you’d be right here with me tomorrow.”
Silence wavers between us. She stares, waiting for me to prove one of us right.
…My eyes lower when I can’t deny it.
She nods at my silence, understanding it too well.
She takes off her engagement ring and places it on the desk. “I’m not the one who isn’t ready to accept this, Sal. You are.”
Tessa turns her back on me, leaving me staring at the diamond on the desk. The office door swings shut as she leaves. I don’t follow her, don’t hound her up the stairs to make sure she goes to her room. I move behind the desk, sinking down into a silence that’s loud with condemnation.
Vera. Noctus. Marcel. Contessa.
I reach for the cigarettes in my pocket and find the box empty. I crush it and throw it onto the desk with Contessa’s ring.
The foundation trembles.