Chapter 8
eight
Salvatore
The guard outside Vincenzo’s office door straightens when he sees me and steps aside without a word. I open the door myself and find Vincenzo leaning back in his chair, half-turned toward the window, shirtsleeves rolled up, and rolling something over his fingers.
He looks up as I come in, and the surprise on his face is evident even as he tries to school his expression.
His composure is nothing new to me. What does catch my attention is the movement of his hand when he shoves whatever he was rolling over his fingers into the drawer next to him.
An ordinary man wouldn’t have caught it—but I am not an ordinary man.
I know what I saw—it was a bullet. More than that, I know enough about my own blood to read the guilty smoothness of the motion that followed it.
Vincenzo does not fidget. He does not spin objects through his fingers absentmindedly.
If he’s sitting alone in his office and turning a bullet over in his hands, then that bullet matters more than he wants anyone else to know.
“Pappa,” he greets, but there’s no warmth in it. There’s rarely warmth between us in private because I taught him better than that. “This is unexpected.”
“Yes,” I say, and he gestures for me to sit.
A faint line appears between his brows. “Is something wrong? You rarely leave the villa.”
Many things are wrong, I think as I cross the room and sit down in the chair opposite his desk. He fixes me with the kind of expression he uses in negotiations when he thinks the other party is about to waste his time.
It strikes me, not for the first time, how much he looks like me as he gets older. That should please me, but today it only makes me tired.
“I was in the neighborhood.”
He lets out the smallest breath through his nose, not quite a laugh, but close enough to be disrespectful if I choose to hear it that way. I don’t. We both know I have never happened to be in the same neighborhood when it comes to him.
“That’s hard to believe,” he says.
“I’m aware.”
The silence that descends is thick and familiar. We have had a great many conversations in silence over the years. My children learned to read me that way because there was often little else to work with.
He waits me out for perhaps ten seconds before saying, “You look as though you haven’t been sleeping well.”
I tilt my head slightly. “You notice a great deal.”
“I learned from the best.”
The exchange is as awkward as I thought it would be, and it occurs to me then that I have never asked him how he is.
Not once in the way fathers are meant to ask.
Not in childhood fevers or after punishments.
Not after Silvano, or even the years when he was building himself into something colder than I could be.
I have asked whether he understood, obeyed, or completed a task. Whether the damage had been contained or what the fallout was. But never the other thing. The ordinary thing… The human thing.
And because I am sixty years old, and apparently age turns men pathetic in private, I hear myself ask, “How are you, Vincenzo?”
My son simply stares at me, and the look on his face is worse than anger would have been. It’s bewilderment sharpened by suspicion. I know he’s wondering whether I’ve gone mad or whether this is just some more intricate cruelty than the ones he already knew how to survive.
“That,” he says after a moment, “is a strange question from you.”
“I think it’s a valid question to ask, given that you’ve just come from seeing a man you’ve been pretending you’re not in love with.”
The words leave my mouth before I can dress them in anything gentler, which is perhaps for the best.
Vincenzo goes utterly still, and for one suspended second, the office seems to stop breathing with him.
The city beyond the window still glints and moves, sunlight flashing off distant glass and chrome.
But in this room, there is only my son, his hand half-curled on the arm of his chair, and the thing I have just pulled into the open between us.
He does not deny it, and that interests me more than it should. Instead, he sits there looking at me as if I’ve spoken in a language he was not prepared to hear from my mouth. “That is a dangerous assumption.”
“No,” I say with a shake of my head. “Just an eight-year-long observation.”
“You think you know what I feel?” he says, clearly getting annoyed.
“I know what I’ve seen.”
“And what exactly have you seen, Pappa?” he asks, and his expression doesn’t change much, but the stillness around him deepens.
Vincenzo has always had a habit of becoming quieter as he gets closer to anger.
“In fact, you saying anything at all would imply that you knew what happened at Vintermoor and said nothing.”
“What would you have preferred I say?” I ask. “‘Careful, Vincenzo, you’re about to hand your heart to your enemy? Don’t be foolish, my son, love does not automatically become safe because it is returned? Stay away from him, or you’ll both end up like Ruslan and me?’”
The bitter edge to my voice surprises me, so does the fact that I have just revealed even more of my own shame.
Vincenzo looks at me as if I’ve struck him.
He’s too smart not to have suspected something had happened between the two of us, especially given our last conversation at Vintermoor.
No, the shock on his face comes from the admission itself.
I hold his gaze and let him have the truth of my face, because if I look away now, he will read it as cowardice. He would be right.
“You’re actually admitting it,” he says with a disbelieving scoff. “You’re actually admitting that something happened between you and Ruslan.”
There is no point pretending otherwise, as I have stepped too far into the open to retreat with dignity. “Yes. A great deal happened between us.”
He shakes his head and smiles without humor. “You are speaking very freely today,” he says. “Should I be worried?”
“You should always be worried,” I answer, and the old reflex makes him almost smile before the mood kills it again. “But not because I’m being honest.”
He leans back slightly in his chair, and there is a kind of exhausted disbelief in the movement. “Do you have any idea how strange this is?”
“Yes.”
“And yet you continue.”
“That is how confessions work, I believe.”
That does get a reaction, a sharper exhale through his nose. “Confession implies remorse, Pappa.”
Ah, now we are closer to the wound.
I look at my son and feel the full weight of what I came here to do. It is much easier to advise men in abstract and to lecture heirs about risk, leverage, and weakness, and the ways power distorts the body around it.
It is something else entirely to sit across from one’s own son and admit that half the architecture of his emotional life was built by design.
That I made him distant on purpose and taught him how to survive me before I ever taught him how to trust me.
That, when he was young, watching and hungry for any ordinary sign of fatherhood, I gave him strategy instead of parental care.
“Yes,” I say quietly. “It does.”
I don’t fault him for the suspicious way he’s looking at me now. I’ve had years to talk and chose to remain a silent parent. Regret is not something I have ever worn openly. Men like me learn early that remorse is best kept private—if at all—because public regret attracts scavengers.
But there is a difference between public and private, and I am currently in my son’s office with the door closed and age finally stripping some of the vanity out of me. Vanity is a young man’s armor.
“What exactly are you remorseful for?” he asks.
I look at him and hear myself say it before I can make the sentence elegant enough to hide inside.
“I’m sorry, Vincenzo.”
That stops him cold. I have never put an apology next to his name before. It is too intimate, too humiliating, too much like kneeling, and men like me have always preferred to die standing.
His eyes widen slightly. Then they narrow, as if he cannot decide whether he has heard correctly.
I continue because stopping now would be another cruelty.
“I am sorry that by the time I learned what certain losses do to a man, I had already taught my son to hide every wound before I could warn him properly. I am sorry that I spent so many years making sure you could not be used by the people around you that I forgot what that kind of distance does from the inside, even though I had gone through it myself. I thought I was hardening you for survival. In many ways, I was. But I was also making you lonelier than I had any right to make my own child.”
Vincenzo’s expression doesn’t soften, and I am not foolish enough to expect it.
Still, the bewilderment on his face is no longer sharpened solely by suspicion.
There is sadness there now—a wariness, as if he does not know where to place this version of me.
It arrived too late to fit into the father he already survived.
“You regret making me this way?” he asks.
“No,” I say with a shake of my head. “I regret making you feel this alone in it.”
His throat works once, and his gaze drops to his hands.
Long fingers, elegant knuckles—he has his mother’s hands, although he hated hearing that when he was younger.
He thought they made him look too polished beside boys who wore brutality more openly.
But he grew into them later and learned how to make refinement look threatening.
There is blood on those hands, as there is on mine. There is also enough old tenderness left in them to spin a bullet in private when no one else is watching.
“I did not expect this from you,” he says, mouth tightening. “You’ve spent my entire life teaching me that attachment is a liability. And now you’re sitting here telling me you were in love with Ruslan Dragovich and that you regret what it made of you.”
“Yes,” is all I can add.