Chapter 18 #3
Three meters. The passage behind me. The cellar window above.
The door at the far end with the blue light under it.
The pistol in his hand and the tremor back in his other hand and the footsteps in the ceiling now almost over our heads, almost at the small door at the top of the stone stairs, almost—
The door at the top of the stairs came off its hinges. It came down in one piece.
It did not splinter. It did not crack along its long edge.
The hinges had been old iron set in old stone, and the men on the other side had not bothered with finesse.
The whole door pivoted off the jamb in one heavy slab of wood and came down the stone stairs end over end and hit the cellar floor flat, raising a slap of dust that hung in the grey light.
At the top of the stairs, a man stood in the empty frame.
I knew him before I could discern any of his features.
I knew him by the way he held his weight.
I knew him by the way his head was tilted a quarter inch.
I knew him by the absence of all hurry in a man who had cleared a corridor at a run and had stopped at a doorway because the next move was a thing he wanted to do correctly.
Pietro.
He came down the first two steps.
He came carefully. He did not call my name. He did not shout. He did not lower his weapon, which he had up and braced in both hands. The barrel was on Enzo, and the barrel did not waver.
Enzo had turned a quarter into the wall, putting me between him and the stairs.
The pistol that had been on me went off me by the breadth of a thumb. The barrel hooked behind my ear now, and his free arm came across my chest the way it had in the corridor upstairs, and his fingers closed on my opposite shoulder so hard I felt the bone of my collarbone register the grip.
“Sicilian,” Enzo said.
Pietro did not answer.
“I will kill her.”
Pietro did not answer that either. He took one step down.
Then another. He was on the cellar floor now, ten feet from us, the weapon still steady, his face the face I had seen at the meeting yesterday—the face he had worn when he had told four men he was going to leave the family if they used me, the face that did not show anything because what was under it was too large to show.
He looked at me, once.
I felt it: I am here. I am sorry. Do not be afraid. I have you.
He looked back at Enzo.
“Mr. Valenti.” His voice was the voice from the carriage house yesterday morning. Quiet. Level. The voice of a man who had decided to use only the words he needed and no others. “Lower the gun, signore.”
“I will lower the gun when you have lowered yours, and your men are out of my house, and a vehicle is waiting at the seaward door. We will walk to it. She and I. You will stand in the cellar with your men and you will watch us go. When we are at sea I will release her on the boat. You will collect her. I am willing to be reasonable.”
“No.”
“No?”
“No,” Pietro said. “There is no version of this where you go through that door with her. There is one version where you put the gun down and live another hour. There is the other version. Choose.”
Enzo laughed a thin, dry laugh.
“You will not shoot, Sicilian. You will not risk her. I have seen this kind of love before. It is your weakness—all men like you and those fucking Carusos. You are very predictable, you romantics. Women! The way you fawn over them—tools that they are.”
Pietro did not move.
Behind him at the top of the stairs another shape had appeared in the empty doorframe — broader, heavier, the unmistakable bulk of Tonio, and behind Tonio, in the corridor beyond, the smaller fast shapes of more men.
Nobody came down. Pietro had lifted one hand a fraction off the grip of the weapon and made a small gesture that meant hold, and the men in the corridor held.
“Pietro,” I said. Quietly. The first word I had spoken since the door came down. “Trust me.”
He flicked his eyes.
Enzo growled, slapped me across the cheek. I didn’t respond, but then, without warning, I dropped.
All my weight at once, my knees going, the whole organism going down.
He let out a strange sound and fumbled, trying to gather me u—
Pietro shot him.
The sound was huge in the cellar. The round took Enzo in the upper chest, high, to the right of the sternum, and he made a noise like a man clearing his throat and his grip on my shoulder went strange—first tighter, briefly, then nothing—and he sat down against the wall behind us in a slow controlled slide, like a man who had decided to sit.
He looked up at Pietro.
He tried to say something. His mouth moved. Whatever it was did not arrive.
I stepped away from him.
Enzo was looking at us.
His chest was working. His eyes were going dull. The hand he had used to hold me was open against the floor with the palm up.
Pietro fired again.
The second round took him in the forehead.
He went over sideways. His shoulder hit the wall and his head followed and he was still.
Pietro lowered his weapon.
“I’ve got you, baby,” he said, into my hair. Italian, then English, then both. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”
At the top of the stairs, Tonio made a sound that was a sob he had not given anyone permission to make. He did not come down. He waited.
I closed my eyes against Pietro’s shoulder, and the small flame at the base of my sternum ignited. It grew and grew until it was so large that I couldn’t feel anything else.