Chapter 18 Tamayo #2
“And the date?”
“Rita.”
I frown until it hits me—the first time we visited Alphabet House, Rita showed Zarina its history, my history, in that photo album she keeps in her office. Each one lovingly labeled with who, what, when, and where. I slump into a chair. “Her photos.”
She organizes the deeds as she goes through them, according to some system that makes sense to her. I swallow back the urge to vomit as she stacks them, one after another showing my targeted, patient acquisition of property in Gallo territory over the last ten years.
“Revenge,” she breathes.
I’m stuck, unable to move. A decade of planning and executing. A decade of vowing to return the favor the Gallos paid me. A decade of cutting down anyone in my path. And all of it is crumbling in front of me, the debris scattered around the Gallo princess in front of me.
If it’s falling apart before me, I might as well fall apart with it. In for a penny, out for a pound never felt as heavy as this moment, even in that alley so many years ago.
I speak softly, answering the unasked questions I can feel building under her tongue. “I was seventeen when I found out a made-man was skimming off the top. I told my capo, Leo—I believe he’s your cousin.”
I don’t chance a look at her for fear of the glare, the judgment in her gaze.
And more, I can’t see the room in front of me.
I’m in my memory, walking into that back office of the nightclub I was too young to get into.
The air is heavy with smoke, the smell of tobacco and spilled liquor sunken into the fabric of the rug, the chairs, the wallpaper.
I swallow as hard as I did that day. “Thing is, I didn’t know he was in on the scheme.
And I didn’t know it was at the direction of your mother. ”
Zarina’s hand fists around the deed in its grip.
“She was there when I told Leo. Thanked me for letting them know.” And then twelve hours later, in the back alley of that club, music vibrated through my bones as they shattered.
Each boom of the bass was like someone pressed directly onto my wounds.
The ground was gravel under my hands, my back, wet with the slime of tossed beer bottles and congealed food.
My mouth full of blood, my eyes hazy, boots so distant in my perception I barely comprehended their weight as they kicked and stomped.
“They were my family. I thought I was theirs.” My body shudders from my scalp to my toes as I breathe through the onslaught.
I wish I had water, whisky, something to clear the taste of pennies off my tongue.
“And they tossed me like garbage, treated me worse than my own parents. Left me to bleed out in that alley as if I was nothing. As if I wasn’t willing to pledge my life and death for them. ”
Zarina rises to stand in front of me, blocking the last vestiges of golden sun filtering through the window.
Her hands are empty, her feet shoulder width apart, like she’s bracing for a fight.
Against me. I stare past her, unable to face that battle.
Not while stuck in the clutches of the moment that started everything.
“And for that,” she whispers, voice straining against an emotion I cannot meet her eye to verify, “the entire Gallo Family must pay? Every soldier and capo?” She pauses, and I can hear her throat bob in the silence. “Me?”
The last word is barely audible and so fragile, it almost cracks between us.
I can’t be the one who breaks her. I can’t be the one broken again. The sound of my knee splintering echoes in my memory so loud, it rings in my ears. “It took a year to heal.”
“I will not survive Marcus Accardi!” Zarina cries, her whole body buckling with the force of the truth. “My life for your knee? For the bruising of your ego? How is that comparable?”
I squeeze my eyes shut. “That was your parents’ choice.”
“And what about the deal we struck?” She smacks her hand down on the map, on that shred of crimson.
“Whose choice was that? My ten percent gets you everything you ever wanted: The decimation of the Gallo Family, enough territory to become a Cardinal Family”—she crumples the paper in her fist, nails biting into the black abyss devouring the Gallo territory—“and the chance to personally destroy their only daughter.”
Those words echo through me, so similar to my own that night she came to me in the Den, that they could be pulled directly from my lips. My head is shaking as if I can re-paint it. “It might have started out that way—for both of us—”
“Speak for yourself,” she snarls.
“It was just business.” At first.
She slams her hand flat on the table. “Revenge is not business!”
“Zarina—”
“Revenge is personal. You didn’t just want more power, you wanted—still want—to hurt my family.
Me.” Real, vivid pain slices through her voice, and I meet her gaze for the first time since she opened the safe.
I almost slide out of my chair and onto my knees at the sight of her—red-splotched cheeks, hard set jaw, and wet, unshed tears pooling in her eyes.
Each piece a syllable of betrayal. “You knew what was going on the whole time. Hell, you fucking caused it.”
And yet I can’t stop my mouth, can’t stop the defense of my actions. Because more than anything, I want her to understand why this is bigger than me and her. Bigger than us. “The marriage was an unintended consequence.”
“That unintended consequence is my life!” She blinks, and the tears fall to her cheeks, somehow slicing a path through my chest. “My freedom.”
“I wouldn’t let it get that far.” The words sound far away and brittle to my own ears.
She swipes the wetness from her face with rough hands and releases the least mirthful laugh I’ve ever heard.
It grates. “How would you save me?” she asks.
“I have two options—marry Marcus Accardi and watch my family be swallowed whole, ceasing to exist entirely, kept alive in my own personal hell until I birth an heir and Marcus kills me. Or run, hunted for the sin of denying Marcus what he thinks he’s owed, and then watch from afar as my family is swallowed whole by you. ”
Now that I’m looking at her, I can’t look away. Like a car crash, but the damage more brutal with each uttered word. “We can find another option.”
“The only other one I see is you selling Gallo territory back to me. And the possibility of that happening less than none.” Zarina stares at me, as if she’s willing me to contradict her.
To pull us both from the wreckage of this truth, dust us off, and proclaim us uninjured.
But as the silence grows, the reality of it, of all of it, impales us both.
We’re not a car crash. We’re two celestial bodies colliding and exploding with enough force to destroy a solar system.
The reverberations of our destruction will ripple through planets, threaten suns, create so much debris that it will endanger galaxies beyond ours for millennia.
And neither of us know how to avoid it.
Zarina sniffs, wipes her face again, and shakes her head. I sit in my chair and watch. Because that’s all I have left now. I cannot touch her, cannot speak to her the way I did this morning, last night, last week.
We are shattered, and it’s my fault.
“You know, you really had me there.” Her voice is even more broken than before, and the sound burns the back of my eyes.
“I believed you. A gangster with a heart of gold, wanting to protect and provide for their family, however that looked. Different than the old institution of white, Italian men playing checkers and calling it chess.”
She straightens her spine, rolling her shoulders back in a move I’ve seen a hundred times. The donning of armor to meet a foe. Only now, I am that foe.
“But you’re just the same—no, you’re worse.
” Her gaze is so dark, the gold flecks almost disappear.
“Because preaching consent, resorting to violence later rather than sooner, volunteering at charities? It’s all bullshit.
A facade you use to play cruel games, when in reality, you’re still a gangster bathed in blood and brutality with no care for those you trample or the pain you inflict. ”
I blink back the regret, force it to harden into steel as I meet her glare for glare. If we’re destroying each other, I won’t be the only one gouged to pieces. “I have never treated another like the Gallos treated me. Like your own parents treat you.”
Zarina brushes her hand over my cheek to cup my jaw, her touch cold and threatening and devoid of any of the familiarity it held just this morning. She leans in, whispering in my ear, “Until now.”
And then she leaves.