Chapter 17 #3
I’d spent the whole night braced for a number, a ransom, a sum of money I’d have moved heaven and the city to put in a bag.
It was never about money. It was never even, really, about the block—the block was a means, the block was the wedge, the block was the thing that put her in his hand.
This was a coup. This was a son who couldn’t beat his father with brilliance because he had none, who couldn’t earn the family because he wasn’t good enough and on some level knew it, reaching instead for the one thing that would force the old man’s hand—and finding it, finding the lever, finding the exact weight that would move Don Arturo off his throne.
Her.
The voice came back, one more time, light, almost kind.
“You’ll want to discuss it,” it said. “I understand. Big decision. Lots of pride in the room.” And then the kindness went out of it like a light. “You have forty-eight hours.”
The line went dead.
Forty-eight hours.
The words hung in the dead room after the line cut, and I was already moving.
This time, I didn’t try to get up. I just fucking did it.
I got my good arm under me and I shoved, and the ribs screamed and the room swung and I didn’t stop, I got my legs over the side of the bed, dragged them over the edge, the gauze pulling, the burn tearing under it so the whole left side of me went white-bright with it, and the doctor was there with his hands on my shoulders saying something about my lungs and the smoke and the ribs and I didn’t hear a word of it because I was getting up.
“Tonio.” Sal’s voice. “Tonio. Stop.”
“No.” It came out of me on a breath that cost me everything.
“No. I’m not lying here. Not one more minute.
Not while she’s—” I got a foot to the floor and the floor came up at me and the doctor caught my arm and I shook him off and the burn screamed and I planted the foot anyway.
“She said I’m fine. You heard her. She lied to my face through a phone so I wouldn’t be scared, and I am not going to be lying in a bed when—”
I made it to standing.
I stood swaying, one hand fisted in the bed rail, the other arm dead and weeping at my side, the room tipping slow, sweat coming up cold all over me, and I stood.
It was the worst four feet of vertical I have ever fought for in my life and I won it and I stood, shaking, useless, upright, and I looked at my cousin.
Sal could have stopped me. One hand. He’s the biggest of us, the strongest, and I was a wreck on a bed rail with a dead arm, and he could have put me back down with no effort at all, the way you’d settle a child, and he’d have been right to.
But he didn’t.
He looked at me a long beat, his deep heavy eyes under the heavy brows, and something moved in them. He looked at me standing there shaking on a bed rail and he gave me, instead of a hand pushing me down, one short nod.
Then he reached for his coat.
“You’ll do nothing useful for two days,” he said, flat, factual, pulling it on. “You can barely stand. But you’ll do it standing.” A beat. “We’ll get a chair that moves. You’ll be where the work is.”
That was Sal’s whole heart, handed over in three sentences. Some things you don’t take from a man.
The machine turned over around us.
Pietro was already on the phone, Angela beside him with her laptop open again, the soft gone out of both of them, the man who’d cracked open at the altar yesterday gone cold and exact, working angles I couldn’t follow.
Donatella was running her network a second time, harder, the brass back on her and a fury under it now, calling not for favors anymore but for soldiers.
Dante’s people were moving—I heard the don’s name go down the phone, heard the count of men, heard the city get carved into territory by men who carve cities for a living.
And somewhere across town, Don Arturo was being told that his son wanted his throne.
And that Katerina, the woman who had baked the mastic loaf that he’d loved, was the leverage.
I did not know what an old man does with a thing like that and neither did anyone in that room, and it wasn’t my call to make.
And the demand wasn’t mine to answer. The throne wasn’t mine. The clan would work that—the impossible math of it, an old man’s crown for a woman who wasn’t even family yet.
My part was smaller and it was the whole of me.
The guilt landed now, all the way, full weight, and I let it, standing there on the bed rail, because I’d earned every ounce.
I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t run. I couldn’t put my hands on the city and shake her loose.
But I could make a vow. That much I had.
“I’m coming,” I said, out loud. The big loud man, gone quiet, gone still, gone to the bottom of himself where the true things live. “I don’t care what it costs. I don’t care what it takes or who it burns or whether the old man keeps his chair. I’m coming for you, Katerina.”
I pressed my forehead to the cold glass the way I’d pressed my mouth to her forehead in a garden full of strangers a hundred years ago.
“And this time,” I said, “I hold the line.”