30. Nico
30
Nico
I left the door unlocked, but they kick it down anyway. It’s a little overdramatic if you ask me. The plywood door claps hollowly against the floor as half a dozen familiar men storm into the empty apartment, breaching formation. Their guns are drawn on me as they round into the bedroom where I sit, their boots trailing Marcel’s half-dried blood across the grimy tile floors.
I’ve been waiting for this, just sitting on the edge of the bed and counting the minutes down. I’ve been flipping through some pictures on my phone. Pictures of her. I was never one for hope, but that’s all I’ve got left now. Optimism always seemed like a cop-out, luck with a brand name. If you want something to happen, you make it happen. But now, even my hands are tied.
There’s no use in running from Salvatore, I know. It’ll just make it all worse.
He steps in after the men, the grim reaper in a dark suit and black leather gloves, with a gun in his hand.
There’s no loyal lapdog following him around, the space Marcel usually occupies pointedly empty. I wonder if he’ll even give me a chance to speak. I don’t know if he thinks I’m worthy of last words. I probably wouldn’t give him any, so I shouldn’t expect to be returned the favor.
He stops in front of me. I look up at him and read that cold, decided expression.
It almost makes me grin, the bitterness enough to make my mouth pucker.
Maybe Salvatore really was born for this. A murderer from his first moment. Maybe it was always going to be him, and I was just the thing in his way. Maybe it was never the other way around. I lower my gaze back to my phone and Ava’s grinning, bashful smile. I’ve never seen her smile like that. I don’t know if she has any of those smiles left, and if she does, they’re not for a man like me.
“What happened?” Salvatore asks.
“Does it matter?” I counter, glancing at the gun in grip. “You already know what you’re going to do.”
“It matters. Because I don’t understand what happened here, and if I’m going to shoot you, I’d at least like to know why . Will you give me that, or would you rather we get right to the bullet?”
I cough out a short laugh.
“So, he’s hanging on then. If he were dead, this would be a much different conversation.”
“It wouldn’t be a conversation at all. But for now it is, and you better start talking while that’s still the case.”
I nod, and Salvatore continues, “How does Marcel end up bleeding out in your apartment, and then wind up in the hospital? I thought maybe he killed you and managed to save himself, but clearly not.”
The bruise from Marcel’s gun has popped up on my jaw in the meantime, but there’s nothing to distinguish it from any other wound from last night’s fight. He has no reason to believe that Marcel attacked me first. And if I tell him the truth, tell him what Marcel planned, that ugly truth might make it back to Ava. It would tarnish her pretty little picture of her perfect brother. I hate the bastard, but I don’t want that either.
He was protecting her, and if he makes it, he needs to keep protecting her. Because right now, his odds are probably a hell of a lot better than mine. It’s a weird irony. The man who killed me is laid up in a hospital bed, unable to speak, while I’m here, perfectly fine. And I’m the dead one.
“Marcel was here when I got back from the fight. He was waiting for me.”
“Why?” Salvatore presses, like a boot on my throat. I don’t want to admit to it.
“He wanted to talk about the family and about Ava.” He holds his silence until I finally add, “He wanted me to leave her alone. I said I wasn’t going to do that, that it was her choice. He got pissed off, shit got out of control, like it always does. I don’t know,” I snap, dancing around the details as best I can. “Shit went south, and he got stabbed.”
“Right. Got stabbed. Not that you stabbed him, he just magically ‘got stabbed.’”
“I stabbed him,” I cut in angrily. “And then I called the fucking ambulance so they could come patch him up and drag him out of here. You and I both know damn well I wasn’t trying to kill him. Hell, I wasn’t even trying to send a message. It’s not my style. We got into a fight, and shit went too far.”
Salvatore glances between us at the bloodied boot prints stamped on the floor.
“You’re right that it isn’t your style. Why did you use a knife?”
“Because it was what I had. He pulled a gun, and we were fighting over it before he could get a shot off. I didn’t like my odds with a knife, much less my bare hands, so when I had the chance, I just...”
Instinct. Life or death.
Hell, that’s not even part of the lie.
I can tell he doesn’t like it, the whole worthless story.
Nothing about it adds up.
Marcel isn’t one for random acts of violence, and I’m not one for acts of mercy. I am the only one who knows that nothing about this was random at all. It was calculated. A risky gamble, sure, but with all the odds weighed out beforehand.
And then for me to stab him—to come out on top when Marcel had both the jump on me and a gun—if Marcel had used even a shred of his typical cunning, I wouldn’t be standing here. I’d already be cold.
“Why does it matter, Sal? You can just ask him.”
“If he lives.”
Salvatore sighs and adjusts his grip on the gun.
“You’re coming into my custody,” he tells me. “Until Marcel wakes up, and I hear the whole truth.”
“Why?”
I don’t get it. Why have mercy? Why care about the truth when once I’m gone, they can rewrite it however they like? Marcel hand-wrapped Salvatore’s reason for him. He handed my life over to him in giftwrap and bows.
“Because my wife asked me to. If you didn’t fight, and you didn’t run, she asked that I bring you back. She wants to be present for your sentencing.”
I thought these plain four walls would be the last thing I saw. I’d made peace with that. Salvatore moves to try to get me to my feet, but I stay rooted, staring at the floor between us. My pulse ticks up, running high suddenly. I dig in my feet.
“No.”
“No?”
“I’m not going anywhere. Not without your word first.”
Salvatore scoffs when I keep trying to make deals, probably assuming I’m dancing through hoops and trying to save my own neck. “And what word is that?” he asks dryly.
“That if this takes more than a day, you come down there and you finish this yourself. If you can’t promise me that, then just shoot me right here, Sal, and save us all the bullshit. I’m not spending another night behind bars. I won’t do that.”
He thinks about it, but he finally nods.
“You have my word.”
With Salvatore’s gun at my back and a half dozen more pointed at me, I am marched out of the apartment and into my brother’s custody.
The hidden cells were built into the underground wine cellar when the house was first being constructed. From its very first blueprint, everyone knew what this place would be, the lineages and conflicts it would see. The place comes with all the old-school mobster hospitality: dirt floors and grimy wrought iron bars. There’s no light down here in the depths—it all comes from the stairwell, and it doesn’t reach far enough to do anything for me. I am left alone, and that one bleary bulb extinguishes on their way out. It’s coffin dark down here, the kind of darkness your eyes don’t adjust to. I run my hand over the walls and feel the grooves of fingernails that once scratched at these walls. Old enemies, long gone now.
And here I am, in the same pathetic category as them.
I was a don.
That all feels far away now, like something that happened to somebody else. A story I heard once, just vivid enough that I could almost picture it. Memory lane and I don’t go back very far. I don’t care much about what happened before the night that Ava St. Clair locked eyes with me and stole a french fry off my plate. From right then, it wasn’t a game anymore. I trace back every step, wondering if I would have done any of it differently. If there was any different way it could have happened.
I guess if I knew I was running on borrowed time, I would have been with her more.
Time is meaningless down here in the dark. Minutes and hours are indistinguishable from each other. Paranoia creeps into the shadows. Maybe this is how he’s going to kill me. Maybe it’s already been a day. Maybe two. Salvatore could just let me rot down here forever, his word be damned, because it’s the one fate I’d hate the most: wasting away in the dark.
If he brought me water, I wonder if I could resist drinking it and prolonging all this.
Finally, footsteps click on the stairwell. The dim, distant light turns on, like a mirage in the distance. The wine rack creaks and slides back. Tessa Mori comes down into the cellar, breaking up hours of monotony. I can tell by those quick, angry high heels. Hell, even I feel a little bad. The woman already saved me once.
Salvatore comes in behind her.
“How is he?” I ask, as they stop in front of me.
I don’t really care, but it answers another question, my real question: how is she ?
“More stable, but just as unconscious,” Salvatore says.
So no answers, then. Oh well. It sounds like Marcel is going to make it, and that will have to be enough. I pull myself to my feet. I figure I might as well die upright if I have the choice. Facing it and all that. A lot of people in our business don’t get to see it coming.
I stand in front of Salvatore.
“So, where’s it going to happen, Sal?” I ask. “Down here? You know it’s a bitch dragging a body up that staircase. But I guess you don’t have to do that yourself.”
Salvatore’s silence crackles like a fire. Even in the dark, I can read the tension on his face, feel the anger bristling in the air.
“I gave you my word, Nico. I’m not going to keep you imprisoned through the night.” His silence blisters, bitter and conflicted as he finally growls, “But I’m not going to shoot you, either.”
My expectations skip. What else is there?
“When we were kids, there wasn’t a day that went by that you didn’t remind me about our mother. How you blamed me for losing her. And I guess you’ll keep blaming me for it until you die. But I’m not what you ever said I was, Nico. I’m not someone who murders my own close kin. And that’s not going to change today, not because of you. Not unless I know you deserve it. I’ll hand out justice, but I won’t stoop to murder my own bloodline. Tessa has convinced me that, no matter how bad it looks, this still isn’t justice. Not yet.”
I glance at her dark eyes and angry expression. The girl isn’t happy with me. She isn’t saving me. This isn’t her sweeping in again and calming everyone down from an overreaction. These are just her principles, and I can tell she isn’t any happier about this than Salvatore is.
“Then what, you want me to hang around until he—”
“No,” Salvatore intercepts. “I want exactly the opposite. I’m sending you to Chicago, Nico. We could use a man like you in that chapter of the business. You’re going to stay there and work for the family. And if anyone sees you on this property—hell, if anyone sees you in New York again—you’ll be killed on sight. No more trials, no more explanations. I’ve handed out more chances to you than I’ve ever given anyone else, and this is the last one.”
Chicago.
I can’t.
I glance at Tessa, who knows—she knows I can’t. Ava is here, and if she’s here, then…
“It’s your only offer, Nico.”
She sounds tired. I wonder how long she and Sal have been discussing this, if they’ve gone back and forth over it all day, until she wore him down to this decision. At first, I try to reason it out. At least if I’m far away in some other place, I’m not dead. Ava won’t have to mourn me in that way. Then I remember Ava isn’t going to be mourning me at all. Marcel made sure of that. She’s probably more upset that they’re not putting a bullet in me. Maybe she’ll come to Chicago and do it herself. I’d like that.
“Alright,” I finally force myself to agree, as if this is a negotiation. As if I have another choice. The bars slide back. For the second time, I am let out of prison, but this time, I’m not going home. I’m going into exile.