Chapter 2 #3
"It's not a story. It's a fact. And the fact is, Aurelio loved us.
Not because we shared his blood. Because we showed up and stayed and earned our place.
" Emilio's eyes hold mine. "You've got his face, Matteo.
You've got his jaw and his shoulders and the way he used to stand in a room and make everyone look at him, but you don't have what we have.
Not right now. Maybe not ever. That's not an insult.
It's the truth, and I'd rather give it to you straight than let you figure it out the hard way. "
"I appreciate the honesty."
"No, you don't… but you will." He turns and walks up the stairs.
"Your room is the third door on the right.
Towels in the closet. Kitchen's on the ground floor, down the corridor to the left.
There's a bar at the end of the hall run by a woman named Savannah who will read your entire life story in your face before you finish ordering your drink. Don't lie to her. She'll know."
"I never lie."
Emilio stops at the top of the stairs and looks back at me, and the grin finally shows up, crooked and knowing and carrying the full weight of a man who has been in this compound long enough to know that everyone who walks through the gate thinks they don't lie.
"Yeah," he says. "That's what they all say."
He walks away. I stand in the corridor and listen to his footsteps fade and then I open the third door on the right and walk into the room that Leone Costa assigned to the son of the man who built this compound.
The room is small. Bed, desk, lamp, window overlooking the courtyard.
The walls are concrete. The floor is concrete.
The bathroom is functional and nothing more.
This is a room designed for soldiers, not guests, and the assignment is deliberate.
Leone put me here to send a message: you are not special.
You are not the heir. You are a man in a room, and the room is no different from the one occupied by the guard on the first floor who checks IDs at the gate.
Fine by me. I’ve been in worse situations. I set the briefcase on the desk and get comfortable, taking off my jacket and loosening my tie, putting my shoes in the corner.
The window looks down on the courtyard where my father was buried.
I can see the grave from here, marked with a headstone I can't read from this distance.
Beside it, stuck upright in the dirt, the handle of a knife.
Someone left it there and it's still standing, weeks after the burial, rusting in the weather. Nobody's moved it.
I stand at the window and look at my father's grave and feel the thing I've been carrying for six years settle deeper into my chest. Not grief because grief requires a relationship and we never had one.
What I feel is closer to theft. The sensation of something taken, a whole life's worth of belonging, removed before I was old enough to know it was mine.
Leone earned his seat. I understand that.
The men in this building followed Aurelio because he led them, and they follow Leone because he leads them now.
Loyalty is earned, not inherited. I know this the way I know contract law and negotiation strategy and the particular rhythm of a courtroom closing argument.
I know it intellectually.
But the blood in my veins is Aurelio's blood, and the jaw in the mirror is Aurelio's jaw, and the compound outside this window was built by a man who held me when I was three months old and then put me down and never picked me up again.
I want the seat, not because I've earned it, but because it was supposed to be mine before Leone or Claudio or Emilio or any of them existed in Aurelio's world. I was first. I was the blood. And the blood was set aside for strangers.
The room is quiet. The compound hums around me, soldiers moving, doors opening, the steady pulse of an organization running under new management. Management that isn't mine.
I loosen my tie the rest of the way and hang it on the chair and sit on the bed and think about the woman I'm supposed to marry in two weeks.
Antonia Castillo. Marco's daughter. The heir he's trading for stability, the bride he's selling for protection.
I've seen her file. The karambits, the kills, the reputation that precedes her into every room.
She's Marco's wild card, honed and aimed, and the marriage is supposed to point her at the Bonaccorsos and make the union look legitimate.
I agreed to the arrangement because it serves my purpose.
A Castillo wife gives me a foot in both families.
The marriage accelerates my claim. Leone can deny my blood right, but he can't deny a union that binds both organizations under a roof he controls.
The politics of it are clean. The strategy is sound.
I wonder what Antonia Castillo will see when she looks at my face. Aurelio's jaw. The diplomat's smile. The charming surface that got me through law school and political circles and seven years of gritting my teeth and doing whatever I was told to do.
I wonder if she'll see what's underneath.
I wonder if she'll run from it or try to cut it open.
The compound settles into its nighttime rhythm.
I lie on the bed in a soldier's room and stare at the ceiling, listening to the new sounds around me and I think about my father and his grave and the knife standing in the dirt and the seat behind the desk and the woman with the karambits who is being traded to me in exchange for peace.
Except… none of them know I’ve defected from the Silent, and they won’t until it’s too late.
They’ll either give me what I want, or we will all die at the hands of men who don’t take no for an answer because I’m the only one who knows the inner workings of the Replication Initiative and why it’s so important.
None of them asked for this. Not Leone, not Emilio, not the soldiers who stared at my face in the corridor. And not Antonia, who is right now sitting in a Castillo estate being told she'll marry a stranger whether she fucking likes it or not.
But I didn't ask for it either. I didn't ask to be born, positioned, funded, monitored, and abandoned. I didn't ask for the trust fund or the law degree or the thirty-one years of quiet, constructed, carefully managed exile from the family that should have been mine.
I asked for nothing. And I'm done asking.
From now on, I take.