Chapter 35
DAMIANO
After the cake, after Sammy goes to his room still grinning at his phone, after Rosa washes the dishes and Vito does his last sweep of the house, the Clemenza and I end up where we always end up. In my bedroom. On my bed.
And the whole city locked out.
“Did you know that Ricky guy was going to be here?” I ask, sitting on the edge to take off my shoes.
“No.” Caligula is sitting cross-legged against the headboard. “But isn’t it nice that he was? Sammy seemed to like him.”
“Sammy doesn’t need a broken heart on top of everything else.”
“Sammy is twenty-seven, Dami.” Caligula looks at me with that patient expression he gets when he thinks I’m being particularly dumb.
“You can keep him physically safe. You can lock down the house and check the cameras and screen every person who walks through the door. But you can’t protect him from heartbreak. Nobody can.”
I want to argue, even though I know he’s right. I’ve been trying to protect people from everything my whole life. And today—Sammy’s reaction to some stupid suit—showed me I’ve been getting it wrong.
Getting all of it wrong.
“He looked happy,” Caligula goes on. “Don’t you think?”
“Yeah.”
I lean back against the headboard with him and stare at the opposite wall. Happy. When was the last time Sammy was happy? When was the last time anyone in this house was happy?
The Clemenza shifts beside me, pulling his legs up, wrapping his arms around his knees. He looks small like that. Young.
He is young. Twenty-one. Five—no, six years younger than Sammy, and I’ve never thought of Caligula as fragile, not the way Sammy is. I’ve thought of him as a threat, a target, a prize. I’ve thought of him as a Clemenza, which in my head has always meant something dangerous and evil.
But he’s twenty-one years old. He turned twenty-one on the streets, running for his life, watching his family get picked off one by one, and then I bought him at auction and put a collar on him and—
And then I broke him.
I took someone like that and I twisted him until he broke.
I think again about the first time I ever saw him. Eighteen, shivering in the rain under an umbrella Tony Stuccio was holding over him at Cesario’s funeral. Eighteen…but he was just a boy.
My first instinct wasn’t hatred. My first instinct was pity. I hate to admit that even now; at the time, I smothered it, because it was a weakness to feel pity for my enemy. For my father’s enemy.
In many ways, Caligula is still just a boy; hell, he’s half a decade younger than Sammy, who I still treat like a child most of the time.
I’ve always hated people calling Caligula a boy.
Making out like he’s helpless. But for all his smarts and all his plans, he’s still just a twenty-one-year-old kid.
And I’ve been cruel to him. To someone who never deserved that kind of treatment any more than Sammy did.
His father killed mine.
But he is not Cesario.
With a sick sensation, I wonder what my father would think of me if he could see me now…
I close my eyes.
“What are you thinking about?” Caligula asks.
“My father.”
I can practically hear him choosing his next words. “You don’t talk about him much.”
“Nothing to talk about. He’s dead.”
“Will you tell me what happened that day?”
I open my eyes and look at him. He looks…
Sad. He looks sad.
I shouldn’t tell him. There’s no reason to tell him. Telling him gives him ammunition, gives him a weakness to use against me later, because that’s what Clemenzas do.
But he was kind today. He was kind when it would have been easier to just ignore Sammy, let the guy stew in his own jealousy, easier not to push me into acting decent for once in my life.
I owe him something for that.
“My dad was…he was friends with yours. My mom died of cancer when I was nine, and the Clemenzas sent your dad to the funeral as a sign of respect. I guess that’s where they met.
And then…I don’t know. Your dad used to come over every now and then.
He’d bring wine. They’d talk together, and then my dad would send me to bed.
But they’d keep talking, long into the night. I’d hear them sometimes.”
Something flickers across Caligula’s face. Not pain, exactly. More like recognition. His father, alive in someone else’s memory. “What kind of things did they talk about?” he asks.
I shrug. “It was mostly in Italian. So I guess it was work stuff. But one night…one night when I was thirteen, I heard shouting, so I got out of bed. I came downstairs and—”
I stop. I’ve never said this part out loud. Not to anyone. Not to Big Gee, not to Seb, not to Rosa. It’s lived in my chest like a stone for twenty-one years, and the thought of pushing it up through my throat makes me feel like I’m thirteen again, barefoot and cold and unable to move.
Caligula slides a hand into mine and holds on.
“I saw Cesario,” I grit out. “Standing over my father. My dad was on the ground. There was…so much blood. My dad was trying to say something, I think. His head was facing the doorway and I think he saw me, but I…” I swallow. “I don’t know.”
“I’m sorry,” Caligula says at last. His voice is barely above a whisper. “I’m sorry my father did that to yours.”
I actually believe him.
“There’s something else,” I say, and this is the part that’s going to break me. “When I saw Cesario—when I saw what he’d done—I ran.”
Caligula waits.
“I didn’t go for help. I didn’t even go to my dad as he lay there dying. I didn’t try to help or fight or do a single goddamn thing. I just ran. I hid behind a dumpster three blocks away, and I stayed there until morning.”
There it is. The stone. Out of my chest, sitting between us on the bed, ugly and cold.
“I was a fucking coward,” I go on when he doesn’t say anything. Too disgusted by me, I guess. “But I swore after that—I swore I would never run again. Never back down. Never let anyone I was supposed to protect get hurt because I was too scared to do something about it.”
Caligula is quiet for a long moment. When he speaks, his voice is gentle in a way I didn’t think him capable of.
“You were thirteen, Dami.”
“I know how old I was.”
“No, I mean—you were a child. A child who saw something no child should ever see. And you ran because that’s what children do when they’re afraid. That’s what they’re supposed to do.”
“My dad needed me—”
“Your father would have wanted you to be safe.” He squeezes my hand and shifts closer, close enough that I can feel his warmth. “The last thing he would have wanted was for you to die beside him. That wouldn’t have been brave. It would have been a waste.”
I can’t look at him. I can’t look at anything. My eyes are fixed on the far wall and my jaw is clamped shut and something in my chest where that stone used to be is throbbing and shaking.
I wish he would hate me. I wish he would needle me, use that confession against me, weaponize it.
But he doesn’t. He just sits there holding my hand.
“Maybe he wanted me safe then,” I spit out. “But my father would be ashamed of me now. Of who I grew up to be.”
“Your father would be proud of the man who takes care of Rosa and Vito and Sammy,” Caligula says.
“He wouldn’t like what I…what I did to you,” I mutter.
He doesn’t reply to that. What is there to say? We sit there while the house ticks and settles around us.
But because he gave me something—because he heard the worst thing I’ve ever done and didn’t throw it back in my face—I decide to give him something back.
“Big Gee is planning a war with the Morellis,” I tell him. “He wants to tear up the Commission and take over. He’s allied with the Bratva to do it.”
I feel Caligula go stiff beside me. “Daniel King?” he asks, his voice careful.
“Daniel King.”
“That’s—” He stops. Starts again. “Insane. The fallout would be catastrophic. The Rossis won’t stand aside. The Alessis will—”
“Caligula. There’s more.”
I turn to look at him. His face is pale in the low light, and his eyes are very wide, and I see the moment when he reads my expression and understands that whatever I’m about to say is worse than news of a Mob War.
“Big Gee wants me to hand you over to Daniel King on Sunday morning,” I say. “As a gesture of good faith. To cement the alliance.”
Caligula stares at me. “Is that what you’re going to do?” he asks at last.
“No. I told you no one would hurt you.”
Relief floods his face for a moment. And then I watch comprehension arrive, slow and terrible, as he works through the logic the way only Caligula Clemenza can. “Except you,” he says.
“Except me,” I echo.
“Are you going to kill me now?” His voice is steady but his hands aren’t. His palm is still in mine, and it’s shaking.
“It’s you or the Family,” I tell him.
The trembling stops. His hand goes still. His chin comes up—that Clemenza chin, that prince-in-exile posture that I thought I’d broken down in the basement but that keeps reassembling itself, over and over, no matter what I do to him.
“Then make your choice, Orsini,” he says. His voice is cold and clear. He doesn’t plead. He doesn’t run. He doesn’t try to manipulate or bargain or cry.
He just looks at me with those golden eyes and waits.