Chapter 8 #2
‘Nonno and Cesare are back in New York,’ he says, voice edged with the kind of mischief I remember from stealing joints and racetrack bets. ‘Old man’s ordered a thousand saints candle for the church in Manhattan and the chapel in Fallbrook and won’t shut up about the plaques.’
What? What the fuck…
The words come in waves, only half making sense.
When he’s not looking, I swallow through the thick fog. The movement hurts in my ribs but it’s good to feel the ache of being alive.
‘He and Maddie are bringing the baby to see you this weekend,’ Dante goes on.
‘She’s riding Cesare’s ass hard about taking your seat for the next race instead of letting the reserve driver.
She’s not going to let him out of her sight for the foreseeable.
’ He snorts. ‘As if she does anyway. Make sure you don’t drool on your nephew when he comes, capisci? ’
Something in me wants to laugh. Nothing in me is light enough to make the sound. My throat tightens. I taste the metallic sedative and the memory of my mother’s laugh like a ghost of her old perfume.
A ghost made so by my Giada?
‘Rafa and Sofiya?’ Dante’s voice dips a little.
‘They’re MIA, which is… odd but the fuck else is new, eh?
He texted me last night with a message for you.
“Tell that little shit if he wakes and doesn’t thank me personally, I’ll make him kiss the ground he drove on” – and then Sofiya sent a picture of herself wielding something with a fake cigarette in her mouth, looking mean.
Romantic, really, but fuck if I understand the hidden meaning in anything those two get up to.
Probably some kinky shit that’ll give me hives for a month. ’
I almost let the corner of my mouth move. A smile is a betrayal right now. It tastes of stitches and nuns’ habits and memories I’m not allowed to have.
Dante’s cadence changes.
He grows quieter, and that’s when the rest slips in – things that scrape the drilled-out hollows clean.
He says the stupid, small things that matter: how pissed he was when I stole the better parts of his car as a kid; how he used to hide my jumpers so I’d have to beg him; how once, during a rainstorm on the coast, we shared a sandwich and he pretended not to know I’d put the last piece in his pocket because I was ashamed to be seen as soft.
The images hit me like shrapnel.
My chest tightens and for a second I feel the panic that made the doctors fuss earlier. I hate him for making me feel it. I hate myself a bit more for liking it. I hate him for reminding him how much I love my family. I hate myself for this stunt I’m forced to pull.
It’s necessary, I remind myself.
‘You know,’ Dante murmurs, softer now, ‘I sat in the paddock the first practice after the crash. I watched the footage loop, and I prayed for you. Not like a sermon – like a selfish prayer. “Bring him back so I can fight him for parking spaces and top podiums.”’ He snorts, then sighs.
‘Fucking selfish. But it was a prayer. Yeah, surprised the fuck out of me too.’
The sedation makes his words stick to my brain like molasses. I wasn’t supposed to hear confessions; I was supposed to hear gripes and tough love.
I keep my face slack, pulse steady on the monitor, but inside my head something unclenches and an ache that isn’t pain comes for me – wet and honest and dangerous.
Dante keeps talking. He talks about the press, Bibiana handling sponsors with more fangs than usual, and how the team is juggling the season without me like a circus, and how Cesare is pretending he’s calm but calls to check my vitals every hour like a man who’s finally learned to love the thing he’s been ordered to protect.
He hits home with an honest shot then, the kind you can’t see coming because you think you’re prepared for every blow.
‘Woke up this morning with an urgency, you know? This need to… to tell you things. Fuck if I know why but it better not be because you’re…
you’re… Yeah, I’m not going to fucking say that out loud.
Just wanted to tell you I was sorry… for the times I spat on your audacity, for the times I let Orazio ride your ass when I should’ve told him to go fuck himself because I knew you were going through things.
For the day Ma died, when I didn’t come when you needed me.
I thought… maybe I thought you’d always be there to take the hits so I wouldn’t have to.
Seeing you like this—’ His voice cracks.
It’s a small sound. A body of a man admitting he’s human.
I wonder if God ever gives out medals for brothers who fail at protection and then try harder. I hate that Dante’s confession makes me want to cry. I hate that I’m proud of him, that the pressure inside my chest eases in a ridiculous, traitorous way.
He drags a hand over his face, exhaling hard.
‘And since you’re clearly not going to wake up and help, I guess I should also tell you the other shit that’s brewing.
There’s a new problem on the horizon – some rancid fucker on the Mancinelli side has popped his head up.
Might be nothing. Might be a storm. We’re keeping an eye on it. ’
A sour laugh escapes him, low and tired.
‘And Matteo… he’s slithered back to Sicily.
Holing up in Taormina, licking his wounds and consolidating loyalties – typical rat bullshit.
Cesare’s already got eyes on every port from Palermo to Catania.
Just thought you should know the cesspit’s stirring again. ’
I’m digesting the last piece of info about Giada’s father, Matteo Mancinelli, and this new threat when Dr Conti bustles in then, urgent and pale, like a man who knows exactly how thin ice feels like.
‘Signore Dante, I really must insist—’ he begins, trying to be professional and failing because one unsettled Salvatore is bad enough.
Two, and brave men descend into shit-in-your-pants territory.
And true to form, Dante snaps his head and he glares at the man with a look I know well: the one that says you are in the wrong room. The doctor flinches, retreats a few paces, then says, ‘Per favore. He needs rest.’ It’s less a command than a plea.
Dante’s fists clench.
Then he sighs and stands slowly, the chair whining against the floor.
He leans over, closer than a man should, until his breath brushes my ear.
‘This has gone on long enough, fucker. Wake up for me, Renzo,’ he whispers, half-order, half-lure.
‘I’ll see you awake. I’ll make sure Maddie’s baby gives you the first slobbering judgement.
Make sure you’re not a ghost by the time he gets here. ’
He pulls back, leaving a wake of warmth. Then, with a grin that’s more pain than humour, he says, ‘Don’t make me have to punch someone.’
He stands, claps the doctor on the shoulder, too hard so the man knows he was in the room with a man capable of manic savagery, and then he heads for the door.
At the threshold he pauses and looks back like a man checking on a wounded bird. ‘Don’t fucking die,’ he says, stupid and soft and the kind of brotherly thing that’s a promise and a threat all at once. ‘I need you to be irritating.’
The door shuts. The room resettles around the beeps and the low mechanical breath. I can sense the vacuum where his presence has been, the way he took up space in my life without asking because it’s his right.
I let the sedation pull me deeper. The twisting ache in my chest refuses to be soothed by drugs. I’m not ready to be a ghost. Not now. Not with this woman in white somewhere beyond the locked door.
Several minutes tick by, then the door opens. ‘He’s left the premises, Signore.’
Dr Conti rushes to my side, syringe prepped.
And in between two heartbeats, the world sharpens like a blade. Dante’s absence cuts deep but something else cuts deeper.
I force my jaw to move. ‘Bring her back,’ I say, voice rough as gravel. ‘Now.’
The doctor moves like a man trying to keep both his head and his job. The other machines murmur approval or concern.
I close my eyes again, satisfied for the moment, the ache and the anger a live thing coiled and ready for whatever comes next.
* * *
Sister Benedetta
They didn’t lock me in the room when they rushed me in here.
They didn’t need to. The window doesn’t open and I don’t need to open the door to know the bodyguards are right outside.
At first, I was outraged in the dignified way of a novice nun who has practised self-control: pacing three measured steps, saying calm prayers through clenched teeth, arranging and rearranging the blanket on the neat bed until the weave left a crosshatch on my palms.
I told myself I was captive, that this was wrong. I told myself, in the firm voice of the Madre Superiora – because old habits are hard to break – that obedience is the shortest road to peace.
But as I wait, with nothing but time on my hands and confused prayers on my lips, for Renzo to summon me back to his room, I think over the last five days.
And my confusion deepens because… I’m not sure what I am.
A prisoner should not have clean sheets and good espresso and a guard who knocks and lowers his eyes with deference when he speaks.
A prisoner should not wake in the night listening for a stranger’s uneven breathing an alarming three feet away.
A prisoner should not feel her heart lift at the stray sound of footsteps that might be his, returning after his latest round of physio.
Why don’t I feel more like a prisoner?
I pause in my pacing, drop to kneel on the rug that’s expensive and soft enough to make contrition feel luxurious, and bow my head. The prayers wander, unnerving me further.
They do that more, lately.
I start with the Our Father and end up thinking about Renzo’s hands braced on crutches, the line of his jaw as he refuses help, the way he softens – not often, not easily – when he looks at me, then looks harder, deeper, like he knows me in ways that would thrill and terrify me.