Chapter 36
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Gemma
The cab drops me at the end of a private road, and I walk the last stretch. The wall runs higher than any I've seen around a house, and the gate at the end of it is black iron with cameras mounted on both pillars, and one of them turns to follow me as I come up the drive.
A guard steps out of the booth before I reach the intercom. He's big through the shoulders, and his right hand stays near his hip, which tells me where his gun sits. I stop six feet back and keep my hands out of my pockets where he can see them.
"Name," he says.
"Gemma Farro." The last name tastes wrong now, but it's the one that opens doors here. "I'm here to see Cesare Orsini."
He looks at my face longer than he needs to.
Then he speaks into his collar, low, and the gate swings inward without a sound.
He doesn't walk me in. He just steps back and watches me pass.
I feel a second camera turn overhead, and a third man standing by a parked SUV halfway up the drive lifts his chin at me and says nothing.
So they're watching me. They've been watching me for two years, apparently, and I never saw a single one of them, which means either they're very good or I was very stupid, and I've had enough of this day to know it's probably both.
The house is stone and enormous. My shoes crunch on the gravel, and I think about my mother in Wisconsin, the one who raised me.
Susan Holt. I've known I was adopted since I was seven.
My parents sat me down at the kitchen table with juice and cookies and told me straight, and I asked one question — did my first mom not want me — and my mom told, We wanted you so much we drove through a snowstorm to get you.
That was enough. It was enough for twenty-one years.
I was curious sometimes, in the way you're curious about a country you'll never visit, but I never sent away for records or spat in a tube, because I had a dad who taught me to drive on back roads and a mom who let me scream off the porch when school got bad, and nothing about my blood ever felt like a missing piece.
The front door opens before I reach the steps. Vico leans against the frame with his head tilted, and the smirk on his face says he's been expecting this exact moment for weeks. His hands are loose at his sides. That's what I check first. Loose is fine.
"Mrs. Farro," he says. "No husband today?"
"I need to see Cesare."
The smirk shifts into a real look, quick, up and down my face, reading me the way I read rooms. Whatever he finds there makes him straighten off the doorframe.
"Follow me," he says.
Inside, a woman in an apron crosses the hall ahead of us and doesn't look at me. Vico takes the stairs and I follow two steps behind him, one hand on the banister. I count the doors on the second floor out of habit — six, one open with light spilling out.
He stops at the open one and knocks on the frame anyway.
"Papà. She's here."
The room is a bedroom, big, with heavy curtains pulled halfway and a hospital rail bolted to one side of the bed.
Cesare lies propped on pillows, thinner than he was the last time I saw him.
There's an oxygen line taped under his nose and a tray of untouched food on the nightstand.
When his eyes find me, his whole face changes.
He smiles, and it's not the careful smile from the wedding.
It falls open on him. His hand comes up off the blanket a few inches and drops again, like lifting it costs him.
"Gemma," he says.
I step into the room. My legs feel far away, but they carry me, and I stop at the foot of the bed where I can see both him and the door.
"I know," I say. My voice comes out flat and steady, which is how it comes out when nothing inside me is either. "I know you're my father."
The smile doesn't fall. His eyes go wet instead, fast, and he doesn't wipe them.
"Sit," he says. He pats the blanket, then points to the chair beside the bed instead, when he sees my face. "Sit. Please."
Vico shifts behind me. I hear his shoes on the floor, turning for the door.
"Vico." Cesare doesn't raise his voice. He doesn't have the breath to. "Stay."
"Papà—"
"Stay." Cesare's eyes don't leave me. "She should hear it with a witness. All of it. So no one can ever tell her it happened differently."
Vico closes the door and puts his back against it, arms crossed. I lower myself into the chair beside a dying man who has my chin and my pale eyes, and I fold my hands in my lap and wait.
"You look like her," Cesare says. His voice cracks in the middle. "You sat down just now exactly the way Ashley used to sit. Like you're apologizing to the chair."
I don't know what to do with that.
"Tell me everything," I say. "From the beginning. And don't lie to me. I've had enough of that to last the rest of my life."
Cesare looks at Vico. Vico looks at the floor.
"The beginning," Cesare says, and reaches with a shaking hand for the water glass he can't quite lift.
I lean over and hold it to his mouth before I can think about whether I want to. He drinks, and his eyes stay on me the whole time.
Luca
The playroom door is half open, and I hear them before I see them.
I push the door and step inside.
Nina's head comes up. Her eyes go wide, and then she screams it, full volume, the way she never screamed anything the first week I knew her.
"Luca!"
She's off the rug and running before Kristen can look up from the window seat. I go down on one knee. Nina stops a foot away from me, bouncing on her toes, her bob haircut swinging.
"Hey," I say. "How are you?"
"We're playing hospital," she says. "Lily's baby has a broken arm and my baby has a fever, but it's not a real fever, it's a pretend one, so she can still have juice."
"That's good."
"Lily has a doctor kit. It has a real light."
"Show me."
She runs back to the rug, grabs a plastic doll wrapped in a dish towel, and carries it over with both arms under it, supporting the head. Someone taught her that. Gemma taught her that.
"This is my baby," Nina says. "Her name is Strawberry."
"Good name."
"Where's Mommy?"
The question lands and I keep my face where it is. Kristen shifts on the window seat, and I don't look at her.
"She'll get here soon," I say.
Nina nods, satisfied. Soon is a word she trusts. Her mother has never broken it.
I clear my throat. The sound comes out rough, and I have to do it twice.
"Nina. I need to tell you something."
She stops rocking the doll.
"I have to be in another city for a while. For work." My voice holds. I make it hold. "I came to say goodbye."
She looks at me. The bouncing stops, and her whole small body goes quiet.
"For how long?" she says.
"I don't know yet."
"Is it far?"
"Yes."
She thinks about this. Her fingers work at the dish towel, tucking it tighter around the doll.
I can't stay in this room much longer. There's a pressure building behind my eyes. If it breaks in front of her, she'll carry it. Kids carry everything you hand them, even the things you drop by accident. Especially those.
I put my hand on the floor and start to push up.
Nina sets the doll down on the carpet, face up, careful with the head even now. Then she steps in and puts her arms around my neck.
I freeze.
Her arms are thin but her grip is strong. My eyes sting so hard I have to open them wide and fix them on the wall over her shoulder. There's a ladybug painted on the mini-fridge. I count its spots. Six.
I bring my arms up and hold her. My hand covers most of her back. She's small for her age, Gemma told me that once, worried, and I told her the girl would grow. I don't know if I'll see it.
"I love you," Nina says into my collar.
The words go through me and the pain I feel in my stomach is real.
"Ti—" It comes out Italian first and I stop it, swallow, start again. "I love you too."
She pulls back and looks at me from six inches away, checking my face the way her mother checks it, and whatever she finds there, she accepts. She pats my shoulder once with her flat little hand.
"Goodbye, Luca," she says.
"Goodbye, Nina."
She picks up Strawberry and walks back to the rug, back to the hospital game, back to Lily, who scoots over to make room.
I get up.
Kristen watches me. She doesn't say anything, and I'm grateful for that in a way I can't show her, so I nod once and she nods back. Her eyes are wet, and I turn before mine can answer.
The hallway is cold after the playroom. Behind the door, muffled now, I hear Nina's voice.
"Okay, your baby can have a broken arm AND a fever."
I stand there with my hand flat on the wall, and I can't make my feet move toward the stairs.
I stand in front of Bruno's desk because sitting would mean I plan to negotiate, and I don't.
"Send me with Ryan," I say. "The Herrera contract."
Bruno leans back. He watches me. Behind me, Valentino sets down whatever he's holding.
"Absolutely not," Valentino says.
I don't turn around. I keep my eyes on Bruno because Bruno is the one who signs off on contracts.
"Ryan works alone," Bruno says.
"Ryan works however the money tells him to work.
I know Juárez. I know the routes out of Rockford.
I've done this kind of job for years without a scratch until Rome.
I'm cleared. Both wounds closed. I can shoot, I can drive, I can sit in a car for eleven hours without complaining, which is more than half your men can do. "
"Luca." Valentino's voice comes from behind me, low. "Look at me."
I don't.
"Bruno," I say. "You wanted the Herreras handled clean. Ryan's good, but eight men is a lot of ground for one gun. You know it. He knows it."
Bruno taps one finger against the desk. He was in a wheelchair for two years, and he still moves like a man who counts the cost of everything, including a nod. He gives me one anyway.
"I'll ask Ryan if he wants you," he says. "It's his contract. His call."
"That's all I'm asking."
"No," Valentino says, and now I hear him stand, the chair scraping back. "That's not all he's asking, and you goddamn well know it."
Bruno doesn't answer him. He looks at me for one more second.
"Luca," Valentino says. "Walk with me."
I follow him out of the office and down the hall. I keep my eyes on Valentino's back so I don't think about things that hurt at the moment.
He stops in the living room. Nobody's in it. He goes to the cart by the wall, pours two fingers of amber into two glasses, picks them both up, and tilts his head toward the glass doors. The garden.
The air out here bites. We walk the gravel path along the fence line, and neither of us says a word for a long time. The gravel crunches. Somewhere behind the house a guard's radio clicks twice and goes quiet.
The whiskey burns going down.
"You were right," I say. "About telling her. I want you to know that I knew. Every fucking day I knew you were right, and I chose the silence anyway, because I told myself it was protection." The glass is cold against my fingers. "It wasn't protection. It was me keeping her."
Valentino walks three more steps before he answers. His breath fogs in front of him.
"There's a chance I would've done the same," he says. "In your position. With what you had to lose." He looks out at the tree line, not at me. "That's why I can't say much to you now."
I nod. It's more honesty than most men give.
"But," he says, and stops walking. "Going off to get killed doesn't make anything right. You know that. You put yourself next to Ryan in Juárez, and you're not asking for work. You're asking for a wall to run into that finally doesn't move."
The frost cracks under my boot when I turn to face him. My hand has gone to my shoulder instinctively, thumb against the scar through the coat, and I make myself drop it.
"She was my last chance," I say. "For years I was a tool.
You point me, I go, I come back, you point me again.
I didn't mind. Tools don't mind. Then a woman stole my car, and for two months I got up in the morning and I fucking wanted to.
I lived with a four-year-old, Valentino.
After everything." The cold pushes into my collar.
I let it. "That was the last chance to live again.
It's gone. She's sitting in Cesare Orsini's house right now hearing every reason she'll never come back. "
Valentino says nothing. He holds his glass and watches me, and his jaw is tight.
"So the message is fucking clear," I say.
"God, fate, whatever runs this thing — it showed me the door.
Fine. Così sia." I raise the knuckles at him, the ink he's seen a hundred times.
"So be it. I go back to being what I'm good at.
And if Ryan's contract is where that ends, then it ends where it was always going to end. At least it'll end useful."