Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Valentino
I’m watching Amanda sleep as I wait for Bruno to answer.
She's on her side, one hand curled under her chin like a kid who fought bedtime and lost. My jacket is still wrapped around her shoulders. I should be making this call in the other room where she can't hear, but I couldn' t make myself leave her.
"Valentino." Bruno's voice is thick with sleep. "This better be the building's on fire kind of call."
"It might as well be." I step into the hall. "I killed Aldo Basile."
The line goes dead quiet.
"What the hell are you talking about?" Bruno says it slowly, each word careful, like he's hoping this is a joke, hoping I'm just drunk.
So I tell him.
I tell him the way you report a hit. Clean, no fluff. No gaps for him to crawl into, to ask how I feel. The room. Three men. Amanda on the floor. The phone. The bruise on her cheek. Aldo crawling for his gun. How I beat him to death instead.
He’s silent for a long time. He’s running the scenarios, calculating how bad this is. How much I’ve cost him.
Don Enzo Basile's youngest son. Dead by a Sartori hand. It will certainly cause problems.
"Where are you now?"
"Safe house outside the city. The one off the Bergamo road." I glance back through the gap I left in the door. She hasn't moved. "I've got Elio and her. Luca's coming here too. He pulled surveillance and he's an hour out."
Bruno curses.
"Did they—" He stops. He's a hard bastard, Bruno. Few things make him pause. But this…
"I got there." It's the most I can give him and the least he'll accept. "I don't know everything they did before. Not yet."
He breathes out, rough. "Fifteen minutes," he says.
"I'll get everyone on. Stay put. Don't move her unless I say so.
Don't talk to anyone, don't call anyone, don't—" He cuts himself off.
Bruno's smart enough to know that telling me how to do this is like telling water to be wet.
"Fifteen minutes," he says gentler this time. "We'll figure it out."
"Bruno."
"What."
"They have her phone," I say. "My number's in it," I go on, before he can. "I imagine that the phone's already in a Basile lieutenant's hand."
"Christ." It comes out of him half-swallowed, desperate, loud as he dares. "Dante can wipe it remotely. If it's still on, if it's still got a signal—"
"Tell him to try. If it's off they'll pull it apart in a lab and it will be impossible to wipe. And tell Vittoria before someone else does. She finds out her friend got taken from a stranger, you'll have two wars instead of one."
"I'll tell her." His voice drops. "She's going to want to come."
"She can't."
"I know she can't." A long breath. "Doesn't mean she won't try.
You know what she's like when it's Amanda.
There's a short list of people Vittoria would burn it all down for, and that girl's on it.
" He pauses. "So is the man who pulled her out of that room, in case you were wondering where you stand. "
I don't answer that. I don't know where I stand. Twenty-two years carrying the guilt of standing outside, hand to the wall, watching. Tonight I went through the door. The guilt came too.
"Fifteen minutes," I say again, putting the wall between the past and present—and my feelings about any of it—back in place.
"Valentino. The old man's going to want blood for this. There's no version of this where he doesn't. You understand you made this personal. You beat him to death with your hands. Enzo will know exactly how his son died."
"Good," I say.
I hang up before he can ask me what I mean by that, because I'm not sure.
I push the door open. Her mouth is curled downward and her brows pitch low between her eyes. Fingers grasp the air, for something that isn’t there. Me. I want it to be me, and hate myself a little.
My phone buzzes against the wooden table, skittering toward the edge before I catch it. One word from Luca. Here.
I cross the safe house, weapon already in my hand because I always have a gun when I open a door. No exceptions. The bolt slides back, and the hinges complain like everything else in this damp little box.
Luca stands on the threshold.
I step back to let him in, and for a second I just look at his green eyes that blink less than they should.
I'm not in the business of cracking a man open on his way through a door. I just remind him sometimes that I remember who he was. That somebody still does.
My phone lights up again.
I answer and prop it against the half-empty whiskey bottle so I can keep my hands free, and the screen fractures into faces. Five of them.
Bruno fills the top box, broad and heavy-browed, sitting forward.
Next Lorenzo, jacket off, sleeves rolled, calm as still water and twice as deep.
Below them Nico, fingers already moving on something I can't see.
Pietro in the corner, jaw tight, looking like a storm deciding which town to flatten. And Dante. All the Sartori brothers.
"You look like shit," Pietro says.
"Buonasera to you too."
"Is she alive?" Nico cuts in, always to the point.
"She's breathing. Drugged. She'll come up out of it by morning." I glance at her, then back at the screen. "One bruise mark. Nothing else visible."
Lorenzo just closes his eyes for half a second. Vittoria's an unspoken presence in the room. Amanda is hers in every way that matters. If I'd been four minutes slower, I'd be on this call explaining to my youngest cousin why her best friend came home in pieces.
Luca crosses behind me and takes the wall, back to it, eyes on the window. He never sits. I'm not sure I've seen Luca sit since what happened to him.
On screen, Dante's eyes shift to him. "Farro."
Luca dips his chin a half inch. The whole reunion.
"My cousins," I say, mostly because I want something to steady me. "All of you." Then I tip my head at Dante's box. "You too. Took us thirty-six years to find out."
His mouth tilts. A barely noticeable movement, but I see it. "Surprise," he says dryly.
It's still a fresh wound, this one. Giuseppe Sartori, dead with his good name intact, his friends in Rome, his name on hospital wings. He had raped many women, including Dante’s mother.
The man hoarded secrets like other men hoard gold, and this was his most recent secret.
Dante. Sartori by blood, the whole way by twenty years of bleeding for them.
Now blood agrees with what loyalty already knew.
"Touching," Pietro says. "Can we get to the part where the youngest son of a Don is dead, and that Don is going to want to burn Milan to the foundations?"
"That part hasn't changed since the last time we spoke," I say. "Aldo's dead. So are the two men with him. They weren't soldati. Civilians, both of them. Aldo had no real guard. This wasn't family business. This was Aldo doing something his father would put him in the ground for himself."
Nico's fingers stop moving. He leans toward the camera, and his eyes cut straight to the bone, inventory everything, give back nothing. "Then why her? You think he knew she was connected with us?"
"No. She asked about a bruise." The words taste like rust in my mouth. "A girl on the shoot had a bruise. She asked the wrong question to the wrong woman, and somebody decided she needed to be taught a lesson."
Silence on the line, the bad kind. Lorenzo opens his eyes.
"Christ," Lorenzo murmurs. Even his curses are gentle.
"So Aldo's running his own trafficking shop under the agency," Bruno says, dragging it back to the cold facts, "and decided to handle a nosy civilian himself, off the books, at a party full of buyers.
Sloppy. Arrogant." He rubs a thumb across his jaw.
"Which means Enzo doesn't know yet. About any of it. The girls or the son."
"He'll know soon," Nico says. "They have her phone now."
"Dante," I say.
Dante sets his glass down somewhere out of frame. "If it's still on, it's already mine. Tell me the carrier when we hang up."
"Aldo reported to Mauro." Bruno says. "His cousin. Mauro reports to Don Enzo. So Don Enzo has it by morning. Or already. Depending on who the guards called first."
Nobody says anything for a moment.
Pietro breaks it.
"Vittoria won't take this well."
"She's going to want to come."
"She's not coming. Not yet. Not until we know what's coming for Valentino."
"Her family," Lorenzo says.
"Her mother will notice in six or seven days. Maybe longer."
"Maybe never," Nico says, still not looking up. "From what I know."
Nobody argues with that.
Pietro sits back. I can hear him breathe out.
"We have until the Basiles decide what they're going to do. If Don Enzo handles this inside the family, we have a week. If he makes a call to Palermo, we have two days."
"He'll make the call," Dante says.
Bruno looks at the camera.
"Luca runs the perimeter. Mancini stays in the house. Amanda doesn't see a window until I tell you. We'll have a plan soon."
"Yes." I say.
"You did the right thing tonight." Bruno says.
I don't say anything.
He hangs up.
The five faces drop one by one until the screen is black.
Luca looks at me across the table.
"Coffee?" he says.
It's the first word out of his mouth since he walked in.
"Yes," I say.
Amanda
My mouth tastes like metal.
My tongue feels too big, and my mouth feels stuffed full of cotton. Water. I need water before I need anything else, before I can even start the impossible math of where I am and how I got here and why my body feels like a stranger's.
I push up onto my elbows. The room spins, and I have to stop. Breathe through it with my eyes shut. When it settles, I try again, slower this time, and the world mostly holds still.
My legs work, technically. I get them over the side of the bed and stand, and my knees do a quick negotiation about whether they're going to participate.
They decide, grudgingly, that they will.
I keep one hand on the wall and shuffle toward the gap of light under the door like a woman three times my age.
Dignity is a thing I'll reclaim later. Right now I'd trade it for a tap.
The hallway is short and dim, plaster scarred down to the brick in places.
I follow the light and a faint smell of coffee until it opens into a small kitchen.
A scarred wooden table and two chairs sit in front of a window with the shutters cracked just enough to slice the morning into thin gold lines across the floor.
Elio is standing by the counter. He sees me, and he takes a step toward me, hand already coming up like he's going to steady me or hold me.
"Don't."
The word lands flat and hard from somewhere to my left, and Elio freezes mid-step like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
I turn my head, which the room punishes me for.
Valentino. His eyes do a quick inventory of me.
He crosses the room and his hands close around my arms. Firm enough to hold me up, careful enough that I notice the care.
"What do you need," he says.
The fog in my head, the careful way he's holding me, and Elio standing three feet off with an apologetic expression covering his entire face… it's a lot to take in on an empty everything.
I open my mouth and nothing useful comes out for a second. "Water," I finally manage. My voice sounds odd like sandpaper and gravel. "I need water."
Elio's already moving before I finish the word. Cabinet, glass, tap. He's got it filled and is holding it out toward me in the time it takes me to blink. There's something almost desperate in how fast he does it. Like this water is a payment on a debt I never agreed to accept.
Valentino takes it without looking at him.
"Slow," Valentino tells me, and presses the glass into my hand, keeping his fingers over mine until he's sure I've got it.
I drink. It's just tap water, lukewarm and faintly metallic, and it is the single best thing I have ever put in my mouth. It hits my throat and spreads through my chest like something waking up. I tip the glass back, desperate for more, but Valentino's hand comes up under it, slowing me .
"Slow," he says again, lower this time, almost gentle, and for some reason it’s that gentleness that makes my eyes water.
Not the pain on my cheek I can feel now that I'm awake.
Not the gaps in my memory I'm not brave enough to fill in yet.
The word slow, said like I'm something that might break if it's rushed.
I drink slower. Half the glass. My hands are shaking, and I hate it. Hate that they can see how vulnerable I am, so I wrap them around the cool glass tighter until they stop.
Elio is still standing there. He wants to say something. I can feel it. Everything we haven't said, filling the room.
"Where are we," I ask. My eyes go to Valentino because he's the one who'll actually answer, or at least the one I'd believe.
"Safe," he says.
"That's not a place."
One corner of his mouth moves. "It's the only one that matters right now. You need to lie down," he says.
"I just got up."
"You got up too soon." He sets the glass on the table, takes it from my hands so smoothly I don't even feel them empty. Then his arm is around my back, broad and certain, turning me toward the hallway. "More water later. Sleep now."
"I don't want to sleep." It comes out smaller than I mean it to. The truth underneath—I don't want to be alone in my own head, I don't want to close my eyes and see the lamps and the hands again—stays buried.
"I know," he says.
He puts his hand against my back, guiding me back toward the room, and I let him. Because right now? He’s the only thing keeping me from falling apart.