17. Nico
NICO
I fold my whole body over Lydia in the booth, and every thought in my mind swirls together until it coalesces into a single word.
No.
Not her. Not here. Not with her thighs still quivering from my mouth a second ago, and not in a box of cheap wood that a bullet would go through like paper.
My hand pulls back from her mouth as gunfire continues to roar. "We’ll move when there’s a break in the shooting.”
To her credit, there’s a calmness in her eyes. She gives me a single nod, pulls me back down towards her by my tie, and gives me a short but fierce kiss. “For luck.”
The cracks of each shot are spaced and evened out. I start counting the shots, and when there is the briefest of lulls, I push open the confession booth door and drag Lydia out behind me, ducking against the nearby wall as bullets rake overhead.
“There she is! Red dress!” One of the gunmen bellows.
Gunfire concentrates towards our position, and I pull back as the wall corner explodes in a shower of dust and powderized brick.
Through the chaos, I spot Anastasio ducking beneath the pews. He waits for a few moments and then rises up, firing his weapon.
“Come on, you bastards!” He laughs as he shoots. “Come and die!”
“Anastasio!” I shout at him when he ducks down again. “How many?”
He looks over at me and holds up five fingers. Then, he rises and fires off another few rounds, and drops a finger, grinning.
Four gunmen, enough to start a massacre but not enough that we can’t fucking overwhelm them. Easy enough. I’ve survived worse odds.
Dust and smoke are making it hard to see in the chaos. The smell of blood hangs heavy in the air. People move like ghosts through the chaos, and I turn back towards Lydia for just a second.
“Stay behind me,” I tell her calmly. “And don’t poke your head out for any reason.”
She nods and gives my hand a squeeze.
Then, we start to move.
There’s a man at the font of holy water with a rifle. I raise my gun as he moves to reload, and fire two rounds. The first one hits him in the shoulder, and the second round sends his head snapping back.
A burst of hurried Greek comes from the entrance, followed quickly by another storm of bullets. I duck just in time, hearing the bullets cracking like whips in the air over my head.
When another lull in the shooting comes, I rise up and fire at the second shooter. He goes down like a sack of wet potatoes. Three down, two to go.
Anastasio slides next to me by the pews, and behind him, I see a flash of yellow. It takes me a heartbeat to recognize Dante’s little wife. Her eyes are open in surprise, and her mouth is twisted in a permanent silent scream.
But I’m having a hard time finding sympathy for her, not after the part she played in making Lydia feel unwanted. I suppose I’ll have to reckon that with God later.
That’s when I see Father Valdoni.
He's spilled across the altar steps with the front of his vestments gone wet with blood, one arm still reaching for the congregation that he spent forty years leading. He once pressed a cold cloth to my split lip when I was nine, and never once asked why it was split.
In a different world, he would’ve been the man to marry Lydia to me. Grief tries to climb up my throat and I force myself to swallow it back. There’s a time and place for that.
“We need to take one of these bastards alive,” I tell Anastasio. “Make him talk.”
A ragged and broken shriek from a woman rises up behind me, and I see Sal take three rounds in the chest before he can get a shot off. She falls to her knees and cradles his head in her lap, begging him not to leave her alone in the world while he bleeds in his good Sunday suit.
Anger unfurls in my chest, and I yank Anastasio close. “Fuck making him talk, we’re going to make him hurt.”
“With fucking pleasure.”
I turn towards Lydia to tell her to come with me outside, but find that she’s scrambling on her hands and knees towards Elena.
“Lydia! No!” I lunge just in time and pull her back as a burst of gunfire impacts the ground where she’d been a second ago.
Lydia pulls against my hand. "Nico, we have to get her!"
"Not yet!" The word comes out savage with the fear surging under the surface. "Not until I know you’re safe."
"Nico—" Her voice climbs as if to argue, but then she shrieks. "Look out!"
I turn and see a man raise his gun at her head.
There’s no time for me to get a shot off. Without thinking, I shove Lydia to the ground and leap forward to cover her body against mine just as another roar of thunder sounds behind me. A red-hot sledgehammer slams into my shoulder, and pain spiders out in a spray of blood and bone.
For half a second, the world is nothing but sound and shove. The impact throws me into her. Then the pain comes–white-hot and complete. It swallows the entire left side of my body and I rage at how close I had come to fucking up and letting someone hurt Lydia.
The rage fuels me enough that I turn and fire my gun at him until the trigger clicks empty with every pull.
I move forward, pick up his rifle, and point it at the final shooter. But he suddenly crumples under his own weight like a marionette with its strings cut. Anastasio is on him in an instant, stepping on his hand and prying the gun out of his fingers.
I stand up, wincing.
Blood drips down from my arm, pitter-pattering steadily on the floor. I push the pain to the back of my head until it’s nothing but a dull throb aching in the background. My feet move me like a man possessed towards the man held underneath Anastasio’s boot.
This bastard dared to walk into church and aim his gun at my wife.
"Nico, you’re hurt." Lydia’s voice sounds like it’s a thousand miles away.
“I’ll be alright,” I say without turning around.
I look down at the gunman, and there’s no mistaking the crown tattoo on his forearm, or the Greek letters underneath the crown.
He’s a Diamandis hitman.
"The furnace room." I say to Anastasio. "We’re going to teach him some fucking manners."
I turn to tell Lydia that she should stay here, but the words die out in my throat.
There’s blood on her hands, and it takes me a second to realize that it’s my own.
But she’s no longer concerned with me. Her arms are wrapped around Elena, gripping her daughter’s hand but staring off into the distance.
Sal’s blood still covers the front of her dress. She stammers something as tears fall from her eyes, and Lydia hugs her even tighter.
Once she’s walked Elena out of the front door, Lydia walks back in with anger flashing in her eyes.
"I'm coming with you."
"No you’re fucking not, Lydia. You don’t need to see this.”
“Elena’s husband died because of this man.” Her chin lifts. “He and God knows how many others died because of me. I’m going to look the man who did it in the face when you end his life.”
“Lydia…”
“Don’t you Lydia me right now, Nico.” She steps in closer and cuts me off. “You said I’m your wife, right? Then as your wife, as the Don’s wife, I have every fucking right to see everything my husband does.”
The breath I take pulls the wound in my shoulder wider, but I don’t care. In that moment, Lydia is the most beautiful fucking thing I’ve seen in this world. She looks like a vengeful goddess with blood drying on her exposed skin.
I nod.
"Then follow," I tell her. "And don’t look away.”
The furnace room hasn't changed one bit since I was a child with skinned knees. The dead boiler won’t be running for a few more months, and a single caged light bulb throws weak yellow light over everything.
Anastasio has the gunman knelt down on the floor while Benito and Dante are taking turns beating his face into a beautiful shade of purple and red.
Ezio nods at me when I walk in and raises an eyebrow when he sees Lydia following. But he has the good graces to keep his fucking mouth shut right now.
The gunman lifts his head when I wave Benito and Dante away. His eyes are barely open from the ruin of what used to be a face. But he maintains his poise, refusing to break even though I’m sure he can taste his death in the air.
I kneel down in front of him.
"You come into a church on a day of holiness." My voice is dead even. "You spilled blood in its walls, and murdered a priest in his vestments."
He turns his head and spits. “Don’t pretend like you’re a man of God, Don Nico.”
“You’re right,” I say. “I’m no man of God.”
I look back at Ezio and then at the bag of sidewalk ice that the church keeps down here for the winter. He understands immediately, and hauls over the bag to me.
I rip it open, grab a handful, and press it viciously into his open eye. He shrieks in pain, the scream echoing up and down the walls. Anastasio’s hands clamp down around his shoulders as he thrashes and buckles.
But he doesn’t pass out, which is the entire point.
"Let’s start with something simple,” I say calmly. “Your name."
"Stavros," he gasps. "Manolakis.”
As expected, a fucking Greek. I grind the salt into his wound, and he screams again.
“Thanasis sent you?”
“Don Thanasis,” he corrects me. “And yeah. He did.” Even so close to death, the man is loyal to a fault. In another life, he would’ve made a good D’Ambrosio soldier.
Unfortunately for him, this isn’t that life.
“Why?”
“Why do you fucking think?” His lips peel back from bloodied teeth. “You put a ring that belongs to the Don’s daughter on a cheap common whore.”
He takes his single eye off me and looks at Lydia as he speaks, voice straining with every tortured breath.
“He wanted to send a fucking message.” He looks back. “Kill as many as we could, and bring her back, dead or alive.”
“Dead or alive?” My hand closes around his throat and squeezes, enough to make his breath hurt but not enough that he can’t talk anymore.
“That’s right.” He smiles through a mouthful of blood. “We bring the whore back dead, and the Don will turn her skin into a new fucking pair of boots. We bring her back alive, and he’ll put her to work on her back until either she’s paid him back for his troubles, or she’s worn out for good.”
My hand starts to squeeze, crushing his windpipe underneath the vise-like grip. My heart pounds at my ears at the man’s confession. Deep down, I know that he’s saying whatever he wants to say to get a rise out of me.
But I also know that Thanasis Diamandis has no fucking morals, and there’s a very real chance that this bastard is telling me the truth.
His face turns purple, and he starts to struggle. Suddenly, I let him go. My hands are shaking from blood loss. The pain in my shoulder is starting to spread.
Stavros drags in long ragged breaths, and looks at me with a smirk. “What’s wrong, D’Ambrosio? Can’t finish your own party?”
“Your life isn’t in my hands, Stavros.”
He looks at me in confusion as I turn to glance at Lydia standing at the foot of the stairs with her arms at her side.
“It’s in hers.”
I rise back up, fighting the lightheadedness that’s swirling around my ears, and undo my tie to wrap it around my shoulder. The blood loss slows and I can think for a moment.
Slowly, I walk over to Lydia. Her face is still but her hands are balled into shaking fists. She doesn’t step back as I approach, and stands just a little taller.
I lift her chin with two bloodied fingers, and my thumb moves along her cheek, leaving a smear of myself on her skin.
"This man came to hurt you in every way that a man can hurt a woman." I look into her eyes. “So it is up to you to pass judgment on what is to be done with him. Say the word, piccola."
She looks at me while blood drains out of me with each slowing heartbeat.
The yellow light continues to swing. Overhead, I can make out the distinct sound of sirens, and I have no idea if they’re ambulance or police.
None of it matters, though. They all march to the beat of my drum in this part of Long Island.
And I march to the beat of my wife’s.
Her eyes break from mine, and rest for a moment on my bloody shoulder, then she looks at Stavros and the crown tattoo on his arm. A shapeless anger passes through her face, and I know her answer even before she nods.
“You have to say the words, piccola.”
For a moment, I think that she won’t. This isn’t something that she can ever walk back from. Once she says those words, she’ll have truly become one of us.
I’ve learned at the age of nine that the distinction between the one passing the order and the one that does the killing barely exists, especially when you can’t leave the room without the terrible deed being done.
But it’s one thing to kill without a choice, and another to kill in righteous vengeance.
“He dies.” Her voice is calm, even, and regal.
Savage satisfaction uncoils itself in my heart, and I plant a gentle kiss on her unblemished cheek before I walk back to Stavros.
The gun is heavy in my hand as I press the barrel against Stavros’ head. “I’ll send your hands back to your Don and let him know that this means war.”
I don’t bother waiting for his response before I pull the trigger.