25. Nico
NICO
The Mercedes takes the coast road too fast, tires cutting through gravel on the shoulder, and I have the phone against my ear before we've cleared the gate.
"Anastasio. Now."
"Boss."
"Bianca Carpenter, Brooklyn Presbyterian, ICU or wherever they've got her. I want two men on that floor before she's out of triage. Nobody talks to her, nobody photographs her, nobody from the NYPD gets near that room without my say. You understand me?"
"Already moving."
"Call Dr. Renna. I want a second opinion sitting next to whatever attending the hospital assigns, and I want it there before we land."
"On it."
I end the call and start the next one before Lydia has even turned her head.
Twenty minutes ago the phone rang on the nightstand while she was still curled into my chest, still soft from what we'd done, what we'd said.
Then her mother's name flashed on the screen, and everything in that room went cold at once.
Bianca found on the bathroom floor. Pills.
Frank out of the house when it happened, which tells me nothing and everything.
I remember the sound Lydia made when she read the message. One breath in, sharp, and then nothing. No scream, no crying. She was already reaching for her clothes before I'd finished reading it myself.
I call the house staff next, tell them to have the car ready, tell them I don't care that it's four in the morning.
Then Renna again, to confirm he's already airborne out of Naples.
Then a number I keep for nights exactly like this, a man who used to work hospital security in three boroughs before I hired him away, and I tell him what I need and he tells me it's already done, which is the only answer I want to hear from anybody tonight.
Lydia sits beside me now with both hands flat on her knees like she's holding herself down.
She hasn't said six words since the phone rang.
I watch her out of the corner of my eye while I talk, the whole ride, and she doesn't look at the driver or the road or me.
She looks straight ahead at nothing, her eyes fixed on some point past the windshield only she can see.
The car swings onto the airstrip access road and the jet is already lit up, stairs down, engine spooling.
I'm out before we've fully stopped, pulling her door open, and she moves slowly, stiff and unsteady, each step uncertain.
I put a hand at the small of her back and she doesn't lean into it and doesn't pull away either. She just goes where I put her.
At the top of the stairs she stops for one second, just one, both hands on the rail, and I think she might be sick. Then she keeps climbing.
We're in the air in eleven minutes.
I know because I check my watch when the wheels leave the ground. It’s an old habit. Eleven minutes from a phone call to altitude. I've moved men and money slower than I moved my wife tonight.
She's in the seat across from me with her knees pulled up, arms wrapped around them, staring at the window like there's something out there besides black sky.
I watch her for a second longer than I should and then go back to the phone, because right now that's the only thing I can actually do for her.
"Talk to me," I say to Anastasio.
"She's stable. Sedated. They pumped her stomach. Doctor says another twenty minutes and it goes different."
Twenty minutes. I don't say that number out loud.
"Frank?"
"Not at the hospital. Not answering his phone."
Of course he isn't.
"Find him anyway. I don't want him near her when she wakes up. If he shows, your men keep him in the hallway and call me before anything else happens."
"Understood."
I hang up and sit with it for a second. Bianca on a bathroom floor with pills in her system and her husband nowhere near enough to notice, and somewhere under the fact of that is the other fact, the one I learned less than a day ago over dinner with Lydia's hand shaking in mine.
Years of Frank selling that woman to men in uniform like she was a line item on a budget.
Years of it, and last night I told Lydia I would kill him for it and I meant it completely.
I make two more calls after that. One to my lawyer in New York, telling him to have papers ready that I'm not going to explain over the phone.
One to Anastasio again, telling him I want a full list of every officer who ever set foot in that house, going back as far as records go. He doesn't ask why. He never does.
By the time I put the phone down, my hand aches from how hard I've been gripping it.
I look up. Lydia hasn't moved.
"Piccola."
Nothing. Not even a flinch at the name.
I unbuckle and cross the small aisle and sit beside her instead, close enough that our knees touch.
She doesn't turn her head. Her eyes are dry, which is somehow worse than if she were crying.
Crying I'd know what to do with. This is something else, something that's gone past tears into a stillness I recognize from men right before they either break completely or shut down so hard nothing gets through anymore.
I've seen fear on her before. At the wedding. In my study, that first week, when she thought I might actually hurt her. Small flickers at the edges, gone as fast as they came, because she's spent her whole life learning to bury it before anyone can use it against her.
This isn't a flicker.
This is old, something she's been carrying since she was a kid in that house, listening for whatever sound meant her mother was in trouble again. Tonight just kicked the door open on all of it at once.
I don't touch her yet. I sit there and let her not talk, because some things you don't push, you wait out.
The plane levels off. Somewhere behind us Rome falls away and there's nothing outside the window but dark ocean and dark sky with no line between them.
I think about Capri. A day ago now, my mother told me I'd become him, Leo D'Ambrosio in a better suit, his blood in me winning out no matter what I told myself. I told myself she was wrong. I still think she was wrong, but I'd be lying if I said the question didn't follow me onto this plane.
Leo never protected anything in his life. He collected people, money, territory, and when they stopped being useful, he put them in the ground or worse. He would never have gotten on this plane. He wouldn't have sat with someone's silence instead of demanding she speak.
I look at the woman beside me, silent, white around the mouth, holding herself together because there's nobody else doing it for her right now, and I understand something I didn't have words for on Capri.
Protecting somebody and destroying somebody can use the same hands.
What scared me on Capri was thinking that made them the same thing.
Sitting here, I know the difference is who you're doing it for.
I'm doing this for her.
"Lydia."
She blinks, slow, like she's coming up from somewhere deep.
"What," she says. Flat. Not a question really.
"We'll be on the ground in six hours. Anastasio has men at the hospital already."
"Okay."
That's all. Okay. Not are they sure, not what did the doctor say, not why wasn't he home, none of the things I'd expect from her on an ordinary night, and that absence tells me more than anything she could have said.
I reach over and take her hand off her knee, and she lets me, fingers cold and unmoving in mine.
"You don't have to talk," I say. "I'm not asking you to."
Her jaw works. For a second I think something's going to come loose in her, some crack finally opening, but it doesn't. She just nods, once, and looks back at the window.
I could fill the silence. I could tell her what I know about overdoses, survival rates, facts that sound like comfort but are really just noise to keep from sitting still with something ugly. I don't. She doesn't need information from me right now. She needs to not be handled.
So I stay quiet with her instead, and after a while, maybe twenty minutes, maybe longer, I feel her shift.
She unfolds her legs. Turns toward me. And then she's against my side, her head under my chin, one hand fisted in my shirt like she's checking I'm actually solid, actually here.
I put my arm around her, and she doesn't cry, still.
But her whole body has gone from rigid to something closer to collapse, all her weight coming into me at once like she's been holding it up by herself for hours and just ran out.
I don't say anything. I put my hand flat against the back of her head and hold her there.
Outside the window the dark keeps going by at five hundred miles an hour.
Somewhere below us is the ocean, and ahead of us New York, and in it a man who did this to his own wife for years and thought no one would ever make him answer for it.
He's wrong.
I sit with Lydia's weight against my chest, her breath finally slowing into something that might, eventually, be sleep, and I go over it once more, calm now, no adrenaline left in it, just the plain fact of the thing.
Frank doesn't survive this.
This is a decision, made somewhere between the bathroom floor in Brooklyn and this seat on this plane.
It has nothing to do with feeling better, or proving anything to her, to my mother, or to my father's ghost still sitting somewhere behind my eyes.
It's settled now. Final. There's nothing left to argue about.
Lydia's hand tightens in my shirt even in whatever half-sleep she's fallen into, like some part of her is still bracing for the next thing to go wrong.
I hold her tighter and let her.
Six hours to New York. Six hours until I find out if her mother lives, until I stand in a hospital hallway and look at the man responsible for putting her there.
I already know what happens after that.