Dont you dare （His pov）
Chapter 18
LORENZO
The door clicks shut , the second everyone left ,the sound of this room becoming something it wasn't thirty seconds ago.
I am still standing exactly where I stood before . Weight even. Hands loose at my sides. Tie straight. Everything about me saying I don't give a fuck .Wich I don't .
Through the glass I see Kingsley shift his weight in the corridor. That small, deliberate repositioning of a man who has worked for my father long enough to know exactly what a closed door in this building means and who has made the professional decision to become suddenly, completely deaf to it.
I don't blame him.
My father stands with his back to me.
One second. Two. Three.
He doesn't move. Only his shoulders I watch them, the slight controlled rise and fall, the breathing of a man who is holding something inside himself that is running out of room.
Something that has been expanding since the moment the Ashwells stood up from that table.
Something that is bigger now than the space he is trying to keep it in.
In all this years I have heard my father truly lose control in public exactly twice.
The first time I was nine years old.
The second time I would rather not think about.
He turns around.
"Che cazzo hai fatto. "
It doesn't come out loud. Not yet. It comes out like something tearing ,rough and uncontrolled, in a register I almost don't recognize on him, because Vito Calloway does not tear. Vito Calloway decides he constructs. The world moves at the pace he sets for it, and everyone else adjusts accordingly.
But this this is not construction.
?What the hell did you do."He moves toward me. Not fast. But with an energy that seems to empty the room ahead of him, that pulls the air out of the space between us, as though the simple fact of him moving is already a statement about what comes next.
"Padre"
"No" He cuts the word out of the air between us. His hand comes up, not to strike, not yet, just to silence, a gesture I have known since childhood, one that my body still responds to in a way I have never been able to fully train away.
"Non mi interrompere. Non osare."
He stops. Less than two meters away. And now I can see it up close what I could only read from across the boardroom table.
The vein at his temple. The way his jaw muscles work.
His hands opening and closing at his sides opening and closing, a rhythm I have never seen from him before, small and uncontrolled and completely out of place on a man whose every movement is usually a deliberate sentence.
My father does not have nervous habits.
My father does not have uncontrolled movements.
And yet.
"Otto mesi." His voice cracks slightly on the words.
He shakes his head, and in that gesture there is something I find even harder to process than the anger ,something that looks almost like disbelief. As though he had thought he knew me. As though he had thought he had me.
"Otto mesi di lavoro, di pazienza, di..."
"The Ashwell numbers don't hold." I keep my voice level. It costs me more than it should. "Meridian is overextended. Their Q2 projections are built on..."
"Enough"The word detonates out of him.
I don't flinch. I force myself not to flinch, force my nervous system into stillness through the kind of willpower you only develop after years of practice but inside, something happens that I cannot entirely stop.
Something old and deep that straightens at that sound like a reflex.
Like a body that remembers, even when the mind is trying to forget.
He is screaming.
My father is screaming
Not the measured, cold version of his disapproval that I know.
Not the glacial silence that is somehow worse than any sound.
This is something else entirely raw, uncontrolled, the language spilling between English and Italian so fast he seems barely aware of it, and that is what frightens me more than the volume.
Not how loud it is. But the fact that Vito Calloway has momentarily lost control over which language is coming out of him.
"Non sei degno..."
He stops. Breathes. Steps closer.
"Credevo di averti insegnato meglio di così..."
"You sat at that table" his voice climbs, breaks slightly, climbs again, "and you humiliated me. In front of people whose trust I have spent countless hours earning"
"I was protecting us."
Silence.
One second just one of complete silence.
And in that second I see something move through his face that I cannot name. Something beneath the anger. Something darker and more specific, something that has nothing to do with the Ashwells or the contract or the eight months of preparation I derailed this afternoon.
He steps closer and drops his voice to something just above a whisper, and somehow that is worse than all the screaming.
"Non dimenticare quello che ho fatto per te."
There it is.
I don't know exactly when I understood that my father doesn't give ,he invests. That every gesture, every favour, every outstretched hand has terms attached that aren't revealed until it's too late to decline them. He has never once given me anything without keeping the receipt.
And the receipt he is holding up right now is the heaviest one in the pile.
A year ago.
I'm not going to think about it.Not here, not in this room, not with him standing this close using it as a weapon the way he always does, the way he promised in a corridor that smelled of something clinical and cold, his hand on my shoulder, his voice the steadiest it has ever been he promised ,
it would never be spoken of again.
"Let me handle it. 'He had said to me that day "No one will ever know. I'll take care of it." He had said .He did something wich I never wanted him to do and yet I have to carry the burden.every day .every night .
He had taken care of it.
The way he takes care of everything with money, with pressure, with the quiet weight of a name that bends situations without ever needing to raise its voice. And afterward he had looked at me with the expression of someone presenting a gift and said: "now we have a deal, my son"
A deal I have been servicing ever since.
"I never asked you to! " The words are at the back of my throat, the place where I keep the things I will never actually say to him. "You did it for yourself. Because it would have touched you too. Because it always comes back to you. You are the reason it is the way it is. You. Not me."
"I was trying to..."The blow lands before I finish the sentence.
No warning. No escalation. No final look, no pause, no moment that would have allowed me to prepare just his hand moving, fast and decisive, and then the impact.
His signet ring connects with my cheekbone and my head snaps sideways and for one long, strange, overexposed second the room goes completely white.
Not black.
White.
The window. The city. The ashtray on the desk. All of it bleached out for a moment, existing somewhere outside of me, while my body processes what just happened without waiting for my permission.
And in that white space in the fraction of a second before everything floods back in something moves through me that isn't pain.
Pain comes later. This is something else.
Something that lives underneath the pain, underneath the shock, something that has been there for years in a locked room I try not to open, something quiet and very old and fluent in a language I learned before I had words for it.
This is not the first time.
I turn my head back.
Slowly. Deliberately. Every degree of it a choice.
He is standing in front of me, breathing.
His chest rises and falls. His hair for the first time in years, possibly the first time in my memory is marginally, almost imperceptibly, out of place.
One strand. That's all. One strand that has worked loose while everything else remains perfectly constructed.
And he is looking at me.
Not with regret. Not with the particular discomfort of a man who has surprised himself.
With assessment
He is calculating. Measuring how deep it landed. Whether it was enough. What it produced.
Something ignites in my chest.
In my head I close the distance between us.
In my head I take him by the front of his perfectly pressed jacket the jacket that has not even wrinkled, the jacket that looks exactly as it did when he walked into the Ashwell meeting three hours ago and I give back exactly what he gave.
And I watch the shock move through his face.
But my hands do not move.
I stand there. The right side of my face is burning. My jaw aches with every heartbeat. The thing in my chest is pressing against every wall I have built for it, hot and specific and so complete that for a single second I am genuinely not certain I can hold it.
I hold it.
"Hai capito?" His voice has returned to its normal register. Measured. Even. Like a switch thrown.
He straightens the cufflink on his left sleeve one small, precise movement, a man tidying himself after something entirely routine.
"Lorenzo. Hai capito?"
I look at him.
I look at the man who taught me how to walk into a room. Who taught me that silence is a weapon and control is the only currency that lasts. Who taught me what it means to hold your face still while everything underneath it is not still at all.
I nod.
Once.
"Understood." My voice comes from somewhere I didn't know I had. Completely level. Completely even. "You'll excuse me. I have somewhere to be."
I don't wait for his answer.
I push through the glass door Kingsley is three metres away, motionless, a man carved from professional discretion, and I walk past him without a word and I take the stairs because the lift will take too long and I need to be moving, I need the floors passing under me,
I need the physical fact of distance.
Lascia fare a me, Lorenzo.
Floor eight.
Don't forget what I did for you.
Floor four.
We have a deal, my son
Floor two.
Ground.
Marcus comes through the lobby toward me before I have fully cleared the stairwell door.
He moves with the alert efficiency of someone who has been waiting and has already run through several scenarios and then he stops. His eyes go to my face. Specifically to my right cheekbone, which is by now doing what it's going to keep doing regardless of my feelings about it.
He doesn't say anything.
That is why Marcus has lasted.
"I need a car." The words come out flat. I hear them from a slight distance, the way you hear your own voice when something else is taking up most of your processing.
"Sir." He steps toward me. "What happened?"
"Marcus." I swallow. The ache in my jaw sharpens with the movement. "Not now. I need a car."
He looks at me. One long second. Then he nods the nods.
I move past him to the reception desk. The woman behind it looks up, registers my face, makes an immediate professional decision about the fascinating content of her monitor. I reach behind the counter toward the key hooks.
"Sir, you can't just take a car key"
Marcus raises one hand. Barely.
Making her stop.
Black Mercedes. Hook nine.
I take it.
The underground garage is cool and grey. My footsteps echo on the concrete. The low hum of the ventilation system blends with the silence. Rows of cars stand in the particular stillness of things that are only ever waiting.
I find the Mercedes and rip the door open.
Jacket off. Tossed onto the passenger seat. I claw at my tie, pulling it loose, suffocating, fighting for air.
Then I freeze.
Both hands grip the wheel.
In the cool silence of the garage, the throb in my cheekbone finally catches up to me. It's sharp, precise, and honest. I let it ache. It is the only thing in the last hour I don't have to make a decision about.
I hate you.
It isn't loud. It isn't dramatic. It's just flat, final, and so completely true it sounds calm. It's the kind of hatred that has been living quietly in the dark corners where you shove things when you have nowhere else to put them, just waiting for a moment exactly like this.
My hands slam into the steering wheel. Once. Again.
I hit it until my palms burn, until the dull thuds bounce off the concrete walls and dissolve into nothing. Finally, I drop my head back against the headrest. Staring at the car ceiling, I let the right side of my face pulse its own steady, agonizing time.
3 minutes
I have exactly 3 minutes before I need to be somewhere. Before I need to produce the version of myself that walks into a room like he owns it, that holds a drink like he has nothing to prove, that looks at the world from a particular angle and makes it look like it costs him nothing.
I am very good at this.
I close my eyes.one last deep breath and start the car .