19. — all the king’s men.
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Staten Island, New York
Salvatore, Gallo Estate
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Salvatore tried his best not to be annoyed at the scene unfolding down in his driveway just a few short hours after he’d laid out the new rules to Nico.
“It’s like they can’t fucking help themselves,” he muttered unhappily. “What, they can’t even be apart more than a few hours now? Absurd.”
Carina hummed where she stood beside him. “That’s love. First love is even worse. You remember what that felt like, don’t you? You don’t want to be apart; it hurts.”
As much as he hated to admit it, Carina hit the nail on head. Her hammer came down on him painfully.
She came to stand in front of Salvatore.
Tilting her head back to stare up at him, he had no choice but to meet her gaze instead of continue watching the scene playing out in the front courtyard of his home.
Her hand found his, and she pulled it to her stomach where his fingers splayed wide.
The tension in his shoulders eased enough that it didn’t ache just to stand there.
“Does that help?” she asked him.
Salvatore shrugged one shoulder. “Some.”
Down below, three distinct voices carried up to them.
“Hi, I’m Carmen,” came the youngest voice.
“Yeah, I know. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“You’re Frankie, right?”
“That’s what everybody calls me.”
“She might have heard that you really like soccer,” Nico informed, a smile in his tone, “and guess who just started soccer summer camp...”
“No way,” Frankie said.
“Yep. Mama wanted me to do ballet, but...not as fun.”
“Soccer’s not always fun, either.”
“Better than tutus. Nico said you’re really good.”
“Crazy good,” he corrected. “I said crazy good.”
“I do okay,” Frankie said about herself. Never too prideful, his daughter. Only if she had to make a point. “Do you wanna kick a ball around? I can put some pylon cones up for a makeshift net. I mean, I have a big net in the backyard but...”
Her voice trailed off. Salvatore bit his inner cheek, knowing why.
“Well, he’s clearly informed her of your new rules,” Carina intoned seriously.
“Before I even could,” Salvatore replied, grumbling.
“I mean, she wouldn’t talk to you, so...”
Like he needed the reminder.
“And she would need to know he’s not allowed past the driveway at the moment,” Carina added as if Salvatore required the information.
He fully believed, because Nico showed back up at the estate with his little sister, that the only reason Frankie had yet to leave for her penthouse as she’d promised was down in the courtyard.
She packed up her bedroom, other than a few things she planned to leave behind, and loaded her vehicle with the items to take.
Yet, she hadn’t left. Now, he knew why. They couldn’t play soccer at the penthouse.
He turned to check the time on the clock. It neared seven-thirty in the evening, and Nico had brought her home edging on two. He had dinner with his father, came out of it relatively unscathed, and made it back to the Gallo estate with his little sister in tow.
“I guess his dinner with Giorgio went well,” Salvatore said aloud.
“You could go down and ask him about it.”
“I don’t think that’s a great idea.”
“Why not?”
“Because I told him to keep my daughter as far away from his father as possible, and then he shows up five hours later with his little sister,” Salvatore said, sighing after it all.
“How do you think that’ll play with Giorgio when Carmen goes back talking about Frankie, and soccer, and her brother.
It’s like feeding live mice to caged snakes, for fuck’s sake. ”
“Sal.”
He sighed even louder.
“Sal.”
He didn’t look at Carina anymore, instead going back to the scene below.
Now, Frankie had found those big orange cones from the garage, and three soccer balls.
She carried two and kicked a third all the way to the two waiting across the courtyard.
Nico helped Carmen get the cones set up as Frankie arrived with the balls.
“Nico plays goalie,” Frankie said.
“Hey, that’s unfair.”
“You’re not a kicker, and she’s gotta practice.”
“Go easy on me,” Nico muttered back, shedding his staple black hoodie.
“Oh, we’ll be so easy. Don’t worry.”
“Lies,” Nico threw back. “All lies.”
Even the little one laughed at that.
It also didn’t escape his notice how to the two spoke to one another while a child remained nearby. No babe or obvious flirting that suggested they were more than friends. Nico had yet to hug Frankie. A feat, considering he couldn’t keep his hands off her on any other day of the week.
And the swearing. That was another thing. He’d yet to hear a single cuss.
“Maybe they should have Carmen between them every time they’re together,” he said to himself.
Carina scoffed, and her fingernails bit into the side of his jaw to turn his face so she could properly look at him again. “Do you hear yourself? You just went on about how him bringing Carmen here would practically bring Giorgio to our doorstep, Sal. I don’t think you know how you feel right now.”
Oh, no. He did. “Pissed,” he said.
Carina rolled her eyes. “Because she did stupid things with him? Because she won’t speak to you? Because, what? What else?”
All of that, and maybe more.
“Terrified,” he admitted, then.
Carina’s shoulders dropped. His hand found her stomach again, willing the baby growing and thriving there to give him some sense of comfort he couldn’t find on his own. All it really reminded him about, unfortunately, was just how much he now had to lose.
“I’ve felt like a dead man walking for so many years I forgot what it was like to truly live,” he confessed.
“Hey,” Carina whispered.
Salvatore couldn’t look at her. He couldn’t look away from his daughter; couldn’t take his hand off his unborn child. If he did, they might both be gone. That’s how it felt.
“Hey,” Carina told him, sharper the second time with fingernails hurting him that time to bring him back as she said, “tell me what you don’t want to say, Sal. Tell me.”
So, he did. He let it all out. If he kept it in, it might kill him long before Giorgio ever got the opportunity.
“He made me with a gun to my head and blood on my hands, Carina.” His words trembled but his body stayed stone.
Locking up into a place and time he could barely make sense of all those many, many years later.
“My father’s blood. It might as well have been.
It took half of his to make mine. I signed and sealed his execution because what the fuck was I going to do? ”
“Shh, shh,” she hushed.
Soft like a mother would. He knew she had that in her, even if she didn’t think so.
“What was I going to do?” Salvatore repeated. “She was sick. She was sick and he was d—”
His words cut off in a choke. He still couldn’t even say it.
Her fingernails eased up a bit.
Only then did a tear track down his cheek. The wet trickle made his jaw twitch from the force he pressed into his teeth.
“Mom and Dad, murdered in a home burglary gone wrong a week later. He killed Christopher when I tried to get my brothers the hell out of the city. Got Andre two months later, in a fucking drive-by just outside the graveyard. Delilah’s parents...”
“You don’t have to go through all this with me.”
Sal did need to, though. “I need to say it for me. The only goddamn one he didn’t take from me was her, because that was the deal.”
Made with the devil. Salvatore’s entire life from his mid-twenties had been owned by a man who used the tragedy of illness and loss to access anything he could ever want or need between Salvatore’s family’s connections and Delilah’s unlimited wealth.
Control. Power. Access to names, people, places, and things.
Salvatore became the personal fixer and middleman to a monster who never once, in his entire life, stopped being one.
“What was I gonna do?” he asked, jaw quivering now as Carina quickly wiped his second and third tear away. “She was sick. He was...It was me and a bullet. Every damn day.”
Blood on his hands. Owned by a man.
“I basically killed my father,” he mumbled. “And everyone else. Just for God to take them from me anyway.”
“Hey, hey,” Carina crooned.
When he didn’t respond to that, she turned quickly to shut the windows. She spun back to face him, getting up close and personal where all he could see were those green eyes of hers as she spoke.
“That’s not them down there,” she told him.
“What about when he finds out you’re pregnant?
Jesus Christ, he can’t even smell you in a room without staring at you.
The baby, one in. Those kids, another. All I’ve done to make us safe, for what?
” Sal shook his head, a sad sound escaping him.
“Unless what? I do it again. Turn myself back into that person I never wanted to be in the first place. Sink lower into the monster he turned me in—”
“Baby, three decades ago you were scared and broken, and he had you in that place.”
“It’s really the only option, isn’t it? At some point, I’ll have to kill him.”
Which meant so much more than just the action of ending Giorgio’s life.
“Jesus. I wanted to be a fucking defense attorney.”
It never mattered how many times he said it. It always came back to that for him. He’d wanted to be a lawyer and would’ve been if he hadn’t fallen in love with a girl and her paint-stained Birkin.
“I didn’t even want to be a made man,” he admitted.
“We’re gonna do what we have to fucking do,” Carina assured him. “Just like you had to do what you did thirty years ago. It’s not going to be like that this time around.”
He chose to believe her. He made himself believe it because the alternative wasn’t fathomable. He settled back into the present wishing his chest didn’t hurt from the way his muscles had been frozen. It took so much energy just to hold himself together when the sky felt like it started falling.
“Are you okay?” Carina asked him.
“No. Better.”
It was the best he could do.
“Well, the baby wants ice cream,” she said.
That earned her a chuckle. “The baby,” he returned playfully, “is the size of a cherry.”