Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Luca
Iwake up like I've been pulled from water.
One moment nothing, the next everything, and I jackknife upright and the wound screams and I grab the bandaging at my chest through reflex and Renzo is there, standing at the foot of the bed, his face carrying an expression I have not seen on him in a long time.
"Where is she?"
Renzo holds my gaze. "She's dead."
The room goes very quiet.
I am off the bed before the pain has time to register.
I cross to him and I punch his jaw and he takes it, which tells me something.
I pull his gun from his holster and I have it cocked and level at his forehead and my hand is completely steady and the rage moving through my chest is not steady at all.
Renzo looks at me down the barrel.
"Eleven years," he says quietly. "You've laid hands on me only once in eleven years."
My jaw tightens.
The memory surfaces, nine years ago. A back room in a building that doesn't exist anymore, Renzo with his eyes blown wide and wrong and a dealer at his elbow, and the rage I had felt had been cold.
Renzo was an addict, we both couldn't afford proper rehabilitation for him and his addiction was making him steal from our then-struggling ammunition business.
He was getting beaten up for his debts and he stole anything and everything in sight for a piece of crack.
I did what I could with what I had. I had broken both his legs without raising my voice.
It had been brutal and cold-hearted and I have never pretended otherwise.
I had spent three years and more money than I will account for putting those legs right again.
Surgeons, rehabilitation, the best of everything, because Renzo had saved my life before I ever saved his and I had vowed, after the legs, never to touch him again.
I have kept that vow until approximately forty seconds ago.
"We don't kill women," I say. My voice is low. "We don't kill children. That is not what we are."
"The girl stabbed you," Renzo replies, in the tone of someone presenting evidence to a jury.
"You have a freshly stitched wound in your chest. You are the Don of Las Vegas.
Do you understand what happens to this territory, to our people, to every family that operates under our protection, if you die?
" He takes one step forward into the barrel.
"Do you understand how many factions want you gone?
How long the line is? You die and everything we have built comes apart and the people who pull it apart will not be gentle about it. "
The silence stretches. I punch my fist through the wall.
The plaster gives and the pain from the wound detonates up through my torso and I stand there breathing through it with my hand still on the wall and my eyes closed.
Renzo exhales.
"She isn't dead," he says.
I go very still.
"She's in her room."
I pull my hand from the wall. I turn to look at him. I set his gun down on the bedside table and I look at my hands and I look at him and I say, very quietly, "I want to see her."
Renzo laughs. It is a dry, humorless sound that contains within it a great deal of commentary that he is choosing not to deliver in words. He picks up his gun and holsters it and steps aside.
She is curled on her side when I push open her door.
Her dark hair loose across the pillow, her knees drawn up. Even from the doorway I can see that she has been crying. The particular tension around her eyes, the dried tracks on her face.
I stand in the doorway and look at her.
Renzo steps up beside me and speaks quietly. "She stabbed you and then she lost it. She started crying, begging us to call a doctor, and wouldn't stop until they told her you were breathing." He pauses. "I had her brought back here."
I recall her face in the moment before she drove the knife in. The fury in it, the desperation, the way her hand had been shaking even as it moved. I remember deciding, in that split second, not to step back.
"She cried?" I ask.
Renzo looks at me with the expression of a man who has seen everything and is still occasionally surprised. "Yes, Luca. She cried."
I cross to the bed and I slide my arms beneath her and I lift her.
"You have a freshly stitched stab wound," Renzo says from the doorway.
The wound makes its opinion known immediately, a deep concentrated burn that radiates outward with every movement. I breathe through it.
"I can't leave her here alone," I reply.
"She stabbed you."
"Did she?" I ask sarcastically.
Renzo is quiet for a moment. When he speaks again his voice has dropped into a threat "Don. I have no problem putting a bullet in her if it means keeping you intact. Say the word."
"There will be no need for that." I adjust her weight against my chest and she stirs slightly but doesn't wake.
"Tomorrow I'll look into Phillip myself. Ask around, find out why the man hasn't noticed his daughter missing for nearly a week. This will be over soon."
Renzo says nothing but he steps aside as I leave the room.
I lay her down on my bed and she settles into the sheets without waking and I stand over her for a moment and then I sit at the edge.
Her eyes open. Just barely halfway, the eyes of someone surfacing from a very deep sleep. They find my face and stay there and a tear tracks sideways across the bridge of her nose and she says, her voice barely a thread of sound, "You're okay."
I reach out and stroke her chin with my thumb.
She is already gone again before my hand leaves her face. The dark hair spread across my pillow. The two moles beneath her eye. The way she breathes, the distress of the last several hours smoothed out of her features by sleep.
I lean forward to look at her face.
What is it about Keller's child that makes me feel this brute weight of protection? I should kill her for daring escape, or at the very least punish her to ruffle Keller.
So why did I feel like I would snap the neck of any man who so much as looked at her wrong?
My gaze moves down to her chest and I see her nipples poking out and I look away.
I arranged it. All of it. The study, the call I half staged, the drawer I left fractionally open, the empty corridor, the compound that appeared unguarded.
I wanted to see how far she would go. I texted the guards before I sat down beside her and told them to pull back into the shadows, and I stood outside the gate in a car and watched her come over that crumbling wall, with a gun between her teeth.
I felt something that I did not immediately have a word for.
Renzo wanted her gone from the beginning.
There are easier ways to pressure Phillip, he argued.
Ways that don't involve keeping a woman in the building and everything that comes with that.
He had been right, professionally speaking.
He is usually right, professionally speaking.
But this stopped being about Phillip some time ago and I haven't said that out loud and I won't, not yet, possibly not ever.
She keeps reminding me of someone.
I stand, walk to the wardrobe, and open it.
It hangs between two dark suits, slightly incongruous, a small pale thing that has no business being there. I have moved it three times across three cities over ten years and it has come with me each time without me knowing why.
Two years ago I was newly positioned to take the title of the Don and the families who didn't want me to have it had moved early.
One of my own men, bought and turned, put something in my drink at a dinner in New York and I passed in the back of a car on the way back to the hotel and by some combination of will and adrenaline, I managed to get myself into a parking garage before I lost the ability to manage anything at all.
And then there was a car. And a woman.
I was in and out of consciousness throughout most of it.
I remember the door opening and I remember getting in and I remember the in between, her voice, her hands, something pressed against my chest, the bright temporary pain of the bullet coming out.
I heard sirens and I knew with the animal clarity of someone running entirely on instinct that I needed to move and I got out and got into the bushes and called Renzo and that was the last thing I remembered until I woke up in a hospital bed twenty hours later.
I took the bra from the car because I had nothing else. It was not a considered decision. I was barely conscious and she had been the only reason I was alive and I wanted something to remember her by and it was there.
I went back a year later. Bought the parking garage and the club nearby, and walked every street in that radius for three weeks. I never found her. I look at the bra hanging between my suits for a long moment.
Then I close the wardrobe and get into the bed beside Nathalie and lie on my back in the dark and look at the ceiling. She shifts in her sleep and her hand finds my arm and stays there.
I don't move it.