Ricardo
Chapter Thirty Four
The waiting room feels different when we return.
Dante is still unconscious. He is still pale beneath hospital sheets, surrounded by machines, with a wound in his body that should never have been there.
But he is alive.
He made it through surgery.
The sentence has been repeating in my head since the doctor said it.
He is alive.
My son is alive.
Now someone has to answer for the fact that he almost was not.
Julia stands beside me, quiet. My jacket is still around her shoulders. Her face is washed clean, but her eyes are swollen, and there is a hollowed-out look to her that makes me want to take her home, bundle her up, and put her into bed. Keep her somewhere safe until she can sleep without fear.
But safety will mean nothing while Harrison Winthrop breathes comfortably.
Mario watches me from across the waiting room.
He knows.
He knew me when I was a boy in Naples and learned too early that certain debts are paid with blood. He knew me when I became a father before I became a man. He knew me when I had to choose between grief and rage so often that rage became easier because at least it gave my hands something to do.
He knows exactly what is moving through me now.
So does Julia.
Her hand touches my wrist.
“Ricardo.”
I look at her.
Her voice is soft, but her eyes are clear. Too clear for a woman who should be sleeping, shaking, crying, doing anything except trying to save me from myself.
“Whatever you’re thinking,” she says, “you have to be careful.”
I lift my hand to her cheek. “Don't you worry about that.”
“I'm serious,” she says. “Harrison isn’t just anybody.”
“No,” I say. “He is the man who did this.”
“He’s a Winthrop.”
“I'm aware.”
“But you're not thinking rationally,” she says. “You're thinking of going after the man who shot your son. But he's not just anyone. The Winthrops are political royalty. Harrison’s father was a senator. Now he’s a top aide to the president. His grandfather was vice president. Their family has judges, donors, governors, ambassadors. They’re one step down from the Kennedys.”
The waiting room is silent around us.
“If you go at Harrison, you might end up paying for it.” She swallows. “You think Dante didn't want to?”
My gaze sharpens at his name.
“The night he came to get me in Connecticut, he wanted to do exactly what you're thinking of. But I convinced him not to.”
“Maybe that was a mistake.”
Immediately there's hurt in her eyes, and I regret my words.
“Harrison will pay,” I finally say.
Mario steps forward. “Julia is right.”
I turn my head toward him, and narrow my eyes.
“He is the reason my son is in the hospital.”
“Whatever you are thinking of doing to Harrison,” he says, “will blow back on you.”
“You think I care?”
“No,” Mario says. “But the people around you do.”
The words hit me exactly where he intended them to.
For one second, I have no answer.
My eyes move before I can stop them.
To Julia, standing across from me in clothes that are not hers, my jacket around her shoulders, still carrying the shock of my son’s blood on her hands.
To Victoria, pale but steady beside Mario, one hand resting over the child she carries.
To Matteo and Tomasso, who look too young and too hard beneath hospital lights.
To Lorenzo, Diego, Edoardo, Alessio.
To the door Dante lies behind.
The people around me.
My family.
My son, who may wake up to a new war because I could not wait long enough to choose the correct battlefield.
That is the part that slows my rage.
It does not soften it. Nothing in me softens.
But it changes shape. Narrows.
Diego pushes away from the wall, his face stripped of its usual charm.
“Mario’s right,” he says. “We can’t just go around putting hands on politicians here.”
My gaze cuts to him.
He lifts one shoulder, but there is no humor in it.
“If this were back in Italy, different story.
A family like theirs would still be powerful, but we would have power to match, and information.
We would know the church they pray in, the cousin who drinks too much, the judge they paid, the mistress they hide, the banker who smiles at dinner and drowns in debt.
“Here?” Diego says. “We have money. We have reach. We have people. But we have been in the United States full time for only a couple of years. We do not have enough roots yet to pull at a family like the Winthrops without pulling the rug out from under our own feet.”
Lorenzo nods once. “Their power is old here. Public and protected.”
I see the truth in those words. That is the problem.
The truth is standing in front of me, wearing a borrowed sweater and trembling beneath my jacket, telling me the man I want to destroy is wrapped in a flag, a family name, and generations of carefully polished influence.
I look at her.
“You are asking me to do nothing.”
“No.” Her voice breaks. “I would never ask that. Not after what he did to Dante. I’m asking you to be smarter than he thinks you are.”
Julia holds my gaze through tears and exhaustion and fear.
“He thinks men like you are violence first,” she says. “He thinks because he grew up around power, he understands all of it. He doesn’t. But if you give him the version he expects, he’ll know how to use it.”
Mario looks at her with approval.
I stare at Julia and feel, beneath the fury, something colder and more dangerous begin to settle.
She is right. Every word.
Harrison expects outrage. A threat. A hand around his throat in some private room. Something he can turn into a story about savages with money and foreign names and a poor political heir targeted by criminals because of a woman’s unstable accusation.
He expects me to write the story for him.
I will not.
Lorenzo says, “We need leverage.”
“And evidence,” Matteo says.
“And a shield,” Diego says. “Someone who can stand against the Winthrops.”
A shield.
My thoughts shift.
Political royalty.
Judges. Donors. Governors. Presidents. Vice presidents.
Old power answers old power.
And if we do not have enough of it here yet, then we use someone who does.
Julia’s hand catches mine.
“Ricardo.”
I look down at her.
Fear for me is written plainly across her face now.
“I heard you,” I say.
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
Mario studies me. “Then tell me what you’re thinking.”
I look at my brother.
“No,” I say. “We cannot move on Harrison the way I want to.”
Diego exhales quietly, as if he expected the fight to take longer.
I turn my hand beneath Julia’s and hold onto her fingers.
“We cannot touch the Winthrops directly. We don't have enough influence or power here for that.”
Mario’s eyes narrow slightly.
“But we know someone who does.”
My house is quiet.
The front hall is lit. The staff has been sent away except for the people I trust closest to the family. Julia is upstairs in my room. She showered for a long time, standing beneath the water until I gently guided her out.
I helped her into clean clothes and put her in my bed. Then I lay beside her until exhaustion finally dragged her under.
Even asleep, she looked tense. Curled on her side, one hand tucked beneath her cheek. Hair damp against the pillow, face pale, eyes swollen.
I stayed until her breathing evened out.
Then I came downstairs to my study.
Now the men are here.
Mario stands near the fireplace, still in the shirt and trousers from the gala, his tuxedo jacket long gone.
Lorenzo is beside the bookshelves with a glass of water.
Diego sits in one of the leather chairs, elbows on his knees, hands clasped loosely in front of him.
Matteo is near the window. Tomasso beside him.
Edoardo and Alessio stand closer to the door.
My brothers.
My nephews.
My son’s cousins.
Every one of them carrying the same things inside them because we're all built the same.
Rage.
Fear.
The need to move.
Dante is still at the hospital. Alive but sedated. Watched by our people unbeknownst to the hospital.
It is still not enough.
Nothing will be enough until Harrison Winthrop is on his knees.
“Harrison sent men into Julia’s apartment,” I start.
“We believe that, yes,” Mario says.
My son is in a hospital bed with a bullet wound through his body because Harrison Winthrop decided Julia was property he could retrieve. He sent men into her home. Into the one place she had made for herself after escaping him. Dante walked into that apartment instead of me and nearly died for it.
I look at Mario. “Luca Conti left us a message months ago.”
His expression changes almost imperceptibly.
“On Emilio Bellandi’s body,” I say.
Diego’s gaze lifts.
Lorenzo exhales once through his nose.
Tomasso looks from me to Mario, while Edoardo’s jaw shifts as if he has already heard enough to understand where this is going.
I continue anyway.
“I let Luca walk once. Blood for blood.” My voice hardens. “He basically admitted that Victoria’s attempted kidnapping was on him. Bellandi walked because Luca allowed it and Victoria almost paid for that with her life.”
Mario’s face goes cold at the reminder. We all remember very well what Bellandi did to Victoria after escaping Luca’s wrath.When Mario had refused to stand next to Bellandi as an ally, Bellandi didn’t come at Mario directly.
Instead, he planted fake news articles to make Victoria doubt Mario, to make her believe the worst of him: that he had killed his own wife.
Then, when she discovered she was pregnant, the Bellandis used her vulnerability against her, luring her to the park, where they tried to kidnap and kill her.The only reason they failed was that Mario had people watching her, and they reacted quickly enough to effect her rescue.
His grief for what nearly happened to her is not buried deeply.
It never has been. Not with her pregnant.
Not with everything he has already lost.
But I am past careful now.
“That is a debt,” I say.
Mario’s eyes cut to mine. “No.”
The word is quiet.
Final.
I stare at him.
“No?”
“He acknowledged blood,” Mario says. “Our blood.”
“He acknowledged responsibility.”
“He acknowledged family.”
“That is a convenient distinction.”
Mario steps away from the fireplace. “Blood does not hold debt over each other’s heads.”
My laugh has no humor in it. “That is beautiful. Put it on a fucking crest.”
His gaze sharpens, but he does not rise to my bait.
“If we go down that path,” he says, “we set a precedent. A bad one.”
“A precedent.” I nearly laugh in bitterness. “My son almost died tonight, and you're worried about precedent?”
“Yes, because it matters in this case.”
“Dante is in the hospital,” I say. “Unconscious. Cut open. Full of someone else’s blood because he lost too much of his own.
Those men were clearly there to take Julia back to Harrison.
Dante stopped them. Now Harrison sits in his ivory tower, hiding behind a name old enough to make police hesitate and politicians kneel, and you want to discuss precedent. ”
Mario’s voice lowers. “I want to keep us from handing Harrison the weapon he needs to turn this back on us.”
“He already sent weapons into her home.”
“And if we answer like fools, he wins twice.”
I curse ripely in Italian.
Lorenzo speaks. “I agree with Mario.”
“Of course, you do,” I spit out.
“If Luca has enough power to take down someone as politically protected as the Winthrops,” he continues, “then he is not someone we want as a potential enemy.”
I narrow my eyes at him.
He does not back down.
“By approaching him as if he owes us,” Lorenzo continues, “that is exactly what we would be doing. We would be telling him his first acknowledgment of blood between us can be converted into obligation whenever we choose.”
Diego leans back slightly. “And Luca Conti does not strike me as a man who enjoys being summoned by anyone’s accounting.”
“No,” Lorenzo says. “He does not.”
I know that.
Of course I know that.
I have met men like Luca before. Many.
A man does not rise to power as he did, hold it through a twelve-year prison sentence, and stay on top without understanding both blood and debt.
Blood for blood.
He chose those words.
Now we have to decide whether to answer them.
Matteo, who has been silent the entire time, speaks now. “Then why approach it like that?”
Mario looks at his son.
Matteo leans one shoulder against the window. He is young, but tonight has stripped whatever youth remained from his face. Dante is his cousin. His brother in every way that matters in this family. The blood spilled tonight belongs to all of them.
“You said it yourself, Papà. Blood does not hold debt over each other’s heads.” Matteo steps away from the glass. “He is our blood. And he has acknowledged that.”
Tomasso glances at his brother, then nods once. “That is true. Maybe not publicly, but enough for us.”
“On Bellandi’s body,” Diego says dryly.
Tomasso looks at him. “I did not say it was sentimental.”
Despite everything, something almost like laughter moves through the room.
But only for a moment.
Then Mario turns back toward the fireplace.
“He acknowledged blood,” Mario says. “But asking for his help would drag him into a political war.”
Edoardo speaks from near the door.
“He is a smart man.”
Mario looks over.
Edoardo’s posture is straight, his face composed, but his voice carries the same strain as everyone else’s. “Let him make that choice himself.”
Lorenzo’s gaze moves to his son.
There is pride there.
Edoardo adds, “We do not need to demand. We do not need to imply debt. We tell him what happened. We tell him who is involved. We tell him why his territory, his connections, his history in this country matter. Then we let him decide whether blood means anything past a note.”
Silence follows.
That is the first thing said tonight that does not make me want to put my fist through something.
Diego shifts in his chair. “You intended to respond to him.”
Mario’s jaw tightens.
Diego watches him carefully. “Just like you wanted, Lorenzo cleared the path. The channel is there. But you haven’t used it.”
“No,” Mario says. “I haven’t.”
The truth is that he has not answered Luca because answering Luca changes things. It pulls Atlantic City closer. It makes the old Naples truth harder to keep at arm’s length.
Mario has delayed because he is Mario. Because he measures every bridge before he steps on it.
Because he knows bridges can become roads.
And roads can become obligations.
I look at him.
“Well, now is the time.”