Chapter 24
NICO
Dante hasn’t called me in since the back room.
I’ve been waiting since dawn. He didn’t summon me and wasn’t going to.
I came anyway.
I stop in the doorframe of his study with my hand on the wood. My stomach turns. Cold sweat at the back of my neck. The same dread I had walking in here as a kid the morning I broke Mama’s vase and Papa was working on a Bratva deal at the desk.
This time I broke worse.
Shame.
I’ve known the word since Moscow. I’ve been calling it other things for three years. My throat is tight. My hands are not steady and I’m not going to look at them.
I did a thing I can’t undo to a woman who deserved better, and my brother is sitting behind that door, and I’m going to stand in front of him and say so.
I go in.
He’s at the desk.
Signet ring on his right hand.
He looks up.
“You didn’t call me,” I say.
“I wanted to see if you’d come.”
He sets the pen down.
“Sit.”
“I’d rather stand.”
“All right.”
He folds his hands on the desk. Doesn’t look at the ring or the papers. Looks at me.
The Don is not in the chair this morning. My brother is in the chair.
“I told you in the back room what I did in Moscow,” I say. “I told you what I’ve been carrying. I told you who she is.”
“You did.”
“You didn’t ask why I didn’t come to you.”
“I didn’t ask in front of the family.”
A beat.
“I’m asking now.”
I look at the floor. The rug Papa bought in Tunisia the year before Mama died. The rug Dante kept.
I don’t get to look away.
I look up.
“I was afraid.”
Dante doesn’t move.
“Afraid he’d do what he said. Send men, find them, find her. That I’d lead him to her. Told myself I was protecting her. Told myself I was protecting you.”
I stop.
“I was protecting myself. I couldn’t go back in that room. So I lied. Three years.”
Don’t be sick.
“Broke my word to her on the floor of a concrete room. Broke my word to you in this study. That’s the answer.”
Dante doesn’t speak.
The signet ring turns once on his finger.
Then he says, quiet.
“You’re the bravest man I know, Niccolò. You’re also the most scared. I’ve always known both. I knew it the day Papa pressed Mama’s cufflinks into your hand and you didn’t drop them and you didn’t cry and you were nine years old.”
My throat closes.
He’s known since I was young. He watched me come back from Moscow hollow and he waited. He sat behind that desk and said nothing and he waited for me to come to him. Dante always waits. He gives his brothers room.
I came too late.
My eyes burn. I don’t let them go.
“You should have come to me three years ago. I would have killed him in Moscow. I’d be sitting at this desk with that on me instead of you sitting in that doorway with this on you.”
“I know.”
“Fix it.”
Two words.
The same words he said in the back room. Different register now. Brother. Not Don.
“How.”
“You don’t know how yet. You will. You’ll know when she lets you in the room with her. Until then you wait.”
He stands. Walks around the desk.
His hand goes to my shoulder. The grip Dante has been giving his brothers for years. Hand. Shoulder. Hold. Mean it.
He doesn’t shake.
He holds.
I want to go back to when I was small. When Mama died and Dante came into my room and sat with me without talking. He didn’t explain it or ask what I needed. He just came in and stayed.
I didn’t know how to be grateful for it then.
I know now.
I breathe.
“You’re not doing this alone. You weren’t doing it alone yesterday and you’re not doing it alone today. The family is with you. The mistake was thinking you had to carry it. You don’t make that mistake again.”
I nod.
I don’t trust my voice.
He holds my shoulder for one full breath more. Drops his hand.
“Go. Renzo’s in the hallway. Gia will find you in the corridor. Marco is already in the back room running the protocols. They’ve been waiting for you to come down.”
I walk out.
Renzo is in the hallway.
Back against the wall opposite Dante’s study door. Arms crossed. He hasn’t been pacing. He’s been here. He didn’t get this private with me in the back room because the back room wasn’t for this.
I close Dante’s study door behind me.
Renzo doesn’t move from the wall.
“You should have come to me.”
“I know.”
A beat.
“Don’t do it again.”
“I won’t.”
He pushes off the wall.
His right hand goes to the back of my neck. Two breaths.
He drops his hand.
He says, quieter:
“I held a thing back from you once. You don’t know what it is and I’m not telling you now. But I know what it costs to carry it. I know what it does to a man. I’m not going to pretend you should have known better. I’m telling you what I know. Don’t do it again.”
I look at him.
My older brother. The Santoro enforcer but it’s just Renzo to me my whole life.
He waits.
“I won’t,” I say. Steady this time.
He nods.
He walks past me toward the side hallway that leads to the kitchen.
He doesn’t look back.
Christ.
My eyes burn. I don’t let them go. My chest hurts. Same as when I was a boy and Mama died and I didn’t cry in front of Papa. I’m not doing it now either.
I keep walking.
Gia is in the corridor outside the back room.
She’s not in scrubs today.
She’s in jeans and the dove-gray sweater Mama was knitting for her the year Mama died. Her hair is down. Her eyes are red but dry.
She’s been waiting for me.
She doesn’t say finally or I told you so.
She says, quiet.
“I’m sorry, Nico.”
My chest seizes.
Nobody has been sorry for me about Moscow. Not for me. For the lie, yes. For the cost, yes. Not for the fact that I broke the promise.
I don’t speak.
I can’t.
She crosses to me. Puts her arms around me. Not the rigid sibling hug I’ve given her for years. Her arms full around my chest. Her cheek on my collarbone.
She says it against my chest, quiet.
“There you are.”
I let her.
I haven’t let her in three years.
My arms come up. Around her. Hold.
I close my eyes.
My eyes burn. I don’t let them go. Not in a hallway. Not where anyone can see me.
But I’m shaking. The smallest shake. Gia feels it.
She doesn’t shush me or tell me it’s going to be all right.
She holds. Dante’s hold. Papa’s hold.
I press my forehead into her hair. The smell of her shampoo. The smell of Mama’s sweater. Mama-and-sister at once. Grief. Years of it. Somebody knows. My chest eases a quarter inch.
I let myself stay there.
When I step back my throat is tight and my eyes are dry. Hers are not. She wipes her face with the cuff of the sweater.
She says, “I love you, Nico.”
She hasn’t said it to me in years.
“I love you too,” I say.
It’s the easiest thing I’ve said all morning.
She nods. Steps back.
“Marco is waiting. Go.”
I go.
Cassia is at the corner between the corridor and the back room hallway.
She doesn’t stop me or say anything.
She puts her hand briefly on my elbow as I pass. She walks past me toward the kitchen.
I keep walking.
The back room.
Marco at the comms station. Izzy at her laptop. The board has shifted since yesterday. New flags. New routes. New names. The protocols Dante set in motion are running.
Marco looks up.
“Casa Lucia is on full lockdown. Cassia closed intake. New badges installed at the gates. The reception position is the new man I vetted last week. Algiers property in lockdown too. Compound security doubled at every entrance.”
He doesn’t ask if I’m here to add to the orders.
He’s reporting.
I let him.
“Bratva movement?”
Izzy. “Two of Alexei’s known associates landed in Houston since yesterday. One more in Miami this morning. He’s moving people. We have eyes on all three. They haven’t moved toward us yet.”
“The Romanian. The leak.”
Marco. “Pulled in. Gia has her in the medical wing. Cassia’s coordinating the sister out of Naples. The shell is the same one that took Andrei Volin’s sister out. Clean.”
“The Moscow courier.”
“Already talked. He didn’t know what he was carrying. He carried it for cash. He gave us the wholesaler. Izzy is on the wholesaler.”
I nod.
“And Marco.”
“Yes.”
“There are files in my desk. Locked drawer. Three years old. Yelena gave them to me before she died. Names. Routes. Financials. Photographs. I haven’t opened the drawer in three years.”
Izzy looks up.
“I’m opening it tomorrow,” I say. “I’m bringing them down.”
She doesn’t say Christ.
She says, “Bring them all.”
“Tomorrow.”
She nods.
I look at Marco.
My youngest brother. Capo only months in. Sleeves rolled. The ink on his knuckles fresh.
He grew up while I wasn’t looking.
Pride. Underneath the shame.
“I am so proud of you, sorry I haven’t been saying it more,” I say.
Marco’s mouth moves a quarter inch.
“I learned from you.”
I have to look at the floor.
I don’t stay for more.
I walk out.
The gallery. The corridor. The back stairs. The hallway to my room.
I walk past Mila’s hallway. Her door is at the end. My chest pulls toward it before my feet do — low, involuntary, a hunger I’ve stopped pretending I don’t have. My jaw goes tight. I turn at the corner before her door.
I do not approach.
I walk to my own room.
The bedroom door is open.
It’s been open every night for weeks.
The small door on the far wall of my bedroom, the one painted the same color as the wall, is closed.
The painting space.
I stop in front of it.
I put my hand on the wood.
I’ve been in this room many times. I haven’t opened this door for another person in three years.
Mama saw it when she was alive. The alcove was hers.
The easel and the brushes were hers. The painting space is the room she taught me to paint in.
She’s the only other person who’s stood inside that door.
I open it.
I don’t go in.
I look in.
The easel. The canvas turned to the wall. The brushes in their jars. The paint gone hard in tubes. The high window facing north. The smell of linseed and turpentine I haven’t refreshed in three years.
Yelena’s face. Turned to the wall.
I painted her from memory after I came home. The only way I knew how to keep my promise the year I broke it. I didn’t tell anyone. Not Dante. Not Giada. The canvas has been facing the wall in this house for three years and I’m the only person who has ever seen it.
I close the door.
I don’t lock it.
I walk back through my bedroom to the desk on the gallery side.
I sit.
I have to show her.
The painting is hers. I painted Yelena. Mila has the right to look at her sister’s face before she decides what to do with me.
I’ll go to her door in the morning. One Russian sentence through the wood. She’ll open it or she won’t.
If she opens it, I’ll take her here.
If she doesn’t, the door stays open from this day until I’m dead.
I don’t get to want anything until she does.