DARIO
TWENTY-SIX
Getting into Marco’s compound is not the hard part.
It’s still dark, and I’ve been inside it enough times to know which camera angles the guards have stopped watching carefully.
The patrol routes have drifted from their original intervals in the way all patrol routes drift when nothing bad has happened for a long time, and complacency settles in like sediment.
The perimeter has soft spots that I’ve mapped over the years and never had reason to use.
Tonight I have reason.
The hard part is knowing what waits at the end of this and choosing to go toward it anyway. I’ve been making that choice since Marco decided I’m his enemy.
He’s finally right about that.
Maybe he’s been right about that all along.
Marco’s bedroom is on the second floor, east side, overlooking the garden. Shit placement for the man’s bedroom, from a security perspective.
The window has old hardware—single-pane, original latch, the window of a man whose security lives at the perimeter, not inside his walls. I’m through it in thirty seconds. The room smells like old wood and something medicinal.
Marco’s health is something he’s never let me attend. He outsources his personal doctoring. I asked him about it once, but he shut me down with, “It’s better this way.”
The medicinal smell is camphor of some kind, with an undercurrent of death. I don’t know if he knows it’s coming.
But he doesn’t know it’s here.
The floor doesn’t squeak as I creep to his bed. He wakes when I sit on the edge. His hand goes immediately for whatever is under the mattress. I have his wrist before he finds it, and in my other hand, my knife.
“Marco.”
He feels the blade at his throat and goes very still.
His eyes find my face. He’s afraid—genuinely, underneath the layers—but Marco has been performing composure since before I was born.
He does it now with the reflexive skill of a man for whom the performance has become indistinguishable from the man himself.
“Dario.” Raspy. Needs water.
“You sent Ed and your guards to kill me tonight.” I let him feel the blade. “You think I’ve gone soft. Is my blade soft, Marco?”
“No.”
“No,” I agree. I lean back slightly—not removing the pressure, just settling in, because there’s a conversation to have first. I don’t know whether his answers will make a difference in the verdict. But I can be reasonable.
I’m not feeling particularly reasonable this morning.
“When my father died, and you took over the organization, I didn’t argue. I went back to medical school because I knew that was what he would have wanted. Do you know why he wanted me to become a doctor instead of a don?”
He swallows, adding pressure to the blade. “Everyone wants a doctor for a son.”
I shake my head. “He didn’t want me running things because he knew I had too much of my mother in me.”
His jaw sets.
“You remember my mother, don’t you, Marco?
Angela Scarpetti, before she married. The assassin.
The sociopath. Or psychopath, depends on the doctor’s diagnosis at the time.
” I shrug. “She was the woman who helped my father build everything he had—silently, invisibly, unless you knew exactly where to look and how to listen. She made him who he was. Her ruthlessness, her patience, her absolute willingness to act while he deliberated. The one smart people feared.” I look at him.
“Including you. Even as you wanted her.”
“She was a beautiful woman, Dario. I won’t apologize for wanting her.”
“All you ever saw was a pretty face and a powerful name from the old country.” I pause. “That’s why she turned you down. My father was wise enough to understand her utility, even when his pride resented it. He saw what she was, and he worked with it. You only ever saw the surface.”
But his eyes flash in anger. “I saw who she was. I wanted her for that. The package was pleasing, but the contents… that was the value.”
He’s just mimicking what I said. He doesn’t believe it. I remember how he was in those days, blatantly checking her out while my father was on his deathbed. Those were not the looks of a man with true admiration. He must think I was too distracted to notice.
I noticed.
I press the blade closer. “By all rights, I should be running this organization. We both know it. His blood built it. Her blood built it. Tell me why I shouldn’t cut your throat right now and take what was always supposed to be mine.”
He calculates. I watch him do it—running through his available options, looking for the angle that might work, the information that might buy him something. He lands on something. I can see the moment he decides.
“Renzo is my son.”
I hold still, keep my reaction internal.
Then I start to smile. Slowly. My voice dips low and soft and vicious. “Nice fucking try.”
“You think I’m lying? I’ll take a blood test—”
“Right. So I leave to get my kit for your blood, and you escape? You’re not as sneaky as you think you are, or I’m not as dumb as you wish I fucking was—”
“Fine. Kill me, be done with it. But you’ll always wonder.”
I laugh. “My mother got pregnant with Renzo when the family was in Rome. I know this because I was old enough to notice when she suffered morning sickness that ran all day, and I was too young to go anywhere unsupervised, and my father was too busy to take me. I spent the entire summer in an apartment with shoddy air conditioning and a mother who couldn’t stop throwing up.
” I look at him. “It was a formative memory.”
“We had an affair before you left for Rome, Dario.”
He’s really trying to sell this bullshit.
It’d be impressive if it weren’t such crap.
“Before Italy, we were in London and Paris and Salzburg and Minsk and a handful of other cities, conducting business. Then Mom wanted to come to Italy to visit with family. You, on the other hand, were ordered to hold down the fort for collections here and check in with my father every few days. I know this because he had you on speakerphone, and I was usually screwing around in his office when I wasn’t with Mom.
Do you want to try a new angle on that stupid lie? ”
Marco goes pale, and his mouth forms a horizontal line of frustration and stubborn dignity. “Get on with it.”
I look at him for a long moment. “Tonight, you terrorized the two people I care about most in the world. You must have had an inkling that this would go wrong because you were smart enough to leave Renzo alone in prison. I called him on my way here to check in. Or did you forget about him until you thought you could use him to save your neck?”
“Fucking do it, Dario. I’m done talking to you.”
He forgot about Renzo until he was desperate enough to grasp at straws.
Pathetic. “A knife is too good for you.” I withdraw it.
“So I’m going to let the feds do their job.
They’ll be here in five minutes. I called them too.
Gave them enough to keep you in prison for the rest of your life, which by the smell in here, won’t be long.
What is it? Cancer? MS? Something else?”
“Go to hell.”
I shrug. “You first.”
“I should have taken you out years ago.”
“Yeah, that seems likely.”
“Taking off before your Fed buddies get here? Coward.”
I stand. “Should make for an interesting morning, don’t you think? Have fun trying to talk your way out of things with them. They’re usually pretty dense, so you might have better luck.” I head back for the window.
Behind me is the unmistakable sound of a shifting mattress.
I spin.
The gun is raised, and I throw the knife without a thought. The handle barely even jiggles when it strikes true.
He doesn’t get a shot off. His mind goes to where a dying man’s mind goes when he knows the end is nigh. Marco leans back against the headboard and reaches for the handle to yank it out.
I’m on him before he can, and I swat his hand. “Don’t touch it. You’ll bleed out faster.”
His mouth gapes a few times like a fish out of water. Breathy sounds that aren’t words come out.
“It didn’t have to be this way. You chose every step of it—from the taped window in my apartment to tonight.” I look at him. “And I never called the Feds. I wanted to see what you’d do if I said that. What exactly was the plan—kill me while law enforcement came through the gate?”
More breathy sounds.
“You got sloppy, Marco. Comfortable. It made you stupid.” I pick up the gun from the floor. “Time for old blood in this organization. My mother’s legacy, the way it always should have been. Tell the devil I’ll be sending more his way soon.”
I don’t look back. I don’t need to.
The drive home is twenty-three minutes. The city runs at its before-dawn frequency—thin traffic, open streets. I drive through it, and I think about my mother, who would have done Marco and had breakfast.
My father would have said some pretty words first, something solemn probably, then had breakfast. He was the sentimental one.
Can’t imagine wasting pretty words on Marco. Even in my own mind. I pick up bagels, lox, and all the accompaniments before heading home.
My father wanted me to build a practice and help out with the organization when I had the time. My mother wanted me to shoot first, ask questions never.
I have a few calls to make to the old guard. Dons I’ve known my whole life, some still involved, others still involved but only tangentially. “Joe, long time no—”
“Dario, since when do you use fucking pleasantries? At six in the morning? The fuck’s going on?”
“I was trying something.” Onto business. “Marco’s dead. I’m taking over.”
The old man goes quiet. “You did him?”
They’re allies of a sort, so it’s a tricky question. “He forced my hand. Attacked my family.”
“Why did he do something stupid like that?”
“He thought I was going soft. He was wrong. Wanted to take us out. He failed.”
Joe goes quiet again. “Your mom woulda been proud.”
I don’t know why, but that strikes something in my core. “Yeah. I think she would have.”
“You get things settled. We’ll have dinner.”
“I’ll call then.” We hang up, and I make the same call four more times. All but Giovanni is on board. That’s fine. He’ll roll over when he sees I’m in with everyone else. He isn’t one to buck a trend.
It’s funny. I never used to think about things like legacy and family. I did my job, had some kicks, and came home. That was my life before Lena and Opal. I think about whether the life I’m building now is the right one.
Yes. Without a doubt.
I long to get back to them. Strange feeling. But a good one, I think.
They went through hell tonight. So they get bagels this morning. And anything else they want. Beyond that, I have a lot of restructuring to do. I wonder what Lena will say when I tell her what’s happening. I drive faster.
Angela Scarpetti was the only mother I ever knew. Didn’t have much contact with the rest of the family, so I know the concept of aunts and grandmothers, but they were never in my life. Mom wasn’t the sentimental type.
But she loved her sons with the complete, fierce, undemonstrative love of someone who shows affection through action rather than expression.
She made sure we were fed and educated, made sure we understood the world we were living in and were prepared for it.
She never pretended it was anything other than what it was.
She told me something once, when I was fourteen and asking why she did what she did, because I understood the urge, but I needed to know I wasn’t broken for it.
Mom sat me down and said that someone has to.
There are bad people in the world, and they make it worse.
People like her and me were here to make it better, and I was good at it, so I should embrace who I was.
“Don’t feel guilty for being able to see people for who they are.
Feel good that you can easily remove the bad ones. Not everyone can.”
“You mean Dad?”
She smirked. “Yes. I mean your father. He’s one of the good ones, Dar. We have to protect him and people like him.”
Lena is one of the good ones. So is Opal.
Though admittedly, when she told Ed she was glad he hurt, I saw a little of myself in her. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
Nah. It’s a good thing.
That’s what’s ahead of me now. Good things. All because of the ladies in my apartment.
I don’t know whether I would have ever made the move on Marco before Lena and Opal. I was content with my life, as content as someone like me ever is, anyway. They’ve changed everything.
For the better.