Chapter 15 Emilio
Chapter Fifteen: Emilio
The nurse calls at three in the morning.
I'm in bed with Savannah and her back is against my chest, my arm over her waist, her breathing slow and even.
The phone buzzes on the nightstand and I grab it before the second vibration because I've been sleeping with one hand on it, waiting for this call, hoping it wouldn't come and knowing it would.
"His oxygen dropped again," the nurse says. Her voice is professional, but tired. "He's stable, but Dr. Mancini thinks you should come. All of you."
"How long?"
"Hours. Maybe less."
I hang up. Savannah stirs against me. "What is it?"
"Aurelio doesn’t have much time left."
She goes still, then her hand finds mine on her stomach and squeezes once, hard, and lets go. "Go."
I get dressed in the dark. Jeans, t-shirt, no shoes because the corridor is twenty feet and I'm not thinking about shoes.
I'm thinking about a man in a bed three floors up who taught me how to tie a tie when I was fifteen and told me I'd amount to something if I could learn to shut my mouth for more than thirty seconds at a time.
I never learned.
The corridor is dark and quiet. I knock on Claudio's door twice, the pattern we've used since we were kids, two short knocks meaning get up, it's important.
The door opens before I finish the second knock.
He's dressed. He's been sleeping in his clothes.
Of course he has. Claudio doesn't get caught unprepared for anything, including the death of the man who basically raised us.
"I know," he says. "Charlotte answered the phone."
Charlotte appears behind him. She's in a sweater and her face is puffy from sleep and she puts her hand on Claudio's back and says nothing. She doesn't need to. Claudio reaches behind himself without looking and takes her hand and holds it for a few seconds and then lets go.
"I’ll be back when it’s over," he tells her.
"I'll be in the kitchen," she says. "When it's over."
We find Leone in the hallway outside the private wing.
He's been here for a while. I can tell because there's a coffee cup on the floor beside the wall and it's empty and cold.
He's leaning against the concrete with his arms crossed and his head back and his eyes closed, and when he hears us coming he opens them and the look on his face is one I've never seen on Leone Costa.
He's scared.
Not of what's in that room. Of what comes after. Of the world without the man who built the one he's been holding together with tape and willpower for the past year.
"He's been asking for you two," Leone says. "Dahlia is inside." He looks at me and Claudio. "He's lucid. The doctor gave him something for the pain, but he wanted to be awake. He was very specific about that."
"Carmelo?" I ask.
"Inside, sitting and waiting. He's been in there since midnight."
Of course. Carmelo doesn't wait to be summoned. He goes where the threat is, and right now the threat is a clock running out, and he's been standing guard over it in the dark for three hours because that's how Carmelo says the things he'll never say out loud. It’s how he shows he cares.
Leone pushes off the wall. "Let's go."
The room smells wrong.
Not bad. Wrong. The smell of a body shutting down. Organs letting go one by one while the machines argue with the process and lose.
Aurelio is in his bed and the rails are up, a blanket tucked around him.
The monitors are beeping but the rhythm is different from last time I was here, slower, with gaps between the beeps that are longer than they should be.
The IV drip runs and the oxygen machine hisses and the room is full of equipment keeping a man alive who has decided it’s time to go.
He's smaller. Every time I see him he's smaller. The Aurelio I met at fifteen was a big man, broad shoulders, thick hands, a voice that filled rooms without trying. The Aurelio in this bed has hands I can see through, skin so thin the veins look painted on, and his cheeks are gaunt.
Carmelo is standing in the corner. Arms crossed, back against the wall, face showing nothing.
He's been crying. His knife isn't in his hands.
That's how I know it's bad. Carmelo's knife is his anchor the way Savannah's bottle cap is hers, and the fact that he's put it away means he's decided that the thing happening in this room deserves his full attention, no distractions, no grounding objects.
Just him and the man in the bed and whatever's between them.
We all file in and stand around his bed as his eyes open. They track across the room, face to face, and despite everything those eyes are the same. The mind behind them is fully online. The Don is dying but he hasn't left yet.
"All of you," he rasps. I can hear the effort it takes to push air through his throat. "Good."
Dahlia sits next to him and takes his hand. Her face is still blank, but her hands are shaking and Aurelio sees it and his fingers close around hers.
"You look like your mother," he says.
"You said that already."
"I'll say it until I can't." He looks at her face the way a man looks at a painting he's seeing for the last time, memorizing the details he won't get another chance to study.
"I wasted time being angry at you for leaving.
Stupid, stupid old man. You left because you needed to live, and I was too proud to see it. "
"Papa."
"Let me talk. I don't have time for interruptions.
" A wet, rattling cough, deep in his chest escapes.
The monitor spikes and then settles. "I built this family on discipline and control, and I applied those same principles to my daughter, and it was wrong.
You are not an empire. You are not a territory.
You are my child, and I treated you like an asset, and I'm sorry. "
Dahlia's face breaks, but not all at once. A crack runs through the blank expression and underneath is the girl who left and hasn't stopped being angry and hasn't stopped loving him. She never stopped needing him.
She leans forward and puts her forehead against his hand. She doesn't cry.
Aurelio looks at Leone. "Come here."
Leone steps forward. He moves like a man walking through water, each step an effort, and I realize this is the hardest thing Leone has ever done.
Not the war. Not the trafficking. Not the Castillo alliance or the attack on the compound or any of the hundred operational crises he's managed in the last year. Walking to this bed. That's the one.
"You're ready," Aurelio says.
"I'm not."
"Nobody's ever ready. I wasn't ready when my father died.
I was twenty-three and I sat in a room just like this and he told me I was ready, and I lied and said yes, sir, and then I walked out and threw up in the corridor.
" He almost smiles. "You won't throw up.
You're better than I was. You've been running this family for a year already, and everyone knows it, including me. "
"I was running it for you."
"You were running it for them." Aurelio lifts his chin toward the rest of us.
Pain crosses his face and gets pushed down, because Aurelio Bonaccorso does not acknowledge pain in front of his people.
"For Claudio and Emilio. For Alexandra. For the soldiers and the families and the people who depend on this organization to keep them safe.
That's who you run it for. Not me. I'm done. My watch is over."
Leone takes his other hand. The Don's fingers wrap around Leone's the way they did in the war room weeks ago, the grip that surprised me then with its strength. It surprises me now with how weak it is.
"The Custodian families," Aurelio says, and the room temperature drops.
"Kreiss was a node. You know this. What you don't know is how deep it goes.
I've kept things from you, Leone. Things I thought I had time to explain.
" He coughs again, longer this time. The monitor screams for two seconds before settling back to its slow, gapped rhythm.
"The folder in my desk. Bottom drawer, left side.
The key is in my watch case. It has names.
Real names. The families who sit above the networks, above the handlers, above the Kreisses of the world.
I gathered them over thirty years of off the record deals and trades.
I met with one of them, the Harrison brother, you can trust them, they want the same as we do.
I want you to have the information because I was never brave enough to act on them. "
"Why not?"
"Because they're bigger than us. Bigger than the Castillos. Bigger than both families combined. Now that Kreiss is dead, pen a letter to him in my name, tell him it’s over and we’re even.
Take the information and make our family stronger.
" His eyes find the ceiling. "That's my failure.
Don't inherit it. Open the folder. Read the names. And do what I couldn't."
Leone nods. He doesn't trust himself to speak. I can see it, the way his throat works, the swallow he can't control.
Aurelio turns to Claudio. "Come."
Claudio steps forward, as Leone steps back, his face giving away nothing of what is happening inside him.
But I'm his twin and I can feel what's happening behind that wall because the twin frequency is roaring and what's coming through it is a sound I've never felt from my brother.
A low, constant vibration that isn't anger or sadness but both, fused together, a grief that Claudio will process silently over weeks and months and years.
"You're the thinker," Aurelio says to him.
"You always were. Even as a boy. Emilio talked and you watched. Emilio ran and you calculated the distance. You will be Leone’s right hand and also his conscience, and you need to be both, always.
Don't let the cold become all of you. Your woman knows this. Listen to her."
"Yes, sir."
"And protect your brother. He'll need it. He doesn't know it yet, but he'll need it."