Chapter 16 Savannah
Chapter Sixteen: Savannah
They bury Aurelio on a Thursday in the compound courtyard, under a sky that can't decide between rain and sun, with thirty-armed men standing in rows and a hole in the ground that's too small for the man going into it.
I stand beside Emilio. His hand is on my lower back, and it hasn't moved since we walked out here, and I get the feeling it's not there for me. It's there because he needs the contact the way I need my bottle cap, which is in my left hand, pressed into my palm hard enough to leave a mark.
The courtyard has been cleared. Vehicles moved, equipment stored, the asphalt swept clean.
Someone put flowers on the low wall near the gate, white roses and something purple I don't know the name of.
The arrangement is careful and wrong in the way all funeral flowers are wrong. Too neat for the mess underneath.
Leone stands at the head of the grave in a black suit.
He's shaved. First time in weeks he's looked put-together, and the effort itself is a statement.
The man standing over this grave is not the sleep-deprived, red-eyed one who held Aurelio's hand three nights ago.
This is the Don. He's put the Don on the way you'd put on armor, piece by piece so the seams don't show.
He waits until the courtyard is still… until the wind dies down and the soldiers stop shuffling and the only sound is the flag on the perimeter wall snapping in the breeze.
"Aurelio Bonaccorso built this family from nothing.
" Leone's voice carries without force. He doesn't need volume.
The courtyard is holding its breath. "He was twenty-three years old when his father died, and he stood in a room full of men who were older and harder and meaner than he was, and he told them he was in charge.
Half of them laughed. The other half tried to kill him.
Within a year, every man in that room was either loyal to Aurelio or in the ground. "
A murmur from the soldiers as they bow their heads in respect. They've heard this story. It's foundational. The origin myth of the family they serve.
"He built the compound we're standing in. He built the alliances, the trade routes, the infrastructure. He built a reputation that kept this family safe for forty years, not because men feared him, but because men respected him. Fear fades, but respect endures. He taught me that."
Leone pauses and looks at the grave. His jaw moves once, a single flex, and that's the only crack. The only moment where the man beneath the Don surfaces.
"He also built secrets. He built rooms inside rooms, plans inside plans.
He played games with people more powerful than we knew existed, and he did it to protect us.
Whether he was right to do it that way, whether the secrets were necessary, whether the cost was worth the safety.
.." Leone stops and takes a breath. "That's not for me to judge.
He made the choices he made with the information he had, and he carried the weight of those choices until his body couldn't carry anything anymore. "
I watch the soldiers' faces. Some of them are old enough to have worked for Aurelio directly.
A man in the second row, mid-fifties, has tears running into his beard and isn't wiping them.
Another, younger, is staring at the grave with his fists at his sides, the knuckles white.
These men don't cry in public. The fact that they're doing it now says more about Aurelio than anything Leone could put into words.
"I'm not going to stand here and tell you he was a good man.
Good isn't a word that fits any of us, and he'd be the first to say so.
He was who he was. He was ruthless when ruthlessness was required and generous when generosity served the cause.
He loved this family the only way he knew how, which was by controlling everything in it, and the irony of a control freak dying in a bed where he couldn't control his own lungs is not lost on me. "
A chuckle ripples through the crowd.
"I will tell you what he was to me. He was the man who found a lost kid running the streets and saw something worth shaping.
He didn't ask if I wanted the life. He simply didn't give me a choice.
He told me to sit down, shut up, and learn, and I did, because Aurelio Bonaccorso was not a man you said no to.
" Leone's voice changes. The Don is still there, but the kid underneath it shows for a second.
The one who got pulled off the streets and turned into a leader.
"He taught me how to run an organization.
How to read people. How to make decisions that cost something and how live with that cost. He taught me that leadership isn't about being liked, it's about being right more often than you're wrong, and admitting it when you're wrong.
He wasn't perfect at that last part. Neither am I.
But I learned it from him, and I'll spend the rest of my life trying to be better at it than he was. "
Beside me, Emilio's hand presses harder against my back. I can feel the tension running through his arm, into his fingers, into me. He's holding himself together with the pressure.
"He told me three things in his last hours. He told me the family is mine now. He told me to open a folder in his desk. And he told me to keep every person in this compound safe, including the bartender who had the nerve to tell him the right thing when the rest of us couldn't."
My chest constricts. I don't look at anyone, so I stare at the grave.
"Aurelio is dead, but the family he built is not.
I intend to honor his legacy by protecting what he protected and fixing what he couldn't. Any man in this compound who doubts my ability to do that is welcome to voice that doubt to my face, in private, at any time.
" Leone looks up from the grave. His eyes move across the rows.
"Any man who acts on that doubt without coming to me first will answer to Carmelo. "
Nobody moves. Nobody breathes. Carmelo, standing at the back with his arms crossed, doesn't change expression. He doesn't need to do anything, the rumors of what he does for the Don behind closed doors is enough.
The Bonaccorso Butcher.
"If you want to pay your respects, the grave will be open until sundown. If you want a drink, the bar is open. Savannah will take care of you."
He steps back. Alexandra is there, at the edge of the group, and she goes to him.
Her hand on his arm. He doesn't acknowledge it publicly, but I see his body lean toward her half an inch, and that half inch is the most vulnerable thing I've seen him do since the night his hand shook when he closed Aurelio's eyes.
The soldiers file past the grave. One by one, they drop things in.
Coins, mostly. A few bullets. One man drops a playing card, the ace of spades, and Emilio sees it and makes a sound that's almost a laugh.
A story I'll hear later, probably in bed, probably while he's pretending not to be devastated.
Dahlia stands across the grave from us. Bam behind her.
She hasn't moved during the entire ceremony. When Leone asked her if she wanted to speak she shook her head. She’d said her goodbyes and the rest didn’t need to be public.
She doesn't drop anything in the grave, she just stands there after the soldiers have gone and she looks at the hole in the ground where her father is.
Bam's hand is on her shoulder, and neither of them speaks until she turns and buries her face in his broad chest, his hand dropping to rub circles on her back before slowly leading her back to the compound.
Claudio stands at the grave for a long time after the soldiers move on.
Charlotte beside him, her hand in his, her face doing the grieving his won't let him do.
He doesn't drop anything. He just looks.
Then he nods, once, the way I've seen him nod at people across rooms, the nod that says I see you, I acknowledge you, we're done.
He turns and walks away, and Charlotte goes with him without a backward glance.
Carmelo is last. He waits until everyone else has gone.
I'm still standing near the edge of the courtyard with Emilio because he hasn’t said his goodbyes yet, but we watch and we wait.
Carmelo stands over the pile of dirt and doesn't move for a long time.
Then he pulls his knife from his belt, the one he's always cleaning, the one he holds the way I hold my bottle cap.
He looks at it. Turns it over in his hand, once, twice, and then he sets it on the edge of the grave, blade down in the dirt, handle up.
He leaves it there.
He walks away without it, and the absence of the knife in his hand is so wrong that it takes me a second to understand what he did. He gave Aurelio the most important thing he owns. His anchor. His grounding object.
He left it in the dirt with a dead man because to him, Aurelio was worth the only thing in this world that he cared about.
I press the bottle cap into my palm and watch him go and I think about Gigi's funeral.
A church on Eastern Avenue with eleven people in the pews and a priest who mispronounced her name twice and a casket that was closed because I couldn't afford the open-casket option.
I stood in the front row with nobody beside me and nobody's hand on my back and a bottle cap in my pocket.
I didn't drop anything in Gigi's grave either. Not because I didn't have something to give. Because the thing I would have given her was myself, my whole self, every year I had left, and you can't drop a future into a hole in the ground.
Emilio's hand moves from my back to my hand. Our fingers lace together. He doesn't say anything as he looks down. We stand in the courtyard until the sun shifts and the shadows change and the soldiers are gone and it's just us and the grave and the knife standing upright in the dirt.