Chapter 16 Savannah #2
"Come on," he says. "I need a drink."
"The bar is open."
"Then let's go."
Dahlia comes to the bar at midnight.
The soldiers have been in and out all evening. I've poured more whiskey in the last six hours than I've poured in my entire life, and yet nobody's gotten loud and nobody's gotten sloppy. They drink and they sit and they leave.
The silence between them is the specific silence of men who lost their commander and haven't figured out what comes next.
Emilio had some drinks before he was called by Leone, and then he came back a couple hours later. He sat at the bar and told me about the folder. Leone opened it after the funeral, called Emilio, Claudio, and Carmelo to the war room, and what was inside changed the shape of everything.
Thirty years of intelligence. Names, structures, financial connections.
Something called the Silent, a shadow hierarchy that sits above the world.
Untouchable. You don't see it unless you look up, and nobody in this family ever looked up because they were too busy fighting at ground level.
Custodian families running the show for decades, using organizations like the Bonaccorsos and the Castillos as enforcement arms. Tools.
Hammers that didn't know the hand swinging them belonged to someone else.
An exchange between to someone called J.
Harrison. An arrangement between them, favors traded, information exchanged.
The Harrisons are apparently dismantling the corrupt parts of the Silent from the inside, and Aurelio was helping them.
From his deathbed, playing chess with a shadow government, while we sat in the bar drinking his Macallan and thinking the old man was just dying.
And a note at the bottom of the folder in Aurelio's handwriting: Kreiss was funding a new Westpoint. The building is going up on the eastern seaboard. Dahlia knows more than she's told you.
Emilio told me all of this sitting on his stool with a glass in his hand, and the look on his face was the look of a man realizing the house he grew up in was built on top of something he didn't know was there.
"We were a franchise," he said. "This whole time. The war, the territory, the Castillos, all of it. Orchestrated."
"Does that change what you did? What Aurelio built?"
"It changes what it meant."
"Does it though?" I poured him another. "The soldiers out there are grieving a real man. The protection he gave this compound was real. The people he kept safe, that was real. The framework above him doesn't undo the work below him."
He looked at me for a long time. Then he drank and said, "The basement's always bigger than the building with these people."
"Then we deal with the basement when we get there. Right now, we're on the ground floor and the ground floor needs whiskey."
He left an hour later to talk to Claudio. Something about security protocols and what to do with the information in the folder. I told him to go because the bar needed closing and because the conversation he needed to have with his brother wasn't a conversation that needed a bartender listening in.
So the bar is quiet when Dahlia walks in.
No Bam. First time I've seen her without him since she arrived, and the absence is noticeable because the man is basically a giant beside her. Somehow, without him, the room feels exposed.
She's changed out of the funeral clothes into jeans and a black shirt.
Her hair is still down. She looks ten years older than she did a week ago, and I recognize the compression because I watched it happen to my own face in the mirror after Gigi died.
Grief ages you fast. It squeezes the time out of your skin and puts it somewhere you can't reach.
She sits on her stool. The one she's claimed since that first night, directly across from me, and puts her elbows on the counter. Doesn't speak.
I pour without asking. Three fingers.
She drinks fast and sets the glass down, then taps the counter. I pour again.
We do this twice more before she talks. I don't rush it.
"My father had another child."
I set the bottle down. Not because the words surprise me. Because the weight behind them deserves a pause.
"A son," she says. "I heard whispers after Westpoint burned down.
People who knew things about my bloodline that he never told the family.
We have our own little community, Bam and I, and after we destroyed the academy, we did more digging on what the hell it was all about.
The people we contacted… they talked about a secondary branch of the Bonaccorso line. A male heir being monitored."
"Monitored by who?"
"By the people who ran Westpoint. The same people Kreiss was connected to.
The same people who are rebuilding the whole feeder academy operation.
" She picks up her glass and holds it without drinking.
"I don't know the son's name. I don't know where he is.
I don't know if he's aware of who his father was or if he's living some normal life somewhere wondering why his education was funded by a trust that doesn't make sense. From what we’ve pieced together, he has been head hunted by the Silent for something. What? We don’t know. "
"How long have you known?"
"A year, give or take a couple months."
"And you didn’t ask your dad?"
“It took me a long time because it was never the right time…” Her mouth forms a thin line. "I finally mentioned it to him on our last call.”
“What did he say?”
"Just that ‘I know’. Two words. He knew his son was out there, and he didn't tell anyone. Didn't act on it. Didn't try to pull the kid out of whatever he’s dealing with or warn him or do anything at all."
"Maybe he couldn't. Maybe the deal he made to protect this family included leaving the son alone."
"Maybe. Or maybe he was afraid of pulling on a thread that might unravel everything he'd spent decades building." She drinks. "Either way, the son exists. And the people rebuilding Westpoint knew about him before any of us did."
I think about this. A whole person out there, walking around with Aurelio's blood, probably positioned on a track by people who see human beings as assets.
I think about what it would feel like to find out your father was a mafia Don who knew you existed and chose to leave you in the hands of the people who were grooming you for something you didn't understand.
I think about Gigi, who raised me because my mother left and nobody else showed up. At least Gigi chose me… at least she stayed in my life on purpose.
Aurelio's son doesn't know he was chosen by anyone. He was placed.
"Are you going to tell Leone?" I ask.
"Tomorrow. He needs to hear it from me before Alexandra finds it in the files, and she will find it because that woman finds everything.
" Dahlia pushes the glass toward me and I refill it.
"Tonight I'm just drinking with the only person in this building who isn't going to give me a speech about duty and legacy and what my father would have wanted. "
"No speeches here. Bar policy."
"Good policy."
We drink until my head spins, and I need to sit for a bit.
"Savannah."
"Yeah."
"I told you first. Not Leone, not Claudio, not Emilio.
You." She looks at me and her eyes are red-rimmed and glassy.
"You're behind the bar and you don't bullshit me and you don't make me explain myself.
I sat down and you poured and you waited and you let me get there on my own.
I can't do that with the people I grew up with.
They need things from me. You just need me to sit on the stool and drink the whiskey. "
"That's what bartenders are for."
"It's more than that."
I know it is. I know it because Gigi was the same thing for the women in our neighborhood.
The ones who came into the bar after their shifts, after their fights, after their days, and sat on those stools and told her things they wouldn't tell their sisters.
The bartender is the confessor. Neutral ground.
The person who holds the secret and doesn't weaponize it.
"I'm not going to tell anyone," I say. "That's yours to share when you're ready."
"I'll be ready tomorrow."
"Then tomorrow."
She nods and finishes her drink.
"My father told me something, the night before he died.
He said he was proud of me for finding my own way and not caving when he pressured me.
He'd never said that before. Not once in twenty-six years.
" Her voice is calm, but her hands are shaking, just barely, a tremor in her fingers that she'd kill me for noticing.
"And I keep thinking about how you can spend your whole life waiting for someone to say one thing, and they finally say it, and it's too late for it to matter the way it should.
Because they're dying when they say it, and you can't tell if they mean it or if dying just made them generous. "
I don't have an answer for that. I'm not even sure one exists.
"Gigi told me she loved me every day," I say.
"Every single day. When I was eight and when I was sixteen and when I was twenty-two and holding her hand in hospice.
She said it so much it became background noise, and I didn't hear it properly until she was gone and the silence where it used to be was the loudest thing in my life. "
Dahlia looks at me. The bartender and the Don's daughter, standing across a polished counter in the middle of the night, both carrying love they got too late or took for granted.
"See ya later, Sav."
"Yeah, try to get some sleep."
She walks out. Her boots on the corridor floor, fading until the sound is gone and I'm alone.
I wipe the counter because my hands need a job. I cap the bottles. I push the stools in. I fold the rag and set it on the shelf, and then stand in the empty bar and press the bottle cap into my palm and think about secrets.
Aurelio's son. A whole person out there, made from the blood that ran through the veins of the man I just watched get buried.
I wonder what he’s like. If he’s like Aurelio, or if he’s like Dahlia. Do they share the same mother?
There’s so many thoughts rolling through my head, but only one sticks out to me. The sins of the father don't belong to the child, but the consequences sure as hell do.
With a sigh, I turn off the light and close the door before walking down the corridor to Emilio's room.
He's awake and sitting on the bed, phone in his hand, probably texting Claudio, probably still processing the folder, probably doing everything except sleeping because sleep requires a brain that's willing to shut up and Emilio's brain has never shut up for a single second in its entire existence.
"Dahlia was at the bar," I say, closing the door behind me.
"Yeah? What did she want?"
"To drink. And to tell me something." I pull off my shoes, climb into bed beside him. "She'll talk to Leone tomorrow. She's got things he needs to hear."
"About the folder? About Westpoint?"
"About a lot of things." I put my head on his chest. His arm comes around me, automatic and easy now. "She told me first because I'm the bartender and the bartender doesn't judge."
"You judge plenty."
"I judge silently. There's a difference."
His chest moves with the breath that's almost a laugh. His fingers trace my shoulder up and down and then across.
"Hey, asshole."
"Yes, vixen."
"Your family is insane."
"I'm aware."
"And I'm apparently part of it now. Leone basically said as much today, in front of the whole compound. The bartender who had the nerve to tell a dying man the truth."
“Yep, one of us now."
"You gonna lock me down now? Tie me to a bedpost and recite poetry to me so I don’t get spooked and disappear?”
He laughs. A real one. Quiet, tired, but whole, and I feel it move through his chest and into my cheek and down into the part of me that's been holding its breath since the funeral. “Vixen, you couldn’t run from me, even if you tried. This dick is too magical for you to pass up.”
“Oh, shut up, that is not true.”
“That’s not what your pussy says every time I destroy it.”
“Asshole.”
“You love me.” He chuckles and then stops. “Shit I—"
My breath sucks in and I freeze. He’s right. I do love him. “No, uh… you’re right.”
“Am I? You love me? Savannah Cole, the feisty, foul-mouthed bartender, loves a simple soul like me?”
My eyes roll back, “Yes. I love you, Emilio.”
He grips my chin and forces it up, capturing my mouth in a kiss. “You sure know how to distract a man from grieving.”
I smack his shoulder and then he bites my lip.
“For the record, I love you too and have every intention of making you my wife.”