Chapter 37
CALIGULA
The next morning, Damiano avoids everyone as much as possible, while I find myself gravitating toward the kitchen. Rosa works around me without comment, mixing flour and butter for something that subsequently requires a lot of pummeling and kneading.
Damiano appears once early on to get himself a coffee, but doesn’t speak to either of us. I can’t help watching him from the corner of my eye. If I wasn’t so angry, I might worry about him. Actually, even though I’m angry, I’m still worried about him. But not enough to reach out. Not yet.
What mercy did he ever show me, after all?
Mercy. I’ve never thought so much about that concept as I have until recently, since declaring its importance to my Loyalists.
And as I watch Rosa’s hands rhythmically work the dough, I find myself thinking about something my father said to me shortly before he died.
We were talking about the Family. About how important it is to live up to the name, but not lose who we are.
“Your grandfather is a prime example,” he’d said tiredly from his hospital bed. We were alone in that hospital room. He’d been drifting in and out of consciousness for the last few days, and the medical staff kept telling me that it was going to be soon.
“You think he’s lost who he is?” I asked.
“No,” he murmured. “He has not lived up to our name.”
It puzzled me at the time. I only realized what he meant after his death, when I was looking at our Family motto, engraved into the brass plate around the painting of the medieval town where we originated: Clementia dignis, gladius indignis.
Mercy to the worthy, the sword to the unworthy.
Our Family name, Clemenza, means mercy. Clemency. Nonno Lou never showed any of that. He preferred the sword.
So I think about that as Dami goes here and there all morning. He seems to be making calls. Making plans. And he doesn’t want my help, I guess, or he’d ask for it.
I can’t force my anger away. But I can’t pretend it’s the only thing I feel, either.
He comes out midmorning to silently show me Sebastiano Conti’s reply, which finally came. My heart drops as soon as I see the text: Don’t leave your house. No reassurance. Not even a clear threat. And no suggestion that things will improve.
Dami walks off again and I contemplate calling Finch D’Amato, offering the information I have about Big Gee’s plans in return for their assistance.
But something in me still shies away from the idea of asking my grandfather’s killer for help.
I haven’t texted Finch since the night Nick Fontana came over demanding to see me.
And I’m pretty sure Luca D’Amato is very well aware of Big Gee’s plans. His intelligence network seems…extensive.
Sammy spends most of the day in his room on the phone—I know because I occasionally hear his laughter echoing from down the corridor.
I’m glad for him. Things seem to be working out with Ricky Benedetti.
And Rosa and Vito are extra-sweet with each other today.
Once I even catch him kissing her cheek, although she flaps him away, intent on her cooking.
She seemed pleased, though.
She doesn’t seem pleased when she looks at me. And even though she doesn’t say anything, even though she’s perfectly polite, there’s a stiffness there.
Dami is in pain, and she blames me for it. I wonder what she’d say if I told her the full story. But of course, that would have to include what I did, along with what Dami did.
He appears again in the kitchen halfway through lunch. Rosa stands out of habit at Dami’s entrance, but he waves a hand at her to sit down without even looking her way.
“Caligula. Come with me,” he says.
Sammy, Vito, and Rosa are all eating at the small table. I’m sitting at the counter with an espresso that Rosa made for me without my asking.
I set down my coffee and slide off the stool. He leads me to the front door, to the scanner panel set into the wall. I watch him enter an administrator code, and then he turns to take my hand.
I suck in a breath as his hand closes around my wrist. But he just positions my index finger on the glass panel.
His hands are as warm as ever. Huge. The pads of his fingers are firm against my wrist as he presses my fingerprint flat.
He holds it there for a beat while the scanner reads, and then he does the next finger, and the next, and I stand very still and focus on the blinking green light instead of on him.
“Other hand,” he says.
I give it to him. His thumb settles over my knuckles to hold my hand steady, and his eyes are fixed on the scanner, and his breathing is even, and I’m certain—absolutely certain—that he’s as hyperaware of this small contact as I am, but is refusing to show it.
“Why?” I ask at last.
“Just in case,” he says. Then: “Come on.”
We move through the house. The side door out to the street, the garage roller door, then the internal door to the garage stairwell. I know the code, but fingerprint access is a lot faster.
He’s expecting an attack.
“Elevator next,” he says, without looking at me.
We stand side by side in front of the brass doors. My former prison is at the end of its descent. The collar, the chain, the darkness.
The fear.
Neither of us mentions any of it. The scanner reads my prints, the light goes green, and we move on.
And then Damiano leads me back upstairs and into his bedroom, to the security door that I’ve always been curious about. I know what’s behind it—or think I do.
He programs my fingerprints in and then, when I start to turn away, pulls me back. “You should see,” he says stiffly. “You should know the worst of it.”
He opens the door.
I step through.
The room is small. Maybe ten by eight. One wall is covered, desk to ceiling, in monitors. Some are dark, some show live feeds: the kitchen, the foyer, the street outside, the garage. And all across the bottom row, in gray-green night vision, different angles of the basement.
I knew this room existed. I knew, from the moment I saw the extent of the surveillance in the basement, that there had to be a control room somewhere. I even assumed it was right here behind this locked door in Dami’s room.
But knowing something exists and standing inside it are two different things.
There’s a chair—a good one, leather, worn at the armrests.
A desk with a half-drunk glass of water on it, a phone charger still plugged in.
Damiano Orsini sat in this chair for hours, for days, watching me curl on my side in the dark, watching me sleep and shiver and press my face into the mattress, and he kept coming back.
Every angle of me. Every camera. I count seven feeds on the basement alone.
Seven ways to watch one man in a personalized horror chamber.
It wasn’t surveillance. It was obsession.
“Why are you showing me this?” I mutter, backing out.
He grabs me by the arm and pulls me back in. “Because you need to understand the extent of it.”
“Why?” I’m almost begging now, pulling away from him. “I already knew. I don’t need to see—”
“Yes, you do. You need to see and understand who I really am. And you need to stay angry if you’re going to survive what happens next. You hear me?”
I stare at him. He’s trying to make me hate him. Using his own fixation as a weapon against himself. “But why? Is there an attack coming?”
He shrugs. “Seb still hasn’t said anything more. So…maybe.”
“Then we need to organize another meeting of the Loyalists, see if they can—”
“They can’t do anything,” he spits. “And even if they could, I’m not letting you wander around the city looking for a bullet.”
“I can leave if I want to,” I point out spitefully. “You literally just gave me access to all the…” I trail off as he gives me an almost pitying look.
“All I have to do is this—” He goes back to the security pad, keys in a different code, and lays his finger on the scanner. An alert sounds, and the panel turns red. “And everything is locked down to the administrator. Me.”
God, he’s infuriating. “Then why give me access in the first place?”
“I gave you access to the doors so you can lock them from the inside. Keep enemies out.”
“I want to see my people,” I say stubbornly.
“I will not let you leave this house,” he growls back.
“Then invite them here!” I snap. “But I’m not going to sit around waiting for Big Gee’s deadline to arrive while my people think I’ve disappeared. If nothing else, they’re warm bodies who will do what I ask them to do. So either let me go or kill me like you always meant to.”
The old fire comes back into his eyes. Ah, there he is. “Don’t fucking say that to me like it’s some card you can play to win the argument.”
“It’s not a card. It’s a fact. Just like it’s a fact that my Loyalists are the only resource we have right now.”
At last I see him waver, even as his hand tightens on my arm.
“Here,” he says at last. “The meeting happens here. In my house. I search everyone who comes through the door, make sure no one has a weapon. And I’m in the meeting with you the whole time, like I was at that so-called safe house.”
“No. You’ll stay outside.”
“You planning to invite the Morellis’ rat?”
“I am.”
“Then no fucking way am I gonna—”
“You’re a Giuliano, Dami,” I say over the top as he tries to protest again.
“That tattoo on your hand should be enough of a reminder. It is for me, and every other Clemenza as well. So you’ll stay outside for the duration of the meeting.
But you can search the men before they come in, and relieve them of any weapons. ”
He doesn’t like that. His mouth goes tight and his nostrils flare. But he doesn’t argue.
And then a thought hits me. “Wait—Sammy,” I say heavily. “I don’t want to make him feel threatened in his own home. We’ll have to think of something else.”
Dami rubs a hand over the back of his head with a grimace. “Ricky Benedetti,” he sighs. “Sammy’s been wanting to see him. I’ll send them out together, and Vito can drive them. Gives Sammy his date, gets him out of the house, and Vito keeps them both safe.”
It’s clever. Two problems solved with one move. Sammy protected, even happy, and the house cleared for the meeting. “Alright,” I say.
“Alright,” he echoes.
We look at each other, and it feels like something has changed. Balanced, maybe. Neither of us is pretending the war is over, but at least there’s a negotiating table between us instead of a wall.
Late that night, well past two, I go back into the surveillance room and look at Damiano lying awake in the basement. The night vision turns everything gray-green and unfamiliar. He’s on his back, hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling.
He’s in my bed.
The one from the townhouse, not…the other one.
He must have watched me like this. Sat in this chair, in this room, and watched me sleep and wake and lie there, hopeless. Night after night.
I slowly become aware that I’m shivering there in the leather seat, so I leave the small room and pull on Dami’s robe, burying my nose in the collar to find his scent.
I miss him.
The admission should sicken me. What kind of fool misses his captor? What kind of masochist craves the company of a man who wanted to murder him? But the anger, when I reach for it, is thinner tonight. Worn down and tired. Superseded by other memories.
My feet carry me out of the bedroom and to the elevator. I stand there for a long time, looking at the brass doors, before I enter them at last.
I scan my fingerprint and press the button for the basement.