Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
Giovanni
I’m polishing my gun and whistling when the shooting at my gates starts. I don’t stop whistling. I knew this was coming the moment I left the hospital. It was only ever a matter of time, so I used the days I had. I rested, and I prepared. I let the wounds close as much as they would.
Fabiano disappeared three days ago, taking most of my men with him.
I’m not surprised. I’d have done the same in his place.
It doesn’t matter. What matters is already done.
Yana, her brother, Lucia, they’re in the air, or close to it, somewhere over an ocean, heading for a city where none of this can reach them.
All I have left to do is handle Fabiano and let them live.
This is where it ends for me. I’m ready for it. I made my peace with it the night I painted my own sister’s face the color of the dead.
The gates come down. A voice goes through the house.
“I want Giovanni Mondi dead!”
I chuckle.
I set the gun down, I stand up, and part the curtains to reveal Yana’s sculpture.
I look at it, and I think of the first time I saw her across that gallery, the only person in the room who looked at me and saw something wrong.
She wormed her way into a place in me I’d kept sealed since I was a boy on a cold floor.
“We go together,” I tell it.
I whistle. I pick up a bottle of wine off the table, half full, and I walk down the stairs, drinking it as the men swarm up. I shoot a few of them without much care, the bottle in my other hand, wine spilling down my shirt, a man with nothing left to lose and no reason to aim well.
Someone gets close enough to kick the gun out of my hand. The bottle goes with it, smashing on the stairs. Several of them grab me and haul me down the rest of the way and drag me out into the courtyard to where Zaki and Fabiano are sitting like they own the place.
Zaki stands.
“Don,” he says, “we finally meet.”
“Long time no see.”
I’ve never met him in person, but I know his name. Zaki opposed me from the day I took the seat. He’s the muscle behind Fabiano. The reason a capo with a grudge became a capo with an army.
Zaki cocks a gun.
“I’d love to keep you alive a while,” he says, “but I need my new Don in his chair.”
His finger settles on the trigger. My hand moves toward my waistband as I steady myself.
The shot rings, but Zaki drops. He dies before he hits the stone; his eyes open.
Fabiano steps over and kicks the body once.
“Stupido,” he spits.
“It’s you and me now, Don,” Fabiano says. He laughs.
I look back down at Zaki on the ground.
“Look at me!” Fabiano screams.
I look up.
“Yes,” he says. “I killed him. I killed him. How dare he think he gets to be the one to take you out after everything, after all the years I —” His voice cracks open. He hits me across the face with the gun.
I go back. He’s on me before I recover, his boot driving into my side, into the wound that hasn’t closed. I grunt.
“On your knees.” He’s shaking. “On your fucking knees!”
I look up at him with blood in my mouth, and I smile.
“I don’t feel like it. Make me.”
He’s foaming now. “Get him on his knees!”
The men force me down. Fabiano stamps on my hands twice, and the pain shoots up both arms. He throws his head back and laughs at the sky.
“You made me act like a dog,” he says. “To you. In front of everyone. For years. Now look.” He crouches close. “Now, you’re the dog.”
“Am I?” I mock. I am just having fun here.
He fumes with rage. “How dare you. How dare you still be arrogant —”
He puts the gun against my forehead, and I watch his face contort.
“I liked your sister,” he says. “Did you know that? The doctor poisoned her that night. She died. It was me. Your Russian whore didn’t do a thing — that was me.
” Spit flies. “And the brother you had me find? I found him. I found him, and I gave her his body in the rain, and I watched her sob over it. Then I gave her the gun she shot you with before she ended herself. I won. I won, Mondi. You have nothing. Not your seat. Not your sister. Not your lover. And soon, not your life. Ha ha ha —”
I’ve never noticed before what a terrible laugh he has. I let him have it all.
After all, none of it is true, and the not-knowing is the last thing of mine he’ll ever get to enjoy.
I met the doctor, Fabiano, the night before it all happened.
The poison Fabiano gave my sister that night was a clean fluid.
While Yana slept in my bed, I went to Lucia’s room.
The maids put the powder into her skin until she was the gray of a corpse, purple at the lips.
I told her the truth that Fabiano would kill her and Yana if she didn’t lie still.
Then I gave her a small pill to slow her pulse just enough and made her drink a glass of cold water a few minutes before Fabiano burst in.
By morning, her skin was cold to the touch, and I made certain Yana, half-asleep and terrified, felt a pulse already slow by nature and read it as nothing.
I didn’t let her check twice, so she would find out.
For Christov. I knew Fabiano would move on Christov to break her.
Kirill and I pooled everything we had and found the boy; luckily, he was working for an Italian family loyal to me, as it happened, easy to free.
He’s been safe with Kirill for days. I swapped in a body, faceless, and planted the birthmark myself in case Fabiano grew suspicious.
I couldn’t stop him from showing her the corpse.
So I put Kirill’s men behind her in the dark instead, the whole way, in case it went wrong.
When they radioed that she was walking that field alone, I nearly threw the entire plan away and went to her myself.
Kirill talked me down. She can handle it, he said.
She always could.
“You can’t even admit you’ve lost,” Fabiano says.
I scoff.
He grabs the front of my shirt and punches me. “I’ll pay back every humiliation. Every time you made me bow. Every order. Every errand you sent me on, like I was nothing. Everything you took from me —”
“You mean Valentina?” I laugh, and it splits my lip wider. “She didn’t want you, Fabiano. She never wanted you.”
“Shut up.” He hits me again. “Shut up.” He’s breathing like a man drowning. “I’ll kill you. But not here. Not quick.” He straightens and turns to his men, and his voice tears out of him. “Take him outside. I’ll tear him apart myself.”
* * *
They leashed me to a post in the middle of my own courtyard.
The rope cuts into my wrists behind my back, and the sun is straight overhead now, white and merciless, and Fabiano is in the center of the yard drinking my wine straight from my bottle.
He sways as he drinks. His men ring him, slapping his shoulders, laughing too loudly, calling him Don.
The word goes into him like a drug. His cheeks are flushed, and his eyes are too bright, and his mouth keeps pulling into a grin he can’t hold steady.
He comes to me. He bends me and takes my hand where it’s bound and slides the ring off my finger, dragging it past the knuckle, and he holds it up so it catches the light. His eyes follow it like a man watching something he’s wanted his whole life finally land in his palm.
“This seat was always mine,” he says.
I laugh.
“Congratulations, then.”
His grin breaks. The muscle in his jaw jumps. “Soon, Mondi, I put you in the ground. But not until you’ve watched me wear this.” He stands and turns to his men, his arms spread wide. “Call the families. Tell them it’s done. Tell them to come and pay their respects to the new Don.”
One of them lifts a phone to his ear.
It rings. I watch the man’s face. The expectation in it. Then the small flicker as it keeps ringing. He tries another number. His brow draws in. A third. His lips press together, and he lowers the phone, and he crosses to Fabiano and murmurs.
Fabiano goes still. “What? What do you mean they won’t pick up —”
The laugh comes up out of me on its own, and it pulls hard at the wound in my side, and I let it.
He’s on me, and his boot cracks into my shin, and the pain goes up my leg. He bends down, his face inches from mine, breath sour with wine. “What’s so funny?”
“You fool,” I say. “They used you. They wanted Zaki gone, and they let you hold the knife. They were never going to seat you. Not for one hour.”
“You’re lying.” But his eyes have changed. There’s a tremor in them now.
“You’re me, Fabiano. No family. No blood. No name worth saying out loud. Only you’re slower than I am.” I hold his gaze and let him see I mean every word. “Why would they ever choose you over me?”
The grin flickers back on, but it’s twitching at one corner. “What are you saying?”
I stand.
The rope is still around my wrists, but I roll my shoulders, flex my hands, and I make sure he is watching me do it.
“Do you know why I made you capo?”
His chest is rising and falling fast. “Because you looked down on me. Because you wanted something under your boot. Someone to step on whenever you —”
The rope snaps, and his gun jerks up. I whistle.
Every weapon behind him turns on him.
Fabiano’s head whips around. His mouth falls open. “What, what are you doing? He’s the enemy. He is the enemy—”
“The only enemy,” I say, working the blood back into my fingers, “is the one who can’t keep a promise.”
I look at him. His gun is still raised, but his hands have started to shake, and the barrel trembles in the air between us.
“I made you capo because you were the weakest man I could afford. I couldn’t have a second with ties to a strong house.
I couldn’t have one too clever to control.
I needed someone competent enough to be useful and small enough never to become this.
” I tilt my head. “And here you are. Become this anyway. Almost impressive.”
His lips are moving without sound.
“When I took the chair, I went to the low-income families, not because I couldn’t outmaneuver the powerful ones.
” I take a step toward him, and he doesn’t fire, his eyes darting between me and the guns at his back.
“Because I know the thing the powerful never have. Loyalty. The rich buy men. They never own them.” I smile.
“If you hadn’t shot Zaki today, Fabiano, he’d have shot you by sundown and put his own nephew in this seat.
“Where are my men?” His voice cracks down the middle. His eyes sweep the ring of barrels pointed at his spine, wild, hunting for one friendly face and finding none. “These are my men —”
“They’re your men,” I agree. “Though I did mention to them, some time ago, that when the families turned you away, and we both knew they would, they could come to me, and I’d let them keep their heads on their shoulders.”
The sound that comes out of him isn’t a laugh. It starts as one and collapses into something gasping and high, his shoulders jerking, his eyes glassing over as they rake the yard.
“It doesn’t matter,” he wheezes. “It doesn’t. I beat you. I won. These — these are technicalities; they don’t change anything, I still —”
I walk to him, I take the gun out of his shaking hand, and I press the barrel to his chest.
“You can’t kill a man with nothing left to lose so easily, Fabiano.”
He nods, and then something terrible settles over his face; the panic drains out of him all at once, leaving behind an awful calm.
“And you can’t kill a man with everything to lose so easily either.”
He tears his shirt open. A vest is strapped across his chest, the wires taped down, a small light blinking red over his heart. His thumb is already on the remote in his fist.
“We die here, Mondi. Today. You and I. Together.” His mouth stretches into something that wants to be triumph and lands on madness. “Just the two dogs who came up from nothing.”
I look at the light on his chest. I look at his thumb. I look at his eyes, and there’s nothing left behind them to bargain with.
“My fucking pleasure,” I reply. One of us had to die, and if I were going to die, I would take him with me. I began to squeeze the trigger of my gun when tires screech at the gate.
Four cars come through it hard and fan out across the courtyard with engines roaring, and Fabiano’s men break into confusion, the guns swinging away from him toward the new noise. A door is thrown open before the car has come to a stop.
Yana jumps out, wearing a vest and a gun, calling my name. “Giovanni!”
She sees me and stops dead. Her chest is heaving, her eyes go wide and bright and wet all at once, and her lips part around my name a second time without sound coming out.
Fabiano’s head turns toward her. His thumb stays on the controller, but his whole face slackens, the madness stalling out into raw disbelief.
“She —” His voice is barely there. “She’s alive?”
Kirill steps from the second car, geared, both hands lifted. “Easy. Everyone, take it easy.”
Fabiano’s eyes dart from Yana to Kirill to me, and the laugh starts again, broken, wheezing, his head shaking side to side. “Good. Good. You lied to me — every one of you. Every single — Then we all go. We all go down together—”
Kirill’s eyes drop to the vest on Fabiano’s chest. His face changes. “Shit.”
“Yana, run!” It rips out of my throat. “Kirill, get her out, get her out of here, now.”
She shouldn’t be here. She should be over an ocean with the sun on her face and none of this in her life. I cannot have her here, not for this, not for the last thing I’m good for —
“Let’s all meet in hell,” Fabiano screams.
His thumb comes down on the controller, and a deafening sound fills the air as the air turns white. The sound takes everything, and in the half-second left to me, I run to her, and I pull her into my chest and wrap every part of myself around her and turn my back to the blast.