Chapter 33
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Luca
The window behind Valentino's head shows a crane lifting a steel beam over the yard. Below it, men in orange vests move like they have all day. I watch the beam instead of him because he's been talking for two minutes and I haven't liked any of it.
"You grabbed Vico Orsini by the collar," he says. "In front of Liam. In front of the doorman. You don't do that. You've never done that."
"He came to my fucking building."
"He came to make you do exactly what you did.
" Valentino leans back. The chair creaks.
This office isn't his — it belongs to the construction company we own on paper, and the desk still has someone else's coffee rings on it.
"You're losing control of this, Luca. You know it. That's why you won't look at me."
I look at him. The dust in the air catches the light from the window.
"Say it," I tell him. "You didn't drag me across the city to a fucking gravel yard for Vico."
"End this. Tell her the truth. All of it — Orsini, the marriage, Voss. Tell her before someone else does, because someone will. You have days, not months."
"I can't."
"You can. You won't."
"Not yet, goddamn it. She's just started sleeping through the night. The kid came closer to me. You want me to walk into that house and tell her the man who made her suffer is alive and her father is a don who's been watching her for two years?"
Valentino doesn't answer right away. Outside, the beam settles onto the frame and the crane swings back empty.
"You're not protecting her," he says. "You're protecting yourself."
The words hit and I have no argument ready, which tells me he's right. That's how I know, always — when the answer should be there and isn't.
I stand up because sitting has become difficult. I walk to the window. The glass is cold near my face and the yard smells of diesel even through it.
Here is the thing I don't say. Liam found Voss in Milwaukee two months ago.
Voss took his fifty thousand and moved, and now nobody knows where he went.
Somewhere in this country there's a man Gemma stood in a church with.
A man she picked. She looked at him across a coffee shop in Madison and decided, out of everyone alive, him. Nobody made her. She chose.
She never chose me. That's the whole story.
Take away the men hunting her and there's no reason for her to be in my apartment at all.
When she learns he's breathing, she learns the choice is open again.
I've watched women go back to men like that.
I've driven some of them there myself, years ago, and kept my mouth shut because it wasn't my business.
"You think she'll go to him," Valentino says behind me.
"I think she married him."
"She married you too."
"On paper. Because a bastard with a gun didn't leave her a fucking exit." My breath fogs the glass. I wipe it with my sleeve. "He got a wedding with her family in the room. He got years. I got a contract and a deadline."
"Luca." He waits until I turn around. His face is steady, which is worse than anger.
"I know what it costs, holding on to someone with both hands.
I've done it wrong my whole life. But she won't forgive the silence.
The longer you carry this, the more it becomes a thing you did to her instead of a thing that happened to her.
There's a date somewhere ahead of you where the truth stops being help and starts being betrayal. You've probably already passed it."
I open my mouth. I don't know what's going to come out of it.
The door opens instead.
Fabio walks in with a duffel over one shoulder and a week of travel on his face, and behind him comes Ryan. Fabio drops the bag by the wall. He hasn't shaved. His hair is too long again, pushed back the way it gets when work has been eating the calendar.
He's supposed to be in Sicily. He's supposed to be running my house, my routes, my problems.
I cross the room before I've decided anything and put my arms around him. His shoulder is solid under my hand. I hold on longer than a greeting needs. I can't remember the last time I did this to a living person besides Gemma. My hands don't know where to settle, so they just grip.
Fabio doesn't say a thing. He stands there and lets me, one hand coming up flat against my back.
Fabio steps back and I let him go. Behind him, Ryan waits by the door with his hands loose at his sides.
I offer mine because you shake this man's hand when he's in the room with you.
It's not respect. It's acknowledgment. His grip is dry and brief.
His eyes go over my shoulder to the window before they come back to me.
"Farro," he says.
"Ryan."
That's not his name. Nobody has his name.
I've met men in four countries who've hired him, and every one of them calls him Ryan.
Every one of them knows it's a coat he puts on.
He works for maybe five people on earth.
He costs millions and he's worth it, because the job gets done no matter what the job is.
I've seen the after of his work twice. Both times the people who paid him stopped sleeping well, and both times they'd gotten exactly what they asked for.
Valentino comes around the desk and shakes his hand too.
"Thank you for coming," Valentino says.
"Bruno asked." Ryan takes the chair across from the desk without being offered it. He sits. "Bruno doesn't ask often."
Fabio moves to the wall by the window and leans there. His hand rests on his chest, over the pocket.
"How much did Bruno tell you?" Valentino says.
"A name. Herrera." Ryan crosses one ankle over his knee. "Sinaloa people, moved product through Milwaukee and Gary for a decade. Then he stopped talking and told me to come hear the rest from you."
Valentino opens the drawer of a desk that isn't his and takes out a folder. He doesn't slide it across yet. He holds it, and I watch him weigh what he's about to put in motion, because Valentino weighs everything and this is heavy even for him.
"Three weeks ago the Herreras took two of our drivers off a route near Rockford," he says. "They sent back the trucks. They kept the men. What came back after that, I won't describe. Bruno went to the table first. He offered terms. They sent his messenger home without his hands."
Ryan doesn't blink. Neither do I, but my stomach goes tight anyway, because I know the messenger. Knew. A kid named Sal who used to park cars at Lorenzo's restaurant.
"Bruno wants the family gone," Valentino says. "Every man who carries the name. The father, four sons, two nephews, an uncle in Juárez. All of them."
"The women?"
"Paid. The children, paid. Accounts, documents, whatever they need to go be something else somewhere else. Bruno was specific about that. Nobody touches a woman or a child. There's money in the folder for it, and more behind it."
"And proof?"
Valentino's jaw sets before he answers. "Bruno asked for heads."
Fabio's eyes come off the window and land on Ryan. I watch my old friend take the measure of what's sitting in that chair. Because here's the thing about Ryan that separates him from every hard man I've ever stood next to, myself included.
Most of us, you ask for proof, you get photographs. A ring, a jaw with dental work, a finger. Ryan brings heads. He's the only man I've ever met who does it without being asked. Now he's being asked, and the corner of his mouth moves like this is the first thing today that's interested him.
"Then we understand each other," Ryan says.
"There's a timeline," Valentino says, and hands the folder over at last.
Ryan opens it in his lap and reads. He turns pages at an even pace, no faster on the photographs than on the ledgers. When he gets to the last page he closes it and stands, and the whole meeting has taken eleven minutes.
"Eight men, three states, one across the border," he says. "Six weeks. Tell Bruno seven if the uncle runs."
"He won't like seven," I say.
"He'll like eight heads." Ryan tucks the folder under his arm. At the door he pauses, and his eyes find me again, and I feel it in the back of my neck the way you feel a scope. "Congratulations, by the way. On the wedding."
My hands go still at my sides. "You keep up on gossip now?"
"I keep up on everything that touches the people who pay me." He opens the door. "Milwaukee's a small town, Farro. Smaller than people think. Names come up."
I have been awake for an hour, but I haven't moved because Gemma's leg is over mine and her breath is on me.
Nina is at the compound with Lily. Kristen has her until noon. The apartment is quiet except for the heat coming on and the lake wind against the glass.
Gemma stirs. Her hand slides across my chest, and stays there.
"You're awake," she says into my skin.
"I am."
"How long?"
"A while."
She lifts her head. There's a crease from the pillow across her cheek. I put my thumb on the crease and follow it to her jaw.
"Come here," I say.
I roll her onto her back and she lets me.
I start at her throat. Slow. I kiss the hollow of it, then her shoulder, then the inside of her elbow where the skin is thin and warm. I take her left wrist and put my mouth on the scar, holding it there until her breathing changes.
"Luca."
"Quiet. Let me."
I work down her body with my mouth. Her ribs, one at a time. The soft of her stomach, where she goes still. She hates her stomach, she told me once. I stay there longer. Her hip bone. The crease of her thigh. I could do this forever and not want anything else.
I spread her legs with my hands and put my mouth on her pussy, soft, no hurry, and she moans. I keep it slow. Flat tongue, then light, then nothing, until her hips lift looking for me. She comes with her heel dug into my back. I stay until she pushes at my head because it's too much.
When I come up, she takes my face in both hands.
She looks at me and her mouth opens. Whatever the words are, they're right there but she closes her mouth and pulls me down instead.
I push into her slow. Face to face, her legs around me, her hands moving over the tattoos on my throat. I move the way she likes, deep and unhurried.
"There," she says. "Don't stop."
"I'm not fucking going anywhere."
She comes with her forehead against mine and her nails in my back, quiet this time, a long shaking exhale, and I follow her because there's no holding out against that. I stay on top of her after. Neither of us moves. Her heartbeat comes down under my mouth where I've got it pressed to her neck.
"I don't want this to end," she says.
The words land in my chest and stay there.
"It won't," I say.
"Promise me."
"I can't lose you," I say.
It's the truest thing I've said in years and it costs me more than the bullets did, because I know what's stacked behind it.
She hears it for what it is. Her eyes go wet and she doesn't cry, just nods once, pulls my head down to her shoulder and holds it there, her fingers in my hair.
We stay like that until her breathing slows and slides into sleep.
I move off her without waking her. I lie on my back and stare at the ceiling.
Tell her now. Wake her up and tell her everything.
I turn my head and watch her breathe. In, out. Her lashes against her cheek, her hand open on the mattress between us like she'd take mine in her sleep if I put it there.
Valentino was right. Every day I don't tell her, the silence stops being protection and starts being what Voss did to her with a different name on it.
I lie here watching her, and I hate myself in a way I haven't since the fire. Since the last morning I lay next to a sleeping woman and believed I had time.