Chapter 39
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Amanda
Vittoria's old bedroom still smells like a Sephora exploded inside a computer repair shop.
The desk is bare now, all the monitors are gone to Dmitri's place, but the dent in the wall from the hard drive she threw is still there. I'm weirdly comforted by the dent.
Some things should stay exactly as broken as you left them.
She's sitting cross-legged against the headboard with a bottle of red that costs more than my first car. She pats the duvet beside her.
"Get up here," she says. "You've got that face."
"I don't have a face."
"You do. The one that says you're either about to deflect with a joke or accidentally tell the truth."
God, I hate that she knows me.
I climb up beside her and take the glass she's already poured. The wine is dark and warm, and I drink too much of it on the first swallow.
Vittoria shifts over, tucks her feet under her, and waits.
She doesn't fill silence. She never has. It used to make me talk just to get away from it.
Tonight, I don't.
"I learned some things," I say finally. "Through all of this. Things I genuinely didn't think I'd ever get."
"Such as?"
"The ability to say no."
The word still feels strange in my mouth.
"Vee, do you know how long I've been sick of myself? Someone asks me to do something. Someone steers me somewhere. Someone decides what I want before I've even opened my mouth, and I just go. Smile. Comply. Hate every second of it. Hate myself harder after."
She doesn't say anything. Her thumb moves slowly around the rim of her glass.
"And then the next time it happens, I do the exact same thing." I take another drink. It doesn't help, but it gives my hands something to do. "Twenty-five years of treating everyone else's comfort like it mattered more than my own."
Vittoria's mouth tightens.
"Francesca said come meet someone important, and I knew. I knew something was off. The room was wrong. She was wrong. All of it was wrong, and I followed her anyway because saying no felt rude." I laugh once, but there isn't anything funny in it. "Rude, Vee. I was worried about being rude."
"Amanda."
"No, let me finish."
I set the glass on the nightstand because I need both hands free.
"For a while, I thought what Aldo did was the thing that fixed it. Like the worst night of my life taught me a lesson. Congratulations, here's your trauma, now you have boundaries." My throat tightens. "And I hated that. I hated that some part of me believed it."
Vittoria goes very still. I can see how badly she wants to interrupt. She doesn't.
"But it wasn't him," I say. "It wasn't what he did."
I look down at my hands.
"It was Valentino."
Vittoria's face changes, but she stays quiet.
"He was careful with me. From the first night, when I couldn't walk straight and didn't know what world I was in, he never pushed. Not once. He asked before he touched me. He stopped when stopping was the last thing either of us wanted, and he meant it."
My eyes burn. I blink hard and keep going.
"He made me understand that a boundary isn't me being difficult. It isn't a test. It isn't a thing I have to apologize for. It's supposed to be respected. By everyone. Including the people who want you. Especially them."
Vittoria reaches for my wrist and squeezes it hard.
I breathe through it.
"Or," I add, because the rawness is getting unbearable and I am still me, "I'm so disgustingly in love with him that I currently don't give a shit what anyone else wants from me. Same result."
Vittoria laughs, and her eyes go wet at the same time.
Her grip tightens, and for a second I'm thrown back to the worst weeks of her life.
Sitting beside her after her father died, after Riccardo died, saying nothing because there was nothing to say.
Holding on to each other because it was the only thing either of us knew how to do.
The pressure of her hand now feels the same. A quiet thank you. A quiet I know.
"He's never let anyone close," she says. "Do you understand that? My entire life. He'd visit from Sicily, and it was like having a very polite gargoyle at dinner. Beautiful. Devoted. Completely sealed shut. And you..."
She shakes her head, and a strand of dark hair falls loose.
"You got in. Nobody gets in."
"I had an unfair advantage. I was extremely annoyed about it."
"You were fifteen and used to stare at him over the lasagna like he was dessert."
"I have no memory of this, and you can't prove anything."
"I have photos."
"Burn them."
"Never."
She grins, then her expression softens all at once.
"Wait," she says. "Do you realize what this means?"
"That I have terrible taste in summer crushes that take a decade to pay off?"
"We're going to be cousins." She says it like she's solved a murder. "He's my aunt's son. If you two... Amanda. We'd be family. Actual family. On paper. Awkward Christmas and everything."
The realization lands before I have a chance to brace for it.
I've spent every holiday since I was a kid orbiting this family. Eating Aria's food. Borrowing their warmth. Standing close enough to belong for a few hours, then going home.
The idea of belonging for real makes my eyes sting.
"Cousins," I manage.
"Cousins." She raises her glass. "Finally. I've been trying to get you into this family since we were twenty."
"You have?"
"I was going to set you up with Lorenzo before the Sophia thing."
"LORENZO?"
"He's very gentle."
"Lorenzo is a saint, Vittoria. Lorenzo would have run screaming."
"Shut up and drink to your cousin."
We clink.
I spill wine on the duvet. She doesn't care. She's laughing and crying a little, and I'm doing the same thing, and neither one of us tries to stop.
"To the longest, most catastrophic crush in recorded history, finally doing something useful," she says.
"To boundaries," I say, lifting my glass.
"To boundaries," she agrees, "and to the terrifying Sicilian who taught you what they are."
We clink again and drink, still laughing, wine sloshing dangerously close to the duvet.
Then the door opens.
Valentino
Bruno smokes inside the living room now, which tells me something about the last two weeks.
Aria would skin him for it. She's two rooms away with Carmela and the girls, and he's blowing smoke at the ceiling like a man who's decided he gets one vice tonight and nobody in this house is stupid enough to mention it.
The whiskey is the good bottle, the one Lorenzo keeps for funerals and weddings. No one says which one tonight is.
Pietro takes the chair facing the door. Nico stands near the window with his glass untouched, watching the driveway through the curtain gap. Dante has claimed the end of the couch, one ankle crossed over his knee, settled in like this house has finally stopped expecting him to prove himself.
Lorenzo stands near the bar with the bottle still in his hand.
I sit carefully.
Forty stitches in my back have made me appreciate chairs with actual padding.
"Five days," Bruno says, ash dropping into a saucer he stole from his own kitchen. "Then you're on a plane back. The lawyers in Rome want you available, the FBI wants statements, and Palermo wants to look you in the eye and confirm we kept the old protocols. You being there matters."
"I know."
"There's something else."
He rolls the cigarette between two fingers, taking his time with the words. Bruno does that when the thing he's about to say changes the atmosphere entirely.
"Mancini gets transferred this week. Out of Bergamo, into the permanent facility outside Rome. Federal hold ends, Italian custody begins. There's a window in the transfer."
Dante's mouth curves around the rim of his glass.
He already knows where this is going.
So do I.
I want Bruno to say it anyway.
"I found a way to put you in a room with him," Bruno says. "Twenty minutes. No record. If you still want it."
I nod once.
"I want it."
"Good." Bruno taps ash into the tray. "But you go in for a name, not a body."
"I'll decide that when I'm in front of him."
"No." His voice turns stern. Don first. Cousin second. "You go in, you get what we need, and you walk out. I'm not telling Vittoria her best friend is a widow before the wedding she's already planning in her head."
"She's planning a wedding?"
Pietro laughs into his glass.
"Of course she is," Dante says. "Women like Vittoria don't survive this long by waiting for men to become useful."
Bruno doesn't smile. He keeps his eyes on me. I hold his stare for a beat, then nod. "I walk out." He nods back.
That's the contract. Two nods between cousins, worth more than anything a lawyer could put on paper.
Nico turns from the window. He has the stare of a man who finds problems before anyone else admits there is one.
"Amanda's going with you?"
"Yes."
"To Sicily."
"To Italy," I say. "For now."
I turn the glass on my knee. "Her work is in Chicago. Vittoria's here. The life she built is here. We haven't talked about where we're living."
"You haven't talked about it," Pietro repeats.
"There hasn't been a calm hour to talk about anything. Every conversation we've had has happened between a kidnapping, a hospital, and someone trying to kill one of us."
Pietro looks at me for a long moment.
Then he laughs.
Properly laughs. Head back. Shoulders moving. Like the idea is so absurd even he can't keep a straight face.
"Cazzo. Listen to us." He gestures around with his glass.
"Two years ago this family was a pack of angry men walking around killing people.
That was the whole operation. Now look. Wives.
Children. Children on the way. Lorenzo cooks Sunday dinner like somebody's nonna, and Valentino fucking Conti is sitting here worried about real estate. "
Lorenzo gives him a look. "I cook better than our nonna."
"Our nonna was a terrible cook."
"Then the comparison is insulting."
Pietro points at him. "That's exactly my point. We have domestic arguments now. Life is ridiculous."
I let myself smile, because Pietro's right.
The man laughing in that chair spent years wanting to die and forgot how to want anything else. Now he's here, drinking Lorenzo's funeral whiskey, talking about children and Sunday dinner like the words don't scare him.
"What happens with Enzo?" I ask.
The room settles back into business.
Lorenzo sets the bottle down. "That's the strange part. He's not fighting."
"No motions," Dante says. "No delays. No usual theater."
"He fired his lawyers," Lorenzo adds. "All of them. The Palermo firm. Men his family kept on retainer for thirty years."
"His soldiers aren't talking either," Bruno says. "Not from fear. Our people say he paid every one of them out before the raid. Severance. Like he was closing the doors."
"A Don doesn't pay severance," Dante says. "A Don promises you'll be taken care of and lets you wonder by whom."
"Exactly."
Lorenzo pours another finger of whiskey and doesn't drink it.
"There's more. He has cancer. Pancreatic, our doctor contact thinks, based on the medication moving through the prison pharmacy. Advanced."
"So maybe he's dying," I say.
"Maybe," Lorenzo says. "Or maybe he's tired. He finds out his son sold girls under his own name, loses him, loses the family in a federal raid. Prison might look like rest."
"Or," Nico says from the window, "a man with nothing left to lose and money already distributed is the most dangerous version of Enzo Basile we've ever dealt with."
No one argues.
Nico's paranoia has an irritating habit of turning out right.
Bruno crushes the cigarette in the saucer and looks at me through the last of the smoke.
"That's why the transfer matters. Elio knew the agency, the routes, the players. Somebody gave the Basiles your airport timing, and it wasn't him. He was already in federal custody with his hands zip-tied to a table."
His jaw tightens.
"He knows who else was inside. He might be the only person alive who does."
Bruno leans back, and the chair creaks under him.
"Twenty minutes, Valentino. Get me a name."
I think about Amanda upstairs, laughing, alive, unaware that in five days I'm going to sit across from the man who lied his way into her bed and onto her protection detail.
I think about the rope marks across my back.
My father's watch on my wrist.
The road Luca bled on.
"If he knows, I'll get it," I say.