Chapter 41
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
A WEEK LATER
Amanda
The sheets smell like him, and I refuse to be embarrassed about burying my face in his pillow twice in the last hour like some kind of cologne-addicted golden retriever.
We got to Rome last night. Valentino promised me ten days of this city on foot, getting lost, eating things from questionable street carts, and so far we've seen exactly one room of it.
The one with the bed.
Well, the shower, briefly, which doesn't count because we ended up back in the bed.
He left an hour ago.
"I have a job," he said. "It's important. It's not dangerous."
That was the whole briefing.
He also left Fabio outside the door.
Fabio, for the record, is six-foot-something of Sicilian granite who has said maybe eleven words to me total, and I'm pretty sure three of them were I'll be here. He's in the hallway right now doing whatever silent mountain men do. Standing. Watching. Possibly photosynthesizing.
And lying here, scrolling my phone with my legs tangled in five-star sheets, I realize how quickly this started feeling normal.
Guards in hallways. A man who checks the locks twice and kisses my forehead like it's sacred. Someone, always, watching the door so I don't have to.
Six months ago, I would've called that a cage.
Now I know what the world looks like without it, and I'll take the granite man in the hallway.
My phone lights up.
MOM. Video call.
My stomach turns.
Her contact photo is from some gala in Monaco, smiling at a camera with the effortless charm she saved for strangers and never quite seemed to have for me.
I could decline.
I've earned the right to decline somewhere between the drugging, the kidnapping, and watching a man trade his life for mine like it made perfect sense.
Instead, I take a breath, sit up against the headboard, and answer.
"Amanda, darling." Her smile is already in place, polished and weightless, the smile she gives donors and waiters and, apparently, her only child. "There you are. You look... rested."
I'm wearing Valentino's shirt and nothing else, and my hair looks like I lost a fight with a wind tunnel.
Rested.
Sure.
"Hi, Mom."
"Listen, I'll be quick. I know you're busy with your little campaign.
" She waves one manicured hand, and behind her I can see the curated beige of whatever hotel suite she's haunting this week.
"The anniversary party is in two days. Thirty years, can you believe it?
Everyone will be there. The Hendersons, the Brices, that lovely senator your father plays golf with.
We need you there, darling. People ask about you. "
People ask about you.
Not we miss you.
Not where have you been?
Not are you okay?
To be fair, she doesn't know what happened. No one told her. No one knew where to start.
A laugh comes out of me before I can stop it. Short. Ugly. Surprising both of us.
"What's funny?" she asks.
"I'm not coming."
Her smile flickers. "What do you mean, you're not coming?"
"I mean I'm not coming."
My voice stays level, and a burst of pride spreads through me.
"You don't deserve me at your party, Mom. The same way I apparently didn't deserve parents who gave a single fuck about me."
"Amanda White. Watch your mouth."
"No. I won't, actually."
The words come fast now.
"I'm done pretending. You never wanted a kid.
You wanted an accessory you could mention at dinner parties.
Our daughter's in fashion. She's in Milan.
She's wonderful. You sent me a thumbs-up emoji, Mom.
The biggest moment of my career, two years of my life, and you sent me an emoji you'd send a dog walker. "
She opens her mouth.
I'm not finished.
"You never wanted a kid. Fine. Now it's my turn. I don't want to see you. Either of you. You don't get the party version of me anymore. The one who shows up and smiles and lets the Hendersons coo over her so you can feel like you didn't fail."
My throat tightens, but I make myself say the rest.
"That girl's retired."
For a moment, neither of us says anything.
Her face is utterly motionless. I watch her take it in, sort it, find the cleanest way out.
Then she nods slowly.
"Okay, honey. You're right."
The words land harder than any argument could have.
For a second, I almost wish she'd gotten angry. Yelled. Defended herself. Anything.
Because anger would mean this mattered to her.
Instead, she accepts it with the same calm efficiency she'd use to reschedule a lunch or change a seating chart.
And that's when it hits me.
I've spent years believing there had to be something underneath all of this. Some hidden version of my parents that loved me more than they knew how to show. Some locked door I just hadn't figured out how to open yet.
But maybe there was never a door.
Maybe I wasn't standing outside of anything.
My eyes start to burn.
I don't let a single tear fall while she can see me.
"If you ever want your daughter back," I say, and my voice catches once, just once, "you're going to have to prove you want her. Not invite her. Prove it."
"Of course," she says, in the tone she uses for vendors.
I hang up before she can say darling again.
For a while, I just sit there with the phone in my hand.
It hurts.
It hurts so much I have to press my fist against the center of my chest and breathe through it.
But underneath the ache, something else rises.
Relief.
I said it.
For the first time in twenty-five years, I said what I needed to say to the person who needed to hear it, and I didn't soften it. I didn't package it. I didn't turn it into something easier for her to swallow.
It hurt.
It still hurts.
I'd do it again.
I press the heels of my hands against my eyes until the burning backs off, then flop into the pillows that smell like cedar and him.
Valentino
Twenty minutes of access, bought with favors Bruno will be repaying for a year, and it all comes down to a piece of warm brass in my palm while a guard at the end of the corridor keeps his eyes fixed on the wall.
The lock turns. The door swings in on a room the size of a confession booth, and there he is.
Elio Mancini sits on the edge of a bolted cot with his hands loose between his knees, looking up at me like I’m room service he ordered a week ago."Hello, Valentino." His voice has rust in it. "I've been waiting for someone to come. For days now."
I believe him completely.
In our world, when you bite the hand that's fed you for years, the hand doesn't write you off or wish you well in your future endeavors. The hand comes to a federal holding facility outside Rome with a key it shouldn't have and twenty minutes nobody will log.
He's known this since the cuffs went on.
The waiting was the punishment. The arrival was always coming.
I step inside and pull the door behind me until it kisses the frame. The room smells of industrial bleach and a man who’s stopped caring how he smells. A fluorescent tube buzzes overhead with the dedication of an insect that forgot how to die.
"Who from the inner circle was working with you against the Sartoris?"
No greeting back.
He doesn't deserve the courtesy, and I don't have the time.
Elio nods once, slow, like he's rehearsed this conversation with the ceiling every night.
"There was no one. Absolutely no one."
I walk toward him without hurry. My footsteps sound flat on the floor, and I watch him track them.
Men expect rage in rooms like this. They brace for it the way they’d brace for weather.
Calm frightens them more. Rage means a man is still negotiating with himself. Calm means the decision was made before he walked in.
"Enzo Basile knew the exact minute that car would reach the airport road," I say. "Not the day. Not the hour. The minute. His truck hit the door Amanda was sitting behind. Luca took a skull fracture to protect her."
I stop in front of him, close enough to count the gray coming in at his temples.
"So you'll tell me who fed him the route."
I don't raise my voice. There's no need. He's going to answer because there’s nothing left in his life except answers, and we both know it.
"I only ever talked to Aldo." He holds my eyes when he says it, which surprises me, and I hate that it does.
"One man. One channel. Aldo wanted information about the family's Milan business.
He paid. That's the whole of it, Valentino.
I never met anyone above him or beside him.
If Basile knew the airport route, it didn't come through me. I was already in a cell."
That leaves one problem.
Aldo died under my hands two weeks before that truck hit the car. A dead man doesn't pass routes to his father.
Which means either Mancini is lying with the composure of a saint, or the leak is still breathing somewhere in our house, walking past our women, drinking our wine.
I don't let myself follow that thought any further. Not with Mancini sitting in front of me. We can deal with it later.
Tonight has one purpose, and it isn't comfort.
"Why?" I ask him. "You had a place. You had Vittoria's trust. Why work with a man like Aldo?"
Elio smiles. It's a sad thing, that smile, worn thin at the edges. The smile of a man looking back at the worst choice he ever made and still understanding why he made it.
"You know what it's like, being around them.
" He rubs his thumb across his knuckles.
"The Sartoris respected me. They did. But respect isn't the same as mattering.
I was the man who guarded their little sister and her friend.
That was what they needed from me, so that was all they saw.
Aldo looked at me and saw someone useful. "
His mouth tightens.
"It's pathetic how far that goes, being seen."
The honesty lands somewhere I don't want it.
I understand being respected and still not feeling seen. I understand standing close enough to power to feel its heat and still knowing none of it belongs to you.
The difference is what you do with that hunger, and he made his choice in an office on Via Savona with a trafficker's money on the table.
"Was it worth it?"
He considers the question seriously, which is the most respect he's shown anyone in months.
"Not really." A small shrug, the kind you'd give about a restaurant that disappointed you. "But that's life, no?"
That's life.
Amanda drugged on a palazzo floor. Luca breathing through a tube in Ostia.
That's life, he says, like he spilled wine on a carpet.
What I wanted was his bones. One at a time, starting small and working inward. Hours of it, until everything he gave Aldo came back out of him in screams.
I've wanted it since Bergamo.
I want it now badly enough that I have to stand still for a second before I trust myself to move.
But the corridor is full of federal attention and Palermo politics, and Bruno's condition was carved in granite.
I walk in clean, and I walk out clean. No hands.
No bullet. No knife. Nothing a coroner can hang on the Sartori name while the FBI still has Enzo's estate roped off like a museum exhibit.
So I look at the small table bolted beside the cot, and I point at the bottle of water sitting on it.
Plastic. Sealed enough to pass a glance. Ordinary as Tuesday.
"In twenty minutes," I tell him, "the pain will start. It’ll make you scream, and the screaming will bring the guards, and the guards will bring a doctor. None of it will matter. You won't survive more than ten minutes past their arrival. There's nothing they can push into your veins fast enough."
I let him look at the bottle.
Then I ask, "Do you have anything to say first?"
Elio looks at the bottle. Then at me.
The fluorescent light hums above us both, indifferent as God.
"I'm sorry," he says. "I mean it. For her, mostly. Tell her or don't. I'm sorry."
An apology at the end.
Sincere and useless.
Sorry doesn't unbruise a jaw. Sorry doesn't pull a truck off a car.
"Drink," I say.
He picks up the bottle. His hands don't shake.
The cap cracks. The plastic crackles under his grip, and he drinks it all the way down, throat working like a man finishing water after a long run in the sun.
When it's empty, he sets it back on the table with a care that's almost tender, the way you'd put down something borrowed.
I look at him sitting there with death already moving through his blood, this man who slept beside Amanda and sold the information that put her on Aldo's floor, and the rage I've been holding slips its grip for one second.
I spit on him.
It catches his cheek, and he doesn't wipe it away. He just closes his eyes.
The door locks behind me with a sound like a sentence ending. The guard down the corridor keeps his eyes on his wall, a professional.
My footsteps carry me out past the checkpoints and into the Roman night, where the air tastes of exhaust and coming rain, and I should feel finished.
The scales should feel balanced.
Instead, his answer works through me slower than any poison.
There was no one. I only ever talked to Aldo.
Dying men polish their sins, but they rarely invent new mysteries on the way out.
If he told the truth, then someone else gave Enzo that route.
Someone close.
Someone who still knows where Amanda sleeps.