Lorik
Iwake with my wife asleep on my chest and the whole board laid out clean in my head, every piece exactly where I want it, and I think—today is the day I take the last of her.
She’s wrecked and soft against me, one leg thrown over mine, her breath even, the little bars of steel in her skin pressed warm to my ribs.
Last night she killed three men and gave me her body and let me hold her while she slept. Somewhere in the dead of the night I let myself believe the war was nearly over, that I had only to sever the last cord and she’d be mine all the way down.
That cord is named Kennedy. And I’m about to cut it in front of her whole family.
My phone lights on the nightstand.
Cas
The Caputos are at the gate.
I knew they’d come.
I built the photo, the silence, the bait, all of it, for this exact morning.
For the moment Matteo De Salvo and his badass wife and their ruthless boss storm my house to take their girl back, and I get to stand in front of them and detonate the lie they’ve carried for years.
And Brooklyn will look at the people she loves and see liars, and there will be no one left in her world but me.
Because she is mine, and I’m going to make sure she stays that way.
Me
Let them in.
I wake her. I tell her, watching her face go from drowsy to ash in a single breath, that her family is downstairs. I tell her to get dressed and meet me. She has a whole wardrobe in our closet now, including the clothes she was wearing the night I took her.
I expect fear. Brooklyn is smart enough to know what I am, what this house is, how outnumbered they’ll be inside my walls.
What I don’t expect is the look she gives me on her way to the closet. Not fear for herself.
Fear for them.
I should have read it then. But I was too busy winning.
They’re in my great room when we come down, and the air is a held breath.
Matteo De Salvo is exactly as big as the legend, and he has gone a shade of red I’ve only ever seen on men a second before they swing.
He’s called the beast in a boxing ring, and here he looks the part.
Beside him, Sienna Caputo De Salvo is average height and lethal in the particular way of women who were raised by a killer, her eyes fixed on Brooklyn like she isn’t leaving without the girl she didn’t birth but loves her as if she did.
And a step behind them both, in a black suit, perfectly calm, stands Domenico Caputo, and he is not looking at his niece at all.
He’s looking at me, faintly, like a man watching a card trick he’s already seen.
I don’t let it land. I have a kill to make.
“Welcome,” I say, warm, spreading my hands, Cas a silent wall at my shoulder.
“I’d offer coffee, but I don’t think you came for the hospitality.
You came for her.” I look at Brooklyn, drawn up tight and pale at the foot of my stairs, and I aim, and I fire.
“Before you try to take her anywhere, she should hear it from someone who isn’t lying to her.
” I let it set a beat. “Brooklyn, love, ask your beloved uncle what he did to your mother. Your real one. Ask all of them how long they’ve known.
Ask why a girl who lays flowers on a grave was never told that the man at her own Sunday table is the one who put her mother in the ground with his own blade across her throat. ”
It’s a beautiful shot. It’s perfectly placed.
Sienna gasps, a real, gutted sound. Her hand comes up to her mouth, and suddenly she isn’t looking so lethal anymore.
Matteo goes from red to white. And Brooklyn’s eyes go wide, and for one shining second I have her, I have all of them, and I think there it is, this is the thing that keeps my girl mine.
“Brooklyn,” Sienna starts, “Baby girl, it’s not—”
Then my wife steels her back and opens her pretty mouth, and I learn what it is to be the one who got played.
“You think I don’t know, Sienna?”
The room stops.
She doesn’t call her Mom. I don’t yet understand what that costs her, what that single dropped word does, but I watch it hit Matteo’s wife like a round to the chest. I watch a strong woman flinch harder at a name than she would at a fist to the face, and then I understand that I am witnessing something I did not set in motion and do not control.
“I’ve known for years,” Brooklyn says, and her voice is ice, and it is cruel, and it is aimed with a precision that has nothing to do with me.
And it’s wrong coming out of her mouth. “I’ve known you all let it sit there.
That you smiled at me across the table with it in your mouths.
That you decided what I could handle like I’m something delicate instead of something you built.
” She turns the blade on her father. “And you. You stood there at her grave and held my hand and said nothing. So no, Matteo, I don’t need the Albanian to tell me what my family is or what my family did, or that they never bother to give me the truth. I grew up in it.”
“Honey—” Sienna’s voice cracks straight down the middle. “We only ever wanted to—”
“Get out.” Brooklyn’s chin is up and her eyes are dry and her hands are shaking at her sides where she thinks no one can see.
She’s wrapping this up and she’s shoving them toward the door before I can land my next move.
“Both of you. All of you. Go home. There’s nothing here for you. There never was.”
Sienna breaks. And if you’d asked me if that were ever possible, I would have laughed and told you hell no.
But then she turns, blind with tears, and Matteo catches her, and for one terrible second he looks like he might come across the room and end me with his bare hands regardless of every gun in it.
And then his wife sobs into his chest, and a father is torn clean in half between the daughter who just gutted him and the wife who’s coming apart in his arms like even he didn’t think this was possible.
Brooklyn makes the choice for him. “She needs you more than I do,” she says, soft and savage. “She always has. Now go.”
And Matteo De Salvo, the greatest there ever was, takes his weeping wife out of my house without throwing a single punch, because his daughter told him to, because she made it the only door he could walk through.
Then doors closes, and I stand there in the silence, victorious, and feel, for reasons I cannot name, like I’ve lost something.
Because it was too clean. Too precise. The cruelty too perfectly weighted to do maximum damage with minimum truth. And the way her hands are shaking—
“Sit down, Domenico,” Brooklyn says, not turning around. “You’re the only one who came here to actually do something.”
That’s when I finally look, really look, at the man I forgot was in the room.
Domenico Caputo hasn’t moved. He’s watching his niece with something that is almost pride and almost grief, and when he crosses to her it’s unhurried, and when he takes her chin in his hand it’s gentle, and his voice, when it comes, is the quietest thing in the house and the most dangerous.
“If you were anyone else,” he tells her, “and you did that to my sister, made her cry like that, dropped her name like a knife, you’d be as cold right now as the worthless whore whose throat I opened.
Anyone else on this earth, doll.” His thumb strokes once along her jaw.
“But you’re not anyone else. And that isn’t what I meant by own it.
So now you’re going to fix it. You’re going to call her tonight and you’re going to call her Mom, and you’re going to let her know you did what you did to get her out of a killer’s house alive, because that is what you did, and I watched you do it, and it was the bravest, stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. ”
Brooklyn’s composure finally fractures, just at the edges, just for him. “Dom—”
“You are not the boss, Brooklyn.” It lands soft and absolute. “I am. I am responsible for every life that carries our blood and our name. I make the calls, and I protect what is mine. I decide who lives and who gets a blade across their throat or a bullet between their eyes.”
That, mine, claws something feral up my throat before I can stop it. A low sound, a warning, because she is not his, she is mine, I made her mine in a dozen ways last night, and he is standing in my house putting his hand on my wife and calling her his—
Domenico’s eyes lift to me, and he smiles, and it is the worst thing I have seen in this entire war.
“There it is,” he says to me. Then, to Brooklyn, never breaking his stare from mine, “Do you honestly believe I would have let my sister walk through that man’s gate if I weren’t certain she’d walk back out of it?”
The floor tilts under me.
Because Brooklyn already knew. About Kennedy. How long, I don’t know. But she knew that Domenico Caputo wielded the blade and is the reason she puts flowers on the ground.
My beautiful, perfect, devastating shot was fired at a target that wasn’t there. The cord was cut long before I got to it, and everything I just watched, the cruelty and the tears and Matteo’s broken exit, wasn’t her shattering under my hand, not theirs.
It was her thinking she was saving them from me.
She turned my weapon into a door and walked her family out through it before I could close it on them. She broke her own heart in front of me, on purpose, with surgical love, and I stood here and called it winning.
“You,” I manage, and my voice is not as steady as it has been in thirteen years.
“Me.” Domenico releases his niece, and turns, and gives me the full weight of his attention for the first time, and I feel it the way you feel the weather changing.
“Let me clear something up for you, Kovaci, because you’ve been operating under a charming misapprehension.
You did not take her. I let her be taken.
I have known exactly where my niece was every hour of every day since the moment she left that arena. ”
He steps closer, unhurried, into the space my guards would kill any other man for entering, and when he speaks next it’s lower, pitched down beneath the room, just for me, Brooklyn close enough to see his mouth move and not to catch the words.
“I know what you are to her, Kovaci,” he murmurs, for me alone.
“Not just what you’ve done under this roof.
What you are. The thing she hasn’t let herself put together yet.
” His eyes don’t leave mine, and there is no bluff anywhere in them.
“I’ve known since the first night you broke your own rule.
When she finds it, and she will, secrets always come into the light, you had better have earned the right to still be breathing, because I’ll be watching that, too. Closely.”
He straightens, and lets his voice come back up to where his niece can hear it, and the easy public weight of it is almost worse.
“You think I’d ever let a man hack my house blind again?
” he says. “That happened to me exactly once. It cost my father his life. So no. Never again. I’ve known where she was since she left that arena, and I’ve had eyes on you for longer than you’ve been comfortable.
You did not take her, krye. I let her be taken, because a smart man lets the board develop before he sweeps it. ”
He buttons his jacket. He nods, almost courteous, at the man whose entire life he has just held up to the light and declined, for now, to burn.
“I know everything, Kovaci,” Domenico Caputo says. “You have never once had the upper hand. You only ever had the part I let you hold.”
And then he walks out of my house, past my guards, through my gate, and leaves me standing in the wreckage of a victory that was never mine, outplayed by a man who let me believe I was the one moving the pieces, and humbled, worse, by a wife who broke her own soul in front of me to walk her family out of here alive.
She’s two feet away, white to the lips, staring at the door her uncle just closed.
“What did he say to you?” she asks. “At the end. The part I couldn’t hear.”
I look at her, the only person alive who could destroy me, one true sentence away from it and not knowing, and for the first time since I was sixteen years old, I lie because I am afraid.
“Mob business,” I tell my wife. “Nothing that’s yours to carry.”