Domenico
It’s taken him a month. A month of every eye I own turned on a single Albanian lawyer in Washington. His money, his clients, his calendar, the gaps in all three, and the picture that’s been developing the whole time is not the picture I expected.
I expected a monster’s journal. What I got is a hole in one. A pattern of nothing. Money that moves and lands nowhere. Court dates that don’t appear on any docket. Nights, all over the eastern seaboard, when Lorik Kovaci is provably not where his life says he is.
“It made no sense for weeks,” Giovanni says.
My father’s oldest friend, now married into the family, my brother-in-law’s biological father and my niece’s true grandfather, even if she still calls him Uncle G, looks older tonight than I’ve ever seen him.
“A krye with no vices. A man who launders for the worst animals in that swamp and skims nothing for himself. I kept looking for the angle. There isn’t one.
” He taps the file. “Then we caught him. Three weeks back. A farmhouse outside Frederick. We had eyes on him for the senator and instead we watched him kill two traffickers and walk a bought girl out to a nun in a sedan, and then we pulled the thread, Dom, and it goes back three years.”
I open the file.
I read it twice.
Lorik Kovaci—the youngest Albanian boss in history, the man who reached into my family and took my niece, has spent three years using his place among the worst men in this country to steal their victims out from under them.
Girls his own clients buy. He sits in rooms where senators confess what they’ve purchased, and he smiles, and then under the cloak of darkness, before they can use what they paid for, he gets there first. Quietly.
For free. For nobody. With no one but his second knowing it exists.
The flesh trade. The thing the Kovaci name has meant for a hundred years. The thing his brother fed and got rich on and raped my wife to satisfy.
And Lorik has been, in secret, the single most effective thing quietly dismantling it.
Giovanni is watching me read it the second time. He has wanted this man dead since the night the photo came. He’s wanted it the way only a grandfather who can’t say the word grandfather out loud can want a thing, and I can see it costing him to have brought me the truth instead of a body.
“Say it,” I tell him.
“I went to that city to find you a reason,” he says, low.
“I found you the opposite. I was at that farmhouse with a rifle, Domenico. One wrong move and the Kovaci boy was a closed file. I watched him carry that girl out to the nun, and I had to put the rifle down, because I have spent forty years killing the men who run houses like that one. I could not make my finger pull on the one man I ever found tearing one apart.” His jaw works.
“I don’t know whether to kill him for taking her or kneel to him for being the only one of them worth a damn. I was hoping you would.”
I sit in the dark of my office for a long time.
I came so close. I had the men, the plan, three approaches to his estate that Krishna mapped the first night.
I had fourteen years of hating the name, and I had a niece who’d been taken, and every righteous reason a man could ask for to walk into his house and put the last Kovaci in the ground beside his brother.
And I would have been killing the one man in that whole bloodline who looked at the machine that tried to break my wife and spent his life trying to take it apart with his bare hands.
Ciera was right. I’d want to know how a man comes out of that clean. He didn’t come out clean. He came out covered in the filth, drowning in a name he can’t scrub off, and he chose, every night, in the dark, where it earns him nothing, to be the opposite of what they made him.
There’s more in the file, but it doesn’t soften the picture, it sharpens it.
A month of footage from inside his own house, pulled by people far better than the men who let his mother walk through his gate.
My niece, who I last saw shatter her own mother’s heart to walk her out of a killer’s house alive, fed on bread that only ships from Italy.
Trained in a sunroom he cleared for her.
Held, two nights ago, by a man who’d just put a bullet between the eyes of the bastard who dared lay a hand on her.
I have spent a month preparing to avenge my niece on a man who has spent that same month loving her more competently than her own family ever managed.
It is the rescues that finally make me do the thing I have not been able to do in fourteen years.
It is the rescues that make me open the drawer.
The flash drive is exactly where it’s been, beside my father’s note in his own handwriting.
Watch when you’re ready to be the man I made you.
I’ve hated that sentence for over a decade. Tonight, with a good man’s secret soul spread across my desk, I finally understand that I’ve been afraid of it because some part of me always suspected it would ask me to forgive him.
I put it in the machine. I press play. And after years of not wanting to face this, my dead father looks out at me from a screen.
He’s exactly as I remember him, and that is the thing that takes my legs out from under me. Black hair that didn’t have one gray strand, a solid wall cased in all black, not slowed by a single day.
Fifty years old and built like a man who could still put you in the ground without loosening his tie, alive in every line on his face, with no idea that the day he was recording this, he was already racing toward his end.
He didn’t die in a bed. He didn’t get to choose his timing the way he chose everything else.
A bullet chose it for him. Ciera’s father aiming a gun leveled at the bride I hadn’t yet admitted I loved, and Tony Caputo doing the last and only soft thing I ever saw him do: shoving her clear and taking the hit so she could live to become the great love of my life, the mother to our four kids with two more on the way, K’s and my everything.
He made this video the way a man like him makes a will.
Once, three moves ahead, filed against a death he assumed would come later and on his terms. He assumed wrong.
And so he smiles at me now from before all of it, the smile I’d know in my sleep, the one that means he knows he’s three moves ahead of you and pities you for it, when he says—
“Domenico. If you’re watching this, then I’m already gone, and it didn’t go the way I planned, and truly that is okay but let me assure you, I am with Ari and I was already heading toward my home, to your mother, and I should have told you sooner than you’re learning now, son.
About the future you don’t know you’re already building. You should sit down for this.”
And then my father, fourteen years later, lays out the rest of his life’s work, the part he ran out of time to finish, the part he left to me without ever asking if I wanted it.
The Russians, by marriage. The Irish, by marriage. Three organized empires braided into a single formidable unit because the one who marries his enemies never has to bury them. I lived that. I am that. A man who agreed to one year and found, on the far side of it, the two loves of his life.
My father took all of our choosings and called it strategy and he was right, and I have spent my whole reign angry at him for being right.
And then he says it. The last family. The one outside the fold.
“The Albanians are the last wall, Domenico. The Kovaci’s.
Vicious, yes, The older brother is the worst kind of animal.
I know it, everyone knows it, but that animal won’t survive.
Animals never do, and I know when you discover what he’s done to Ciera, you’ll be the one to end him.
There is a second son. Lorik. He was shipped off to Albania, forgotten the same way Ciera was shipped to Ireland.
He was raised hard and smart and angry while everyone watched the wrong brother.
That is the one you keep your eye on. When the older one falls, the spare becomes the head, and the spare is the one worth binding to us. ”
The room has gone very cold and very quiet.
“She’’ll be of age by then,” my father says, gentle, terrible, reaching out of a grave to arrange another marriage, when he recorded this.
“Or close enough. And when the time is right, you’ll bind the last wall to us the only way that has ever truly held.
You’ll give Brooklyn to the Kovaci krye.
Not by force. We don’t break the ones we love, that’s the whole art of it.
You’ll do it by patience. By letting the board develop.
By being, my son, exactly the kind of ruthless that looks, from the outside, like fate. ”
I stop the video.
I sit back in my chair, in the dark of my office, in a city that used to be his, and I stare at my dead father frozen mid-sentence on a screen, and I say the only thing there is left to say.
“You son of a bitch.”
He named it. Fourteen fucking years ago, he named my niece and the Kovaci boy and the marriage I have spent the last month preparing to end in blood, and he set the whole thing in motion with a patience so total it reached past his own death to arrange a wedding I thought was revenge.
“How the hell did you do it, old man?” I say to the darkness that can’t hear me.
The masked stalker I let circle her for eighteen months because something in me wouldn’t kill him. The marriage I let stand because something wouldn’t let me storm his gate. The rescues that stayed my hand at the last possible second.
I have been playing his game the entire time. I just didn’t know whose board it was. And my sister is going to flip her shit.
“You planned this from the grave,” I tell the frozen, smiling face of the man who made me. “You arranged her the same way you arranged me, and Lorenzo, and Sienna, and you collected Ciera like a debt and never asked what it cost, and I swore the next one of us would choose.”
And there it is. The thing I can’t get around, the splinter under all of it, the reason I haven’t been able to finish this video for longer than decade.
He was right about every other arrangement he ever forced. Every single one ended in love. Love so deep and possessive none of us could breath without the others.
But he forced them. And I promised Brooklyn, I promised her the day I told her the truth about her mother at a graveside, I promised her with my hand on the back of her neck, that she would never be a piece on anyone’s board. Not even on a dead man’s. Not even on mine.
And now she’s married to the man my father chose, in a marriage that began at the point of a needle, and they tell me she’s falling for him three hundred miles away, and I don’t know anymore whether I’d be saving her by tearing it apart or robbing her by leaving it whole.
And the one person whose counsel I would trust with this is her mother, and her mother cannot be trusted with it, because it is her daughter.
I am the boss. I make the calls. And for the first time in fourteen years, I do not know what the right one is.
I take the flash drive out of the machine. I do not lock it away again.
I pour my father’s favorite bourbon, and this time I drink it. I look out at his city, and I make the only decision a man in my chair can make when the board is this unclear.
I’m going to go to Washington. I’m going to look the Kovaci krye in the eye, with everything I now know, and I’m going to decide whether my father gave my niece a husband, or whether I have to make a liar of a dead man, and a widow of my doll, to keep a promise I made her at a grave.
“I love you, dad, with everything inside of me, I love you, but tonight, fuck you. Fuck you for putting this decision in my hand.”