Chapter 14
CONSTANTINE
The days after our wedding had a quality I didn't have a word for.
Not quite peace, because the threat from Italy was always in the background, a low frequency hum underneath everything else, and I was too experienced to mistake a lull for safety.
But something adjacent to peace. Something that felt like what life might be when the external pressure lifted, a preview of a thing I hadn't known I wanted until I had a glimpse of it.
CeCe had moved through the house and made it different without changing anything visible.
She cooked in the mornings and read in the afternoons, talked about the history of our family and anything else he raised with enough conviction to invite an argument, which was most things.
She sat with my mother in the evenings sometimes, the two of them in the sitting room with a bottle of something good between them, and I would pass the doorway and hear them talking in the easy unhurried way of women who had decided to trust each other, and I would keep walking because some things were private and I was glad they existed.
At night she was mine, and I was hers, and the mornings came too quickly and I found myself resenting my own alarm clock for the first time in my adult life.
I had a wife. I was still getting used to the specific weight of that word and finding that it fit better every day.
Four days after the wedding I was at my desk when Emilio came through the door without knocking.
"Constantine, we've got chatter." He set a transcript on my desk that our security team had intercepted overnight, his expression doing the thing it did when the news was worse than he wanted it to be. "It's significant."
I picked it up and read it. Then I set it down on the desk and leaned back in my chair and looked at the ceiling for a moment.
"Fuck." I had known it was coming. I had known it since the night of the wedding when the four families had sat in my office and told me the window was narrowing. Knowing something is coming and having it arrive were different things. "I was hoping we'd have more time."
"I know."
"How long?"
"Days. A week at the outside, and that's optimistic." He sat down across from me, his eyebrows pulled tight. "The chatter puts him in transit. He's not making calls from Sicily anymore."
Which meant Sergio Avola was already moving. Which meant whatever I needed to have in place needed to be in place now.
"Call everyone in," I said. "We need to get the full picture before we make any moves."
"Where will we fight?" Emilio said it with the directness of a man who had already made his own decision about his role in what was coming.
I looked at him. "Emilio?”
"Your father can't stand with you." He sat straighter in the chair, and I saw in him the man he had been before years of consigliere work had made fighting someone else's battles the primary expression of his loyalty.
"So it's my job now. I haven't forgotten any of my training.
" His jaw was set and his eyes were level and I knew without asking that he'd been preparing for this since the day my father was diagnosed, quietly and without announcement, the way he did everything that mattered.
"I know you haven't," I said. "I've seen you in the shooting range." Three times a week, every week, without fail. "I'm glad you're with me."
"Always." He nodded once. "Where?"
"Here." I leaned forward on the desk. "I can control everything here.
I know every inch of this property and so do my men, and that advantage matters more than it sounds.
" I thought through the logistics, the parts of the grounds that were defensible, the parts that weren't, the staff who needed to be gone before this happened.
"I'm sending everyone non-essential home.
Housekeeping, the chef, the gardeners, anyone who doesn't need to be here.
I want only guards, soldiers, and the security team on the property when this goes down. "
Emilio nodded, already cataloguing.
"And Dante," I said, because it needed to be said. "He's going to push back but I need him in the safe house."
Emilio's expression shifted slightly. "He already knows," he said. "I told him this morning because I thought he'd want time to prepare." A pause. "He said he'd take his chances."
I looked at the desk for a moment. My father, who was dying of lung cancer in his bedroom, who had been the most formidable man I'd ever known, who was refusing to be moved from his own house in the face of an armed threat because he was still, even now, more don than patient.
I couldn't decide if I was frustrated or proud.
"I'll talk to him," I said.
I was reading back through the transcript, going through every vile thing Sergio Avola had written about his daughter with a cold fury that I was keeping carefully managed, when a knock came at the door and Cecelia walked in.
She stopped when she saw Emilio and read the room immediately, the way she read rooms, which was to say completely and without apparent effort. Emilio excused himself with a nod and she waited until the door closed behind him before she came to me.
I pushed my chair back from the desk and held out my hand and she settled onto my lap with the naturalness of someone who had been doing it for years rather than days, and I held the transcript in front of her without preamble because she had asked to be treated as a partner and I intended to keep that promise.
She read it. I watched her face go through several things in quick succession, none of which she tried to hide from me.
"I knew he hated me," she said finally. "But this is vile, Con." She let the paper flutter to the desk and leaned back against me. I wrapped my arms around her and felt some of the tension in her shoulders slowly release.
"You challenged him and won," I said. "I never imagined he'd take that lying down. Especially with my family involved."
She was quiet for a moment. I half expected her to stiffen at the reminder of what her father was, but she didn't. "He used to be kind," she said.
"He was a good father, once." Her voice was distant, reaching for something that was a long way back.
"Before the wars. Before he understood what I was worth to him.
" She didn't finish the sentence and she didn't need to.
I held her tighter and didn't try to offer anything that would ring false. Some things didn't have a response that was adequate and this was one of them.
"I'm sending the staff home within the hour," I said after a moment. "We'll be down to guards and soldiers until this is resolved." I paused. "I hate to ask, given that we're technically on our honeymoon."
She turned on my lap and looked at me with an expression that had something in it I was still learning to recognize, the particular warmth she reserved for moments when I said something that surprised her with its honesty. "Will you cook for the men? It's a lot to ask."
"You don't have to ask." She held my gaze. "I will do anything you need me to."
I looked at her face, at the concern in her eyes and the steadiness underneath it, at this woman who had crossed an ocean alone and walked into enemy territory and built something real here with the same quiet determination she brought to everything, and I thought that I had not adequately understood what I was agreeing to when I proposed marriage in the library six days ago.
I had thought I understood. I had been wrong in the best possible way.
"I'm going to remember you said that," I said.
"I promise." She leaned in and kissed me, and it was the first time she'd initiated it without the context of the bedroom, the first time it had come from her without anything prompting it except the wanting to, and I held her the way you held things you intended to keep and kissed her back with everything I had.
Her arms went around my neck and she leaned into me and the kiss stopped being something gentle and became something considerably less manageable, and I had one hand in her hair and the other moving down her back and I was genuinely considering the structural integrity of my own desk when a soft knock on the door made us both go completely still.
"Oh god, Con." She let go of me and was off my lap and across the room in approximately two seconds, smoothing her hair with both hands before pressing her fingers to her mouth.
Her lips were beautifully swollen and her face was flushed red from the stubble of my jaw.
I slid my chair forward and closer to the desk with a speed that was not my most dignified moment.
"Come in."
My mother's head appeared around the door and I watched CeCe contemplate the window as a means of escape before deciding against it and turning her back to examine the bookshelf with tremendous apparent interest in books she'd already read.
"I'm sorry to bother you while you're working.
" My mother came in and looked between us with an expression that missed nothing and was enjoying itself considerably.
CeCe kept her attention on the bookshelf and left the room with the quiet speed of someone who had decided that retreat was the better part of valor, pulling the door closed behind her.
"I'm sorry, sweetheart, did I interrupt something?"
"No, mother. I was kissing my wife and she's shy about being caught."
"Hmm." She sat down across from me and the amusement faded into something else.
"I need you to talk to your father. Emilio told him everything and he's refusing to go to the safe house.
He won't hear it." She folded her hands in her lap and I could see the effort she was making to hold herself together, the particular composure of a woman who had been holding herself together for eight months and was running low on the resources required.
"I need you to talk to him, Constantine. "
I looked at her across the desk. "Mother, I can't make him do anything he doesn't want to do.
He is still the head of this family. If he was giving up, I'd worry, but refusing to be moved from his own house is exactly the kind of thing he should be doing.
" I paused. "He's still fighting. That's what we want. "
She knew I was right. I could see it in her face alongside the fact that being right didn't help much when the man you'd spent forty-one years loving was refusing to take the action that might keep him alive slightly longer.
"Go back to making out with your wife," she said, standing, her voice catching the edge of something she wasn't going to let out in my office. "Must be nice."
"Mother." I was around the desk before she reached the door. She stopped and her shoulders dropped, all the composure she'd been maintaining going out of her at once, and I put my arms around her and held on.
She was quiet for a moment. Then her shoulders began to shake.
"I'm not ready," she said, her voice muffled against my chest, stripped of everything except the plain truth of it. "I know it's coming. I've known for months. I'm still not ready."
"I know." I held her tighter. There was nothing else available.
No version of this that I could make easier, no comfort that was adequate to the size of what she was facing.
I was going to lose the most important man in my life, and she was going to lose the man who had been her entire life for forty-one years, and neither of those things had a remedy.
We stood there for a while, my mother and I, in my office with the threat from Italy sitting on the desk behind us and the house quiet around us, and I thought about my father refusing to go to the safe house and understood it completely.
He was going to go the way he'd decided to go, on his own terms, in his own house, fighting to the last available moment.
I thought that was probably the most Dante Venosa thing he had ever done.
It didn't make it easier. But it made it true.