27. Dominic
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Dominic
I had expected to find Grassi hiding.
But I did not expect to find him standing over Angela with a gun in his hand.
She was bound to a chair in the center of the warehouse floor.
The two men Grassi had posted at the side entrance hadn’t wanted to let me through. They were still on the gravel outside.
Grassi’s men raised their weapons when my men came through the door. My men raised theirs in response. The warehouse went still, two armies facing each other across the concrete floor, and neither side fired.
Grassi looked at me across the space between us. His gun stayed pointed at Angela’s head.
“Before you do something loud.” His voice echoed off the metal walls. “Ask her who sold you to me.”
I kept my own gun trained on his chest. “I already know who sold me to you.”
“Then ask her who sold me to you.” He tilted his head toward Angela. “Go on. Ask her.”
I looked at Angela. Her eyes were wet. Her lower lip was trembling. She looked smaller than I had ever seen her, crumpled in that chair with her wrists zip-tied behind her back.
“What is he talking about?” I kept my voice flat. “What does he mean, who sold him to me?”
“Dominic.” Her voice cracked on my name. “You have to understand. Everything I did, I did for you. For us. For what we could have been.”
“Answer the question.”
“She’s been handing me your shipments for a year.” Grassi stepped closer to her chair, his gun still aimed at her temple. “She fed it all to me. Cost you millions. Made you look weak in front of every family on the coast.”
“I know.” My finger rested on the trigger. “That’s why I’m here.”
“But here’s what you don’t know.” Grassi’s mouth curved into a thin smile. “She’s also been handing your people my moves. My shipments. My schedules. Feeding you just enough to keep you circling, keep you suspicious, keep you looking at me instead of at her.”
I looked at Angela again. At her wet eyes and her trembling lip and the panic written across her face.
“Is that true?” I took a step toward her. “You were feeding both sides?”
“I was trying to help you.” The words tumbled out of her, fast and desperate.
“I was trying to make you see that you needed me. That I could handle things Liana never could. If you and Grassi kept fighting, kept bleeding each other, eventually you would turn to me. You would see what I could do. What I could be for you.”
“You were playing us against each other.” I lowered my gun slightly. “Keeping the war going so you could make yourself indispensable.”
“I was showing you my value.” She leaned forward against her restraints. “Everything I did, every piece of information I gave him, I gave you something in return. I kept the balance. I kept you both alive.”
“You kept us circling.” Grassi’s voice was cold. “Neither of us able to land a killing blow. Neither of us sure where the leaks were coming from. All so you could play queen of the board.”
I stared at her. At this woman I had trusted.
“Ask yourself who wins if you and I finally put each other in the ground.” Grassi turned to face me fully, his gun still trained on Angela.
“The Calabrese move in while we’re bleeding out.
The Moretti pick our bones clean. And she walks away with whatever she managed to skim, finds another family to play, starts the whole game over. ”
“I wasn’t skimming.” Angela’s voice went shrill. “I never took a cent that wasn’t mine. I did this for you, Dominic. I did this because I love you.”
Love. She had the audacity to use that word.
After everything she had done.
“You don’t love me.” I holstered my gun and walked toward her chair. “You don’t know the first thing about love.”
“I do.” Tears were running down her face now. “I’ve loved you since we were kids. I’ve been waiting for you to see me, really see me, for twenty years.”
“I see you now.” I stopped in front of her chair and looked down at her. “I see exactly what you are.”
“I could have run it better than she ever did.” She was crying harder now, her words coming out in gasps. “I could have been everything you needed. If you had just given me a chance. If you had just let me show you-”
“You could have been nothing.” I crouched down so I was eye level with her. “There was never a seat open next to me, Angela. There’s one woman on this earth who sits there. And you spent months trying to bleed her out for a chair that was never empty.”
“Dominic, please.” She was sobbing now. “Please. I can fix this. I can make it right. Just give me a chance. Just let me-”
“You sent men into my daughter’s bedroom.” I stood up and stepped back from her chair. “You put a target on my wife. You used my child as leverage against me.”
“That wasn’t me.” She shook her head frantically. “That was Grassi. He sent those men, not me. I would never hurt Bianca. I would never-”
Grassi cut in, his voice flat. “Don’t play innocent now.”
Angela’s mouth opened and closed. No sound came out.
I looked at Grassi across the warehouse floor. Two men who had grown up in the same water. Two men who had spent a year bleeding each other dry because the woman between us couldn’t stand to be second place.
“She played us both.” I held his gaze.
“She did.” Grassi nodded slowly. “My war’s with her.”
“Your war’s with me too.” I didn’t lower my voice. “You sent two men into my daughter’s bedroom.”
His jaw worked. He didn’t deny it.
“Those two men are alive. My people have them.” I let that sit. “They’ll tell anyone who asks who paid them to pull a child out of her bed. There isn’t a family on this coast that will sit at a table with a man who sends a crew after children.”
Grassi’s gun hand didn’t move. Something in his face did.
“Here’s what ends this.” I took one step closer.
“Every route she handed you comes back to me by the end of the week. You pay back every dollar you took off my trucks. Every forged manifest with my codes on it, every page of that trail you built to hand the families, comes back to me too. And if anyone who has ever taken your money comes within a mile of my wife or my daughter, those two men start talking. And I won’t wait for the other families to decide what to do with you. ”
“And if I agree?”
“Then you keep breathing. And I never forget what you did.”
The silence stretched long enough that I heard water lapping against the pilings outside.
“Done,” Grassi said.
“Then she’s yours.” I turned away from Angela’s chair. “She stole from you last. Settle it however you settle it.”
“Dominic.” Angela’s voice climbed to a scream. “Dominic, you can’t do this. You can’t leave me here. Please. Please, I’m begging you.”
I kept walking toward the door.
“I did everything for you.” She was shrieking now, fighting against her restraints. “Everything. And this is how you repay me? By leaving me with him? Dominic. Dominic!”
I paused at the door but didn’t turn around.
“The harbor’s cold this time of year.” Grassi said it casual, like he was discussing the weather. “Takes a long time to drown when you’re weighted down just enough to sink slow.”
Angela started screaming again. Begging. Promising anything, everything. Her voice broke and cracked and climbed until it wasn’t words anymore, just sound.
I walked out and let the door close behind me.
The cars were waiting in the lot. I climbed into the passenger seat and Stefan got behind the wheel. The engine started and we pulled away, leaving the warehouse and everything in it behind.
“What about Grassi?” Stefan glanced over at me. “We just let him walk?”
“He walks because I’m letting him.” I stared out the window at the lightening sky. “The two men from the house stay alive. Put them somewhere Grassi will never find them. The day he forgets our arrangement, they tell the Calabrese and the Moretti exactly who sent them after a child.”
“You trust him to keep it?”
“I trust him to do the math.” I closed my eyes. “A war with me costs him money. What those two men know costs him everything.”
Stefan was quiet for a moment. The car turned onto the main road, heading back toward Newport.
“And Angela?”
“By tomorrow she will be fish feed.”
Stefan didn’t respond. He didn’t need to.
“She sent it to me.” His voice was rough. “Liana. Last night. The whole folder.”
I turned my head and looked at him.
“I was down at the docks going through the manifests again. My phone was in my jacket on the back seat.” His knuckles were white on the wheel. “I didn’t look at it until your man called it in. By then they were already through the window.”
“Stefan.”
“Thirty years I’ve been telling men to keep their eyes open and their phones on them.” He shook his head once, hard. “And the one night it mattered, I had my head buried in paperwork. If I’d looked. If I’d just picked it up-”
“You weren’t the one who let her into my house.”
“Doesn’t matter.” He stared straight ahead at the road. “I should have been faster. That’s the job. That’s always been the job, and last night I didn’t do it.”
I didn’t answer him. There was nothing to say that would make either of us feel any lighter.
***
The house on Maple Street looked quiet when we pulled up. Two of my men were still stationed at the front door, right where I’d left them. They nodded as I walked past.
The living room was dim. The curtains were still drawn. And on the sofa, where my men had carried her after the medic finished, was Liana.
She was awake. Her arm was strapped tight against her body in a sling, the medic’s stitches hidden under white gauze at her shoulder.
Bianca was curled against her side, finally asleep, her small face pressed into her mother’s hip. Liana’s hand was resting on our daughter’s hair, stroking it slowly, rhythmically, the way she had done since Bianca was a baby.
She looked up when I came in.
I stopped in the doorway. My hands were wrecked, knuckles split and bloody from the men I had gone through to get to the warehouse.
My suit was ruined. I probably smelled like cordite and sweat and the particular copper tang of violence.
I crossed the room and knelt down in front of the sofa. Below her. I had never done this for anyone.
“It’s done.” I kept my voice low so I wouldn’t wake Bianca. “Angela. Grassi. The whole thing. It’s finished. It’ll never touch you again.”
Liana didn’t say anything. Her hand kept moving in Bianca’s hair.
Her eyes were wet. But she still wasn’t speaking.
“You were right.” I looked down at my ruined hands. “You were right about everything. And I was so busy defending her, so sure that I knew best, that I almost lost you. Almost lost Bianca. Almost lost everything that actually matters.”
“What happened to Angela?” Her voice was hoarse.
“Grassi has her.” I met her eyes.
“And you left her there?”
“She sent men into our daughter’s bedroom.” My jaw tightened. “She used our child as a weapon against me.”
Liana’s hand stilled in Bianca’s hair.
“Grassi’s settling it.” I held her gaze. “She won’t be a problem anymore. For either of us. Ever again.”
“Good.” The word came out flat. Hard. Final. “Good.”
“And Grassi?” Her eyes held mine. “He sent them, Dominic. He’s the one who sent them.”
“Grassi gives back every route she handed him and pays for every truck.” I didn’t look away.
“And the two men who came into this house are alive. They know who hired them. If Grassi, or anyone who takes his money, comes near you or Bianca again, every family on this coast hears it. He knows what that means.”
“That’s not enough.”
“It’s enough to keep him away.” I held her gaze. “And if it ever stops being enough, I’ll finish it myself.”
I reached into my jacket. The envelope was crumpled from everything that had happened, but still intact. I pulled it out and set it in her lap, next to our sleeping daughter.
Liana looked down at it. Her hand lifted from Bianca’s hair and picked it up.
“What is this?”
“Open it.”
She did. She pulled out the papers and unfolded them, and I watched her breath stop in her chest.
My name was at the bottom. In my own hand. Signed an hour ago in the car on the way to the warehouse, before I knew how the night would end.
“Dominic.” Her voice was barely a whisper.
“You asked me to let you go.” I kept my hands at my sides. Did not reach for her. Did not try to touch her or hold her or pull her back to me. “So I’m letting you go.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No house you don’t know I own.” I held her eyes. “No doors closing that you can’t see. No manipulation, no control, no cages. If you want to go, Liana, go. I’m not going to stop you this time.”
Her hands were shaking. The papers trembled between her fingers.
“I spent ten years trying to keep you.” My voice cracked. “Trying to hold on so tight you couldn’t leave. And all I did was push you away. All I did was prove that you were right to be scared of me.”
“I was never scared of you.”
“You should have been.” I looked at our daughter, asleep and peaceful, her face soft in the dim light. “I’ve done terrible things. I am a terrible thing. And I brought that into your life when you were twenty-one years old and I never once asked if you wanted it there.”
“Dominic.”
“I’m asking now.” I looked back at her. “I’m asking you what you want. Not what I want. Not what’s best for the family or the business or any of it. Just you. What do you want?”
Liana stared at the papers in her hands. At my signature at the bottom.
The sun was fully up now, light streaming through the gaps in the curtains, falling across the sofa and the sleeping child and the woman I loved more than my own life.
I had done everything wrong. I knew that. I had hurt her in ways I was only beginning to understand.
I couldn’t undo any of it. Couldn’t take back the lost years or the broken promises or the nights she had spent alone while I worked late with a snake in my own office.
All I could do was give her this. The choice I should have given her from the beginning.
The choice to stay or go.
Liana looked up from the papers. Her eyes met mine. And she opened her mouth to answer.