Page 74 of Savage Daddy
The gas. The chemical wall of it pouring out under her door. Olimpo locking up on the threshold with that ancient sound coming out of him. My arm across her chest. The white. The heat the size of the building, the hand that lifted us both off the ground.
And then the hands that weren’t mine.
I’d seen them. I’d been on the ground with the smoke pouring into my mouth and the ringing eating the world and I’d seen, through the orange dark, gloved hands close on her arms and haul her up off her own sidewalk and back, away from the fire, away from me, while I crawled toward her on a street that wouldn’t hold still and shouted a name nobody could hear.
I tried to sit up.
I put my hands flat to push myself up off that bed and my body simply refused me. The ribs locked. The arm screamed. My back went to water. I got maybe four inches off the pillow, four inches, and the room swung hard and a sound came out of me that wasn’t a word, and I dropped.
Flat on my back. While she was gone.
“Easy.” A voice. Low. Accented soft. Pietro.
I got my eyes to focus and found him at the window, and the sight of him stopped my breath worse than the ribs did.
He was still in his wedding tux.
Hours ago I’d watched my cousin marry the woman who brought him back from the dead. I’d watched the stillness crack on his face when she came up the aisle, watched joy and disbelief land on the most controlled of all of us, and I’d cried beside Katerina and not made a sound. And here was Pietro now, the bow tie gone, the collar open, the white shirt that had been crisp under the orange blossom turned grey down the whole front of it—smoke, ash, and lower, near the hip, a dark stiff stain that was someone’s blood and wasn’t his. He stood with one hand on the sill and watched me and his face had nothing in it. Nothing. The volume turned all the way down, the way it gets down only when it’s bad, the way it had been before Angela, and I knew before anyone said anything that we were back in the worst country there is.
“Where is she?” It came out of me like gravel. “Pietro. Where is she?”
He didn’t answer.
Sal was in the chair beside the bed. I hadn’t seen him because he was so still he’d gone into the furniture, the way he does, the eldest, the unmoved object, still as the stone of the church wall holding the afternoon’s heat. His suit was wrecked too. There was a graze along his jaw, dried dark, and his big hands were folded in his lap and he was watching me with the deep heavy eyes set under those brows, and there was something in them I had only seen on Salvatore Scordato twice in my life. Once when our father didn’t come home. Once when the woman he was going to marry told him she’d be marrying someone else.
Grief, with the lid bolted down so it couldn’t move.
“Sal.” I heard my own voice climb. “Sal. Tell me she’s—” I couldn’t get the end of the sentence out. The big loud man, nevershort of words in three languages, and I lay there with my chest taped and could not say the word, because saying it might make the answer be the answer. “Tell me.”
“She’s alive.”
Two words. He said them flat and fast, the way you’d throw a rope to a man over a drop, and I felt them go into me and hold and I breathed—one whole ragged breath I’d been refusing to take.
“As far as we know,” he said. And then, because he is the one who does not lie to you, who never softens an edge: “Tonio. She’s alive, and she’s gone. They took her. We don’t have her.”
I looked from him to Pietro and back, at the smoke-grey tux and the bolted-down grief and the two men who stand who don’t stand for nothing, and the ringing screamed under all of it, and I understood that everything I’d been so sure of—the snub, the tantrum, the fortress, nothing happens Saturday—had been a coat thrown over a knife.
And that I’d helped them throw it.
“Tell me all of it,” I said. “Don’t manage me. I’ll know.”
Sal looked at Pietro. Some whole conversation passed between them in nothing, the cousin shorthand, and then Sal turned back to me and gave it to me straight, the way I’d asked.
“The soldier on the block,” he said. “The one Caruso put on the corner. He was bought. Weeks back. Gianni’s people got to him—money, maybe a threat, it doesn’t matter which. He’s been feeding them since before the wedding. Movements. Schedules.” A muscle worked in his jaw. “He’s the one who told them the building would be empty. He’s the one who let the man in to set the gas.”
I lay there and took it. The watcher, watched. The eyes I’d trusted on her corner all day, sold.
“We thought they might hit the wedding. He did in a way,” Pietro said from the window. He hadn’t moved. His voice camesoft and even and terrible. “The whole family across town in one ballroom. The street empty. Everyone who would protect her standing shoulder to shoulder forty minutes away, drunk and unarmed and dancing.” A pause. “Donatella told you Saturday was the safest day. She was right about the wedding. She was wrong about the bakery. He counted on us thinking exactly what we thought.”
“The snub,” I said. My voice came out flat. “The clown in the coat. The pride. That was—”
“Bait,” Sal said. “Or half of it. The snub is real—Gianni is the kind of small man who would burn a city for a wedding card he didn’t get. But it wasn’t the snub that made him light it,” Sal said, quieter now, because he reads me, because he’s read me since I was thirteen. “He wanted the block—truly. He’s wanted it for months. So this is about us, and it’s about her.” He looked at me. “She was the holdout. Brave but stupid.”
It hurt to breathe. It hurt to think. It hurt.
“There’s one more.” He said it carefully. I felt the dread come up before the words did. “Olimpo went in after her.”
The room tilted.
