Page 77 of Savage Daddy
Sal could have stopped me. One hand. He’s the biggest of us, the strongest, and I was a wreck on a bed rail with a dead arm, and he could have put me back down with no effort at all, the way you’d settle a child, and he’d have been right to.
But he didn’t.
He looked at me a long beat, his deep heavy eyes under the heavy brows, and something moved in them. He looked at me standing there shaking on a bed rail and he gave me, instead of a hand pushing me down, one short nod.
Then he reached for his coat.
“You’ll do nothing useful for two days,” he said, flat, factual, pulling it on. “You can barely stand. But you’ll do it standing.” A beat. “We’ll get a chair that moves. You’ll be where the work is.”
That was Sal’s whole heart, handed over in three sentences. Some things you don’t take from a man.
The machine turned over around us.
Pietro was already on the phone, Angela beside him with her laptop open again, the soft gone out of both of them, the man who’d cracked open at the altar yesterday gone cold and exact, working angles I couldn’t follow. Donatella was running her network a second time, harder, the brass back on her and a fury under it now, calling not for favors anymore but for soldiers. Dante’s people were moving—I heard the don’s name go down the phone, heard the count of men, heard the city get carved into territory by men who carve cities for a living. And somewhere across town, Don Arturo was being told that his son wanted his throne. And that Katerina, the woman who had baked the mastic loaf that he’d loved, was the leverage. I did not know what an old man does with a thing like that and neither did anyone in that room, and it wasn’t my call to make.
And the demand wasn’t mine to answer. The throne wasn’t mine. The clan would work that—the impossible math of it, an old man’s crown for a woman who wasn’t even family yet.
My part was smaller and it was the whole of me.
The guilt landed now, all the way, full weight, and I let it, standing there on the bed rail, because I’d earned every ounce.
I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t run. I couldn’t put my hands on the city and shake her loose.
But I could make a vow. That much I had.
“I’m coming,” I said, out loud. The big loud man, gone quiet, gone still, gone to the bottom of himself where the true things live. “I don’t care what it costs. I don’t care what it takes or whoit burns or whether the old man keeps his chair. I’m coming for you, Katerina.”
I pressed my forehead to the cold glass the way I’d pressed my mouth to her forehead in a garden full of strangers a hundred years ago.
“And this time,” I said, “I hold the line.”
Chapter 18
Katerina
Myheadhurt.
My mouth tasted of smoke and copper. When I tried to lift my hands to my face they came up raw.
I was on a cot, an army thing, canvas gone grey, in a room that had been somebody’s office once.
I sat up slow and the room held still, which was something. White subway tile climbed the walls to shoulder height, the old kind, gone the color of weak tea with age and grime in the grout. Above the tile, cork. The whole upper half of the room lined in cork board, dingy and deadening.
There was a window, but somebody had painted it over. White paint, thick, brushed on from the inside in long ugly strokes, so the daylight came through it grey and dead and shapeless, no street, no sky, no telling east from west. An iron radiator sat under it, the fat old ribbed kind, and when I put my palm to it on instinct it was cold.
The door was steel. Steel, with a bar across it on the outside; I could see the shadow of the bracket through the gap at the bottom. Bolted. A door built to keep people out, and now me in.
The smell of the place told me something.
Under the bleach, under the chemical reek of a place somebody scrubs hard and often, there was something else—green and brown and old, the river, the flat dead mineral breath of the water that runs the freight corridor. And then, while I sat there with my cold palm flat to the cold iron, it came: a long low shudder up through the concrete and into the soles of my feet and the bones of my hips, building and building, the whole floor humming with it, a freight train going by on the spur close enough to feel in my teeth. It rolled past for a slow age and faded, and the silence the cork made afterward was somehow worse.
I felt the terror come up.
My hands shook. My breath went short and high, the Little in me right there under the surface, the one Tonio had taught my body to find, shaking, wanting to come up and cry and be held and told it was over.
And then I folded her down.
I didn’t have space for her now. Right now I needed the other me, the me who had been bloody-mindedly keeping my bakery going for the past year. The me who wouldn’t give up, who wouldn’t surrender, no matter how desperate things seemed.
