Page 162 of Valentino

Elio smiles. It's a sad thing, that smile, worn thin at the edges. The smile of a man looking back at the worst choice he ever made and still understanding why he made it.

"You know what it's like, being around them." He rubs his thumb across his knuckles. "The Sartoris respected me. They did. But respect isn't the same as mattering. I was the man who guarded their little sister and her friend. That was what they needed from me, so that was all they saw. Aldo looked at me and saw someone useful."

His mouth tightens.

"It's pathetic how far that goes, being seen."

The honesty lands somewhere I don't want it.

I understand being respected and still not feeling seen. I understand standing close enough to power to feel its heat and still knowing none of it belongs to you.

The difference is what you do with that hunger, and he made his choice in an office on Via Savona with a trafficker's money on the table.

"Was it worth it?"

He considers the question seriously, which is the most respect he's shown anyone in months.

"Not really." A small shrug, the kind you'd give about a restaurant that disappointed you. "But that's life, no?"

That's life.

Amanda drugged on a palazzo floor. Luca breathing through a tube in Ostia.

That's life, he says, like he spilled wine on a carpet.

What I wanted was his bones. One at a time, starting small and working inward. Hours of it, until everything he gave Aldo came back out of him in screams.

I've wanted it since Bergamo.

I want it now badly enough that I have to stand still for a second before I trust myself to move.

But the corridor is full of federal attention and Palermo politics, and Bruno's condition was carved in granite. I walk in clean, and I walk out clean. No hands. No bullet. No knife. Nothing a coroner can hang on the Sartori name while the FBI still has Enzo's estate roped off like a museum exhibit.

So I look at the small table bolted beside the cot, and I point at the bottle of water sitting on it.

Plastic. Sealed enough to pass a glance. Ordinary as Tuesday.

"In twenty minutes," I tell him, "the pain will start. It’ll make you scream, and the screaming will bring the guards, and the guards will bring a doctor. None of it will matter. You won't survive more than ten minutes past their arrival. There's nothing they can push into your veins fast enough."

I let him look at the bottle.

Then I ask, "Do you have anything to say first?"

Elio looks at the bottle. Then at me.

The fluorescent light hums above us both, indifferent as God.

"I'm sorry," he says. "I mean it. For her, mostly. Tell her or don't. I'm sorry."

An apology at the end.

Sincere and useless.

Sorry doesn't unbruise a jaw. Sorry doesn't pull a truck off a car.

"Drink," I say.

He picks up the bottle. His hands don't shake.