Tears blur my vision. Whatever I expected to hear, this level of detail—the image of someone being tortured for hours—it’s too much.
What did you do, Dad?
“I found him.” Luca’s eyes are distant now, seeing something I can’t. “Danny called me. Said there was a situation at the port. When I got there?—”
He stops, his throat working as he swallows hard.
“When I got there, he was still in that chair. Still zip-tied, still…” His voice breaks. “Still warm.”
He slams his fist on the desk, making me jump.
“I could have saved him,” Luca says, clearly tortured at the memories. “I should have had someone else go to the North Side. I shouldn’t have let Marco go alone.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” I whisper.
“Wasn’t it?” His eyes snap to mine, and the pain in them is devastating. “I was the enforcer. I was always the brawn to Marco’s brains. Marco died because I wasn’t there, because I chose to handle a stupid territorial dispute instead of being where I was supposed to be.”
The guilt in his voice is palpable, and suddenly I understand something I hadn’t before. This isn’t just about revenge. It’s about survivor’s guilt so profound it’s turned him into someone who can’t forgive himself, so he’s redirected all that self-hatred outward toward anyone connected to Marco’s death.
“The investigation afterward traced the leak back to your father,” Luca continues, his voice regaining some of that cold control. “He’d been approached by loan sharks he owed money to. They offered to clear his fifty-thousand-dollar gambling debt in exchange for intelligence about Marco’s shipment schedule.” He smiles mockingly at me. “He took the deal, as you know.”
“But—” I start then stop. Because how do I tell him the rest without revealing I know exactly who orchestrated it?
“But what?” His eyes are sharp now, focused on me with laser focus.
“But that doesn’t make sense.” I force myself to meet his gaze, refusing to lower it. “He’s weak and stupid and self-destructive, but he’s not—he wouldn’t have known those kinds of details. He didn’t work for you. He didn’t have access to shipment schedules or security protocols. So how did he get that information to sell?”
Luca’s jaw tightens. “That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out for three fucking years” He gestures to his desk and all his files and papers. “The investigation shows he received the information through intermediaries, but tracking back to the original source has been—” He stops, frustration evident. “Complicated.”
“What if he was just a pawn?” The question bursts out before I can stop it. “What if someone else used my father as a convenient scapegoat?”
“Then I’d want to know who.” His eyes narrow. “Do you know something, Giuliana? Is that why you’re here at nearly four in the morning asking questions?”
Terror spikes through me. This is it—the moment where I could tell him everything, where I could redirect his revenge toward Salvatore Romano and maybe save what’s left of my father.
But the words stick in my throat.
“I—” I swallow hard, my hands twisting in my lap as my heart rises to my throat. I feel sweat trickle down my back. “The night of Marco’s death. Three years ago. I went to check on my father because he’d been missing for five days.”
Luca goes very still. “What?”
“He disappeared after—after whatever happened. He didn’t answer his phone or show up at his apartment. I got worried and used my spare key to get in.”
The memory is vivid even after three years. “The place was destroyed. Furniture overturned, photos smashed, blood on the walls. I found him in the bathroom, still wearing clothes covered in blood. His own blood, from being beaten.”
“He was beaten?” Luca leans forward, every line of his body alert. “By who?”
I shrug helplessly. “I don’t know. He wouldn’t tell me details. Just kept sobbing about how ‘they killed him’ and ‘it wasn’t supposed to happen this way.’” The words tumble out faster now, three years of silence breaking. “He was terrified, Luca. Not guilty—terrified. Like he’d been used for something he didn’t fully understand and now the consequences were destroying him.”
Luca’s eyes are boring into mine. “What else?” he demands, his voice rough. “What else, Giuliana?”
“He got a phone call while I was there,” I say, fighting to keep my composure. “Someone checking in, someone he was reporting to. I couldn’t hear the other side of the conversation, but my father—” I stop, remembering the way his voice shook. “He was sobbing, saying he was sorry, that he did exactly what they told him, that it wasn’t his fault the plan went wrong.”
“The plan went wrong,” Luca repeats slowly, rubbing his chin with his thumb and index finger, clearly thinking. “As in, it didn’t achieve its intended goal?”
“That’s what it sounded like. My father kept saying ‘the wrong one died’ over and over. Like…” I force myself to continue. “Like Marco wasn’t the intended target. Like someone else was supposed to die that night.”
The silence that follows is so complete I can hear my own heartbeat. Luca stares at me with an expression I can’t read—shock, maybe, or fury, or some combination of both.
