The west wing smells faintly of antiseptic and clean linen. Doctors, nurses, cleaners—they’re the only ones who come here besides me. This part of the house isn’t forbidden because it’s dangerous. It’s forbidden because it’s fragile.
Like my dad now is.
Moreno Moretti was once a proud, fearsome man. Don of Brooklyn. A name that used to shut mouths and open doors. Now he’s thinner, quieter, his power reduced to stories and memory. What surprises me still is that he never turned bitter. If anything, being freed from the weight of command made room for other things. Patience. Gentleness. Regret.
Grief, too.
His eyes flick to me, knowing as always. “Do you remember when Marco tried to teach you how to ride his motorcycle?” he asks suddenly.
I huff a quiet laugh despite myself. “I was twelve. He told me if I didn’t let go of the handlebars, I’d never learn.”
“And you didn’t listen,” Moreno says, lips curving.
“I crashed into Mrs. Bellini’s hedge,” I say. “Marco swore it wasn’t his fault.”
“He paid for the hedge,” my father adds. “And for your stitches.”
We sit there smiling at the memory, the warmth of it edged with something sharp. Marco’s absence presses in around the room, heavy and familiar. The laughter fades, but neither of us looks away.
Some losses never get lighter.
My mind drifts, as it always does, to the night Marco died.
It was supposed to be a truce. Philly coming up the coast, us meeting them halfway in some warehouse that smelled like oil and dust and bad decisions.
I wasn’t there. I was still the younger brother then, the one kept out of rooms where deals were sealed and guns came out. But my father was.
The other boss got nervous. Started shouting, waving his gun. He was high as a kite, a mistake you don't make when youpush product. Rule number one: never get addicted to your own dust.
He fired and hit one of the barrels.
When Dad talks about it, he always mentions the smoke first. How it filled the place so fast it felt alive. Then the shouting. The running. Chaos blooming as the roof caved in and collapsed on them in hot, angry chunks.
Marco carried him out.
That’s the part that never leaves me. My brother, bigger and braver than he had any right to be, hauling our father out from under a fallen beam and through flames, coughing blood and still pushing on, because that’s who he was. Action first. People first. He got Dad outside, got him to safety.
Then he went back in.
One of the men was trapped. One ofours. Marco didn’t hesitate. He never did. A true leader, they said afterward. A hero.
Heroes don’t come home.
I feel it all at once every time—the pain, sharp and immediate; the anger that still hasn’t burned itself out; the helplessness of knowing I wasn’t there, that I couldn’t stop it. He was my older brother. My shield. The one who moved while I thought.
I had my nose in books. He had blood on his hands and fire at his back.
When he died, the space he left behind swallowed everything. Big shoes to fill. Expectations stacked so high I didn’t have time to grieve properly before I had to learn how to rule.
I look at my father now, at the steady rise and fall of his chest helped along by machines, and the weight settles back where it always does.
Marco saved him.
And I became what was left.
My father shifts in his chair, like he’s felt the turn my thoughts have taken. He closes the book in his hands and sets it aside, fingers lingering on the cover.
“I heard a woman’s voice earlier,” he says lightly, like he’s commenting on the weather. “Around the house.”
