"I appreciate what you've said, Salt, but it ends here. I won't sit around like a duck and wait for his next move." I pause, then add dryly, "I need to deal with my damn family once and for all."
"Someone from your damn family texted you and warned you. Try to look at it this way."
"Hey, what are you two doing back there?"
A voice calls out behind us.
I recognize the alpha. He lives in unit eighteen. Apparently, he was alerted by our voices.
"Our unit… it just exploded," I say, and Salt and I get to our feet, straightening up.
"Oh shit, it was yours? And you survived? I was sure you were done for. What was it, debris from a plane falling down or something?"
"We don’t know," Salt says, giving me a pointed look. "We’ll find out everything from the firefighters."
We pass him and head out onto the main promenade. I glance at Salt and ask quietly,
"How did you know what to say back there?"
He snorts with laughter.
"I’ve watched a ton of mafia shows. It’s a bad idea to talk openly about internal mafia feuds," he says with a crooked smile.
By then, a group of program participants has gathered around us. Everyone is stunned that we’re alive, because they can all see our unit still burning, flames licking at what’s left of it while the betas struggle to put the fire out.
Surrounded by people talking over one another, we make our way back to the main building, where every light is on and the entire staff is up, running back and forth.
Gomez appears almost immediately and adds to the chaos, firing off questions left and right.
One of the guards responds. It turns out the surveillance system didn’t fail completely, because the drones patrolling the sky above the island noticed something incoming. That was the alarm that went off first. However, none of the observationdrones were exactly equipped to shoot targets down, which makes sense.
Shouts start breaking out, people asking exactly what it was, whether it was debris, a falling satellite, or a deliberate attack.
I was raised in the mafia, though, and I know that if I want to take Rocco down, I don’t need the FBI sniffing around.
At one point Gomez addresses me, but I calm him down and explain that we had left the unit for a walk and that we were unharmed. We just saw something crash into our unit, an object that fell from the sky.
I can see the shock in him.
He advises us to go to the small hospital room, the same one we stayed in after we were shot before, and wait there until morning.
So, we go. A nurse looks us over, checking for injuries, but we wave him off pretty quickly.
Once he leaves, we curl up together on the bed, holding each other. We barely talk. Salt seems strangely at peace with the situation, though maybe it onlyfeelsstrange to me, because inside my head everything is chaos.
I don’t even know if sleep comes at all that night. I lie there in a kind of stunned haze, brooding over Rocco. My thoughts drift back to my childhood. Out of all my brothers, he was the one I felt the least connected to. There was always something empty about him. Hollow.
People used to say he took after our father’s brother, Uncle Tito. Ruthless. Ice-cold. The kind of man people feared before they even knew why. Everyone was convinced Rocco would grow into a great capo, but to me, he just seemed like a psychopath. I never bought into the idea that cruelty makes a good leader. If anything, I always saw Ennio or Luca in that role instead.
Ah, damn. In theory, I walked away from that life. But I guess that saying is true: You can take a man out of the mafia, but that doesn’t mean the mafia lets go of him.
And clearly… it hasn’t.
Time to stop pretending otherwise and deal with it.
So, I spend all those hours awake, sometimes staring at Salt as he sleeps, sometimes fighting bouts of hyperventilation. The only conclusion I keep coming back to is that I have to be his protector, no matter my principles.
It’s ironic, in a way, that I criticized Salt for his plan to kill Tanner, for not wanting to handle it legally, and now what? Now it’s me who has to step outside the law, because I know that eliminating Rocco through legal means borders on impossible.
