“I didn’t go for help. I didn’t even go to my dad as he lay there dying. I didn’t try to help or fight or do a single goddamn thing. I justran. I hid behind a dumpster three blocks away, and I stayed there until morning.”
There it is. The stone. Out of my chest, sitting between us on the bed, ugly and cold.
“I was a fucking coward,” I go on when he doesn’t say anything. Too disgusted by me, I guess. “But I swore after that—I swore I would never run again. Never back down. Never let anyone I was supposed to protect get hurt because I was too scared to do something about it.”
Caligula is quiet for a long moment. When he speaks, his voice is gentle in a way I didn’t think him capable of.
“You were thirteen, Dami.”
“I know how old I was.”
“No, I mean—you were a child. A child who saw something no child should ever see. And you ran because that’s what children do when they’re afraid. That’s what they’resupposedto do.”
“My dad needed me?—”
“Your father would have wanted you to be safe.” He squeezes my hand and shifts closer, close enough that I can feel his warmth. “The last thing he would have wanted was for you to die beside him. That wouldn’t have been brave. It would have been a waste.”
I can’t look at him. I can’t look at anything. My eyes are fixed on the far wall and my jaw is clamped shut and something in my chest where that stone used to be is throbbing and shaking.
I wish he would hate me. I wish he would needle me, use that confession against me, weaponize it.
But he doesn’t. He just sits there holding my hand.
“Maybe he wanted me safe then,” I spit out. “But my father would be ashamed of me now. Of who I grew up to be.”
“Your father would be proud of the man who takes care of Rosa and Vito and Sammy,” Caligula says.
“He wouldn’t like what I…what I did to you,” I mutter.
He doesn’t reply to that. What is there to say? We sit there while the house ticks and settles around us.
But because he gave me something—because he heard the worst thing I’ve ever done and didn’t throw it back in my face—I decide to give him something back.
“Big Gee is planning a war with the Morellis,” I tell him. “He wants to tear up the Commission and take over. He’s allied with the Bratva to do it.”
I feel Caligula go stiff beside me. “Daniel King?” he asks, his voice careful.
“Daniel King.”
“That’s—” He stops. Starts again. “Insane. The fallout would be catastrophic. The Rossis won’t stand aside. The Alessis will?—”
“Caligula. There’s more.”
I turn to look at him. His face is pale in the low light, and his eyes are very wide, and I see the moment when he reads my expression and understands that whatever I’m about to say is worse than news of a Mob War.
“Big Gee wants me to hand you over to Daniel King on Sunday morning,” I say. “As a gesture of good faith. To cement the alliance.”
Caligula stares at me. “Is that what you’re going to do?” he asks at last.
“No. I told you no one would hurt you.”
Relief floods his face for a moment. And then I watch comprehension arrive, slow and terrible, as he works through the logic the way only Caligula Clemenza can. “Except you,” he says.
“Except me,” I echo.
“Are you going to kill me now?” His voice is steady but his hands aren’t. His palm is still in mine, and it’s shaking.
“It’s you or the Family,” I tell him.
