I’m standing on the steps of my family’s townhouse, thinking about that emptiness, when I see a gun aimed at my head.
I don’t move. It just doesn’t occur to me.
Two things happen at once. Damiano’s hand yanks me backward through the open door so hard that I skid across the foyer floor, landing two yards from where Louie bled out.
And a loud cracking shot goes off as Dami yells, “Run!”
I’m on the floor, staring at the dark stain beside me, and something shudders awake in me. An animal instinct.
I scramble to my feet, and I run. Idorun. But I head back toward the front door, toward him, as though Damiano Orsini needs my help, or even deserves it.
But there’s something in me that won’t let him face it alone. Just like I wasn’t going to give him up to Nick Fontana.
From across the street, Vito is already sprinting over, gun drawn. But Dami doesn’t need either of us. The gunman is dressed in a long, dirty coat and a knit cap, a rag tied across his face as a mask, and he looks like he weighs even less than I do. Dami has him disarmed in seconds. The gun skitters across the pavement, and Vito grabs it.
And then Damiano does something that I will see behind my eyelids for the rest of my life. He grabs the man by the back of the neck and drags him to the wrought iron fence at the front of the stoop. He pushes his head inexorably down on one of the spikes, ignoring the screams, which are cut off into a silence that’s even worse to hear.
Damiano stands back, shaking blood off his hands with a look of irritation. He turns to me where I stand at the top of the steps. “You know him?” he asks, thumbing over his shoulder at the impaled head.
Casual. Like he’s asking if I recognize someone at a party.
Everything I was numb to for three days floods in at the same time, and my stomach turns itself inside out. I turn and vomit bile over the stoop railing, into the narrow gap between the house and the sidewalk, where the bins are kept. My whole body convulses with it, my hands gripping the iron railing, and all I can think is that the same kind of iron is currently lodged in a man’s skull eight feet away from me.
By the time I’m done, Damiano has jogged up the steps. He grabs me, not gently. He turns me this way and that, his bloody hands on my face, my shoulders, my ribs, patting me down, checking for injury. There’s blood on his fingers, and now it’s on my jaw, my cheek, the collar of my shirt.
I want to shove him away, but the look on his face keeps me compliant.
Damiano Orsini isfurious. Not cold fury, not the purposeful rage I’ve seen him direct at me often enough. This is something far less controlled.
“What the hell have I been telling you all morning?” he demands. “Staybehindme!”
“Sorry,” I say blankly.
“Goddamn, that motherfucker. Are you hurt?”
I’m not physically hurt. But I’m shaking. My body has decided to feel everything it didn’t feel in the townhouse, in the basement, in the three days of dark and silence, all of it arriving now in one great ugly wave, and I can’t stop it.
I pull away and retch again, reduced to dry heaves.
Dami waits, scanning the street, which is alive now with twitching curtains. In the distance, I hear sirens. “We need to go,” he says.
He half-drags me down the steps, past the fence where I don’t look,won’tlook, down to the street where Vito already has the car running. Dami opens the back door and shoves me in, climbing in after me.
Vito pulls away hard from the curb. The force of it throws me into Damiano, and his hand comes up to steady me, gripping my shoulder. When I see the blood on his fingers again, I try to pull free, but he holds on. “The fuck is wrong with you?” he demands. “When I told you to run back there, I meant theother fucking way.”
“You killed him,” I say in a hoarse voice.
“You’re goddamn right I did. You prefer I let him killyou? Jesus—are you gonna puke again?”
I feel like I am, but I shake my head quickly, though I don’t trust myself to speak.
He gives a hollow laugh. “You want to be the big bad Boss? Then you need to get a stomach for this kinda thing. You think D’Amato or Big Gee ever get queasy after a kill?”
Only a few days ago he said essentially the same thing with his hand around my throat and his cock buried inside me:You’d make a terrible Don.
And he’s right.
A Don doesn’t vomit at the sight of violence. Or shake. Or shy away from the realities of the work.
