Something else.
So I do what I always do. I scramble to bury it.
“It’s not what gets you off that’s the problem. You’ll make a bad Boss because you’re a Clemenza.” I hear the cruelty in my voice, but I don’t stop. I can’t have him thinking I— “You people lie like you breathe,” I go on quickly. “Sell out your own blood, then cry about loyalty while the body’s still warm. Your Family’s a nest of vipers, always has been, and you’ve got the same poison in you whether you wanna admit it or not.”
The silence that follows is worse than anything he could have said back.
A fire truck wails by in the opposite direction, red and white strobing across my eyes.
Then, so quiet I almost miss it, he says, “I don’t understand why you keep protecting me.”
I look over. He’s turned from the window, finally. “You plan to kill me eventually,” he goes on. “You’ve said so. More than once. And yet you step in front of guns for me. You kill men who come for me. You won’t let anyone else touch me.” He tilts his head, studying me. “Why?”
I open my mouth.
Nothing comes out.
I try again. “Because I—” I stop. “Because you’re?—”
And the worst part is, he can see me floundering. I don’t have a sane answer, and I keep remembering exactly what I just didto him up there in that unsafe house, what I did to him in the basement, and…
“Because you’remine,” I tell him. “You’re still mine. Nothing about that has changed.”
My phone buzzes, and I’m grateful for the interruption. I pull it out and check it. It’s a text from Tony Stuccio. Just an address.
The Vicario.
“Uncle Tony came through,” I say, holding up the screen so Caligula can read it. “Your cousin’s address.”
Caligula’s eyebrows go up. “Gramercy Park,” he reads out. “Nice neighborhood.”
“We’ll go tomorrow,” I say. “First thing.”
“Tomorrow.” He nods, and then shifts in his seat. The wince is small, barely there, but I catch it. “I need a shower.”
“Yeah,” I say after a second.
Brilliant contribution, Orsini. Fucking poetic.
“Listen, Dami,” he says. “I’ve been thinking. What if whoever is after me doesn’t want me dead?”
I stare at him, wondering what the punch line will be. “Pretty sure they want you dead, Clemenza. I have the scars to prove it.”
“No, I mean, what if they want to kill me because they think Ihavesomething? Something they want?”
“Like a ring?”
His mouth opens. Closes fast.
“That’s what you were searching for in the basement,” I say. “The Clemenza ring. You told those Loyalists you had it. You don’t.”
He says nothing, and his silence is its own answer.
“Look, if you think your grandfather hid that ring in the freezer or his sock drawer, you’re gonna be disappointed,” I say, and for the first time in a long fucking time, I try to be gentle. “If it was in anything your family owned, I would’ve found it. I went through all that shit when I bought it. There was no ring. Maybe they buried it with him.”
“They wouldn’tdothat,” he insists. “And you know it.”
He has a real trust in all those Clemenza Family taboos and traditions. “Then maybe someone pinched it off his corpse. Anyone could have taken it. The cops. The Feds. Hell, the mortuary workers.”
