She turned to look at me, eyes filled with tears and grief covering her face in a way I hadn't seen since the night she learned about Nicola. "Uncle Guido even? They all wanted a horrible future for me?" The pain on her face was enough to crush something in my chest, but she took a shaky breath and squared her shoulders and stepped over the body.
He had been heading for the stairs when I found him. He never saw me coming.
I followed her through the house, through every room, watching her navigate what her father had brought to our home with a composure that cost her more than she was showing. She stepped over each body with her head up and her jaw set and I stayed close enough to catch her if she needed it and far enough back to let her do this the way she needed to do it, which was on her own terms.
She got to the room where her father was and I watched her square her shoulders one more time and walk through the door with her head held high.
He wasn't dead.
I had tied him to a chair, and that was what had slowed me down from getting to her. He was losing blood quickly, judging from the puddle spreading beneath him, and his color was the particular gray of a man who didn't have much longer, but he was alive and he was looking at his daughter with an expression that told me he still hadn't understood what had happened here tonight, still hadn't absorbed the fact that he had lost.
"Oh, my daughter. I'm so glad you're safe." He wheezed, shallow and wet. "Get me out of these ropes, you can take me to the hospital, and then we will go home and forget all of this."
CeCe stood in the middle of the room and looked at her father, this man who had planned her life like a transaction and sold her future to a man old enough to be her grandfather, andI watched her face do something very specific and very quiet before she spoke.
"You want me to forget you breaking into my home, putting every person I love in danger, and then sending my brother to kill me?" She took a step closer to him. "You wanted to use me as a pawn regardless of what it meant for my life. What kind of father are you?"
"He was supposed to kill Dante, not you," the dying man spat. His color continued to drain, the gray deepening by the minute. "As for your life, you're a woman in the mafia. You don't matter."
I felt something cold move through me at those words. Looked at my wife standing in front of the man who had said them.
"Maybe in your family," I said. "But in mine, she's the only thing in life that matters."
My words made her stand a little straighter. She turned slightly to look at me, and what passed between us in that moment was brief and complete and required nothing additional from either of us.
She turned back to her father.
"I killed Santino. Me, father. Cecilia Venosa killed your precious son." She leaned closer to him. "Payback's a bitch, isn't it?" He stared at her and I watched him try to find something in her face that he recognized, some version of the daughter he had managed and controlled and sold, and fail to find it. "My only wish is that I had killed you in Italy. Then innocent people in your war wouldn't have gotten involved."
"Don't you dare speak to me that way," he shouted, and then coughed and sputtered, his pale face turning red with the effort before going pale again, shallower than before.
CeCe waited for it to pass. She crossed her arms and looked at him with the patience of someone who had already made theirdecision and was simply waiting for the right moment to deliver it.
"I'm going to watch as the light drains from your eyes," she said quietly. "But before you die, tell me why you killed Nicola. She did nothing."
Sergio Avola looked at his daughter and took a rattling breath. "She was supposed to take you to Lombardi. I knew about your plan to run, and I paid her to take you to your husband." Another breath, shorter. "She disobeyed."
CeCe was very still.
"That's where you're wrong, father." She turned and looked at me over her shoulder, and the smile on her face in that moment was something I was going to carry with me for the rest of my life. "Nicola did exactly what you told her to do." She turned back to look at her father for the last time. "She brought me to him."
The room was quiet except for the sound of Sergio Avola's breathing, which was becoming less of a sound and more of a suggestion. He was still alive, barely, the last of whatever had driven him through this night running out of places to go.
"I renounce your name and bear the Venosa name proudly, because they are my family." She held his gaze and her voice didn't waver. "Goodbye, father. I'll see to mother."
She turned her back on him and walked into my waiting arms and I held her, and over her head I looked at the man in the chair and saw the last of the fight still in him, the particular stubbornness of someone who had spent his entire life refusing to accept the terms being offered to him, and I reached for my wife's jaw and tilted her face up to mine and claimed her mouth with a hunger and a relief and a possession that was everything I had been holding back since I'd come through the door of my father's room and found her standing over her brother's body still breathing.
She belonged with me. She was mine and I would spend my life making sure she knew how completely and how entirely in love with her I was.
She opened her mouth to me and kissed me back and behind her I heard the man in the chair make one final sound and then make no sound at all.
I led Cecelia from the room.
The hallways were quieter now, my men moving through them with efficient purpose, and I walked my wife through the house with my arm around her and thought about everything that needed to happen before morning.
"I want you to rest," I said when we reached our door. "I have to see to the cleanup and figure out how to get these bodies back to Italy." I wasn't going to call them her family. They weren't. At one time perhaps, but too much had happened now for that word to mean anything in the same sentence as the people currently lying on my floors.
"Cremate them," she said without hesitation. "Put them all in one bag and dump them over the vineyard. Nobody deserves closure after this." She wrapped her arm around my waist. "They were all complicit."
