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Valentina holds her head up straight. She reaches for my hand. “We’re regrouping in the aftermath of a brutal attack on both families. We arranged an alliance between our families once.” She sighs and rests her head on my shoulder. “After everything I’ve been through, Torin is the one I trust. And it would be an honor to arrange another alliance. But I’m tired. So tired.” She sighs. “I want to go home with him, to Ireland. Here holds too many memories I wish to leave behind.”
Lorenzo nods. Giuseppe stares and clears his throat. “You have my blessing, Valentina.”
“And mine,” Lorenzo says hoarsely. “We move on. We regroup. We strengthen our families and put the past to rest.”
I squeeze her hand. It’s hard to put into words what I feel. “I love your sister. And I promise I will cherish and protect her until my last dying breath.”
Her brothers nod. Giuseppe gives me a rare smile, picks up his phone, and makes a call. “A bottle of champagne to the penthouse,” he orders, then hangs up and looks back at me.
“Put it on ice, Esposito,” I tell him. “We’ll have it when we get back. It will be our celebratory drink for dismantling Boston.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
TORIN
The pier smells of rot and something old when we arrive at the warehouse.
Valentina’s beside me in borrowed clothing, one hand in her pocket, the other in mine. She begged to come with us. Her brothers didn’t want her to, but in the end I convinced them she deserved closure.
“Before you go,” Declan says on the phone. He’s been orchestrating every step of this for us before we arrived here. “I want you to know what you’re walking into. We sent a few of our men ahead of you. We used their kit.”
It takes me a second to understand what he’s saying.
Inside, the floor is poured concrete with a drain in the middle and a slope. The cages are lined up in rows. Steel mesh, four feet by six, wheeled. The kind that go into the back of a van.
There’s a hose coiled by the wall, the nozzle still wet. A folding table is near the door.
Valentina stops three steps in.
She looks for a long time. I let her. The men in cages have started up again, the noise unheeded. They try my name, then hers.
“You numbered them.”
“Aye. My idea.”
She turns to look at me properly. “You had them tortured.”
“Not as much as they deserve, but aye. They’ve been starved, assaulted, beaten, and stripped. They had hours of not knowing where they were or what hour it was.”
She frowns. “So a touch of what they put me and those other women through.”
“My lads had one order, and it wasn’t a suggestion. We’re not them. If we were, we’d cross a line we can’t come back from.”
She turns to me and buries her head in my shoulder. “Only one of the many reasons I love you.” She sighs.
Lorenzo sets the laptop on the folding table. For a full minute, the only sounds are the water under the pier and the men in cages, each in various stages of understanding why this floor is made of concrete with a drain in the middle.
Giuseppe has a length of scaffolding pipe he picked up in the yard on the way in. “Which one hurt you?” he asks Valentina.
She points to number nineteen. “Of those that are left, he was one.”
Giuseppe nods to me. “He’s yours, McCarthy. Who else?” She points to a man crying and begging in cage number four. Giuseppe pulls him to the center of the room by his hair.
Valentina turns away from the dull thud and the cries of utter destruction. When Giuseppe’s finished, he's breathing through his mouth, and there's blood up to the elbow on the arm that had the jacket over it an hour ago. He walks straight past his brother and past me, stands in front of Valentina, and puts his forehead down on her shoulder like a boy.
“I’m sorry they hurt you,” he whispers. “I’m sorry I couldn’t stop them.”
She holds the back of his neck. Her eyes stay open over his shoulder, fixed on me the whole time.
