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Vitari gave it a few second’s thought. “It’s human. If someone hurts us enough, revenge is all we have left.”
“Is it revenge?”
“Revenge is also justice.”
The phone beside them on the counter rang—Giancarlo’s mobile, now Vitari’s. He got up from the table and snatched it up. Sal grumbled down the line, on his way over, ready to take them to the airstrip. They had to be ready in fifteen minutes.
Vitari ended the call and repeated the message.
“We can trust him?” Francis asked while clearing the plates away.
“Sal is as solid as they come. The others, not so much.”
“He’s a good friend?”
Vitari folded his arms and leaned against the counter. “When I first came to Italy, I didn’t remember the language, didn’t know anyone. Giancarlo threw me in with the wolves, other Mafia kids. Battaglia fathers raise their boys hard. I got the shit beaten out of me day after day. I fought back, but… You know how it is, the Mafia don’t fight fair.”
Francis briefly closed his eyes and muttered something like a prayer.
“It was a long time ago. They set on me, five on one, and I didn’t stand a chance. But I fought anyway because fists were all I had. To this fucking day, I’m sure my father had hoped they’d kill me. And then this enormous bastard shows up. Eleven years old and already as big as a gorilla. He saw what was happening, said it wasn’t fair, and took out four of them with a few right hooks. He left one, though, for me.”
“Salvatore saved you?”
“Yeah. He’s as vicious as he looks, but everything he does has a reason. If Sal is coming for you, you deserve it. But Sal is one of the few good ones. He’s saved me from a few tight spots over the years.” Francis didn’t appear any more comforted, and it wasn’t going to get any easier for them. This life had its claws in him too now. “We should get dressed.” Vitari eyed Francis’s slouched form, wishing he could devour him all over again. “The honeymoon is over.”
Francis tried to hold on to his smile, but it crumbled away. “The cassock?”
“Yeah, but put something on underneath or I won’t be able to think.”
Vitari left him chuckling at the table to shower. When he stepped from the bathroom, the cassock was gone from over the back of the chair where it had been draped all night. Vitari adjusted his cuffs in front of the mirror, straightened his hair, and reapplied all the layers of sophistication that put distance between him and L’ Angelo della Morte, mob boss’s son, and now the Battaglia don. He didn’t much like the man looking back at him.
A vineyard in the Italian hills couldn’t happen fast enough.
He found Francis waiting in the corridor, dressed in his priestly layers, his hair smooth and eyes cold.
“So I uh… I found this and forgot to mention it. It seemed important.” He held out the USB drive with Vitari’s name on it. Francis must have picked it up from his father’s desk. A good thing he had taken it; too many people had come and gone since then. Anyone could have found it.
If the contents of that drive were anything like the ones he’d found before, then he did not want Francis seeing any of it. But it was also safer with him than anywhere else. “Thanks, just… keep it for me? Don’t look at it, just keep hold of it?”
He closed his fist around it. “Of course.”
A car horn honked outside.
“Ready, Padre?”
“Yes.” Francis straightened to his full, composed, holier-than-thou height and Vitari was reminded of the troubled priest with the haunted eyes he’d met inside a rural English church, desperately trying to keep the pieces of himself together.
What sin brought you here?
You did.
After that first meeting, he could never have imagined how they’d save each other, in so many ways.
Vitari reached up and pressed his forehead to Francis’s. “Whatever happens, know how I love you with all my heart and soul, Francis. And if…” He wet his lips. “If we don’t?—”
Francis kissed him, silencing the rest of his words. “I know,” he said, then whispered again, “I know.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
