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She flinches and looks away.
“Stop it,” she whispers. “You already have Marcel upset with you.”
“I have hell of a lot more than just Marcel upset with me. You can’t help them,” I say, slamming the door shut on the conversation. I drag her out of the cellar, up the steep stairwell, toward the light.
“Call your father if that’s what you want. It won’t make a difference. It won’t change anything.”
“Maybe you can trade—”
“Tessa, I have the leverage here. I have you; I have the prisoners. There’s nothing your father can offer me that I would trade for.”
“Then what are you waiting for?” she demands, pulling out of my grip. The light above us buzzes angrily.
“For someone to break. When your family decides they’re done sending their sons into the ground for him, that’s how this ends. One of us will run out of men willing to die for us or break the heart of the wrong mother. You don’t have to wipe out families like ours. You just make it weak enough that it devours itself. What just happened with Marcel—it’s those little cracks in the foundation that bring families down.”
Her eyes lower.
She glances back down the steep stairwell. A trail of blood marks the path. Finally, she sighs and falls into step with me again, giving up the fight.
“Do you think you made the right call, letting her…”
“Second-guessing isn’t a luxury I have in my line of work,” I interrupt, “But if there’s any man on earth I don’t want to piss off, it’s Marcel.”
“Why him?”
“Marcel is a bad enemy to have. I’m like a blade. The threat of danger is always there with me.
You can see it. But Marcel, he’s a landmine. By the time you realize the danger, you’re already in pieces.”
I see the doubt in her gaze. It almost makes me grin. It is exactly that doubt that makes Marcel so efficiently dangerous. A powerful undercurrent beneath calm water, able to rip you down into the dark.
From the bottom of the stairs, one of the prisoners moans distantly. Pain and frustration flicker across Contessa’s face, as surely as if she feels his suffering herself. I pull her away from the cellar, out into the new night.
A dead man’s screams still ring in my ears. I’ve wondered who I would yell for in those last moments. I like to think I wouldn’t, but then, all men probably like to think that. I never had a mother to cry out for, and no father that would help if I did. I know whose name would be on my lips now. The light from the windows throws a dim halo around her hair as we approach the house.
Tessa does not head for her bedroom as I expect. She veers toward my office, her purposeful steps clicking against the marble. The broken light on the desk doesn’t turn on when she flips the switch.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
She ignores me as she finds the overhead light instead.
“What happened to this?” she asks, annoyed, tossing disorganized stacks of papers out of her way.
I ignore her question with the same conviction that she ignored mine. I bury my hands in my pockets, watching, trying to figure out her plan. She finds a pad of stationery and a fountain pen.
She takes a seat in my chair, at my desk.
“Tessa,” I say.
She does not glance up, head bowed over the paper.
“I’m writing to my family. Dario’s parents. Donny’s wife and kids. They need to know.
Everyone needs to know.”
The pen scratches slowly against the page as she chooses her words.
“They already know—”
