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“They know they’re not coming back from a job,” she interrupts. “But they don’t know why. If you want my family to turn on itself, they need to know the truth—that my father is the only thing standing between them and their dying loved ones. That I don’t want this, that none of this had to happen.”
I know that look. Scrambling for some kind of control, some action to take when your hands are tied.
“They’ll never believe you wrote this without a gun to your head.”
“Maybe,” she dismisses. “Or maybe it’ll make them doubt him, just enough. Cracks in the foundation, right?”
There’s no sense in stopping her. We have nothing to lose from a letter. I take a seat across from her, assuming the role across the desk, the seat so many men have taken with me. I haven’t been on this side of the desk in years. She glances up at me as our roles reverse, catching the amusement in my gaze.
“Shut up,” she mumbles, though I haven’t said a single word. I bite back my smirk.
She sighs as she stares at the page, struggling to find the words. I can tell from her expression alone that she isn’t happy with the letter.
“…It doesn’t feel like enough.” She looks at me, those troubled eyes searching my face.
She worries her lip, the way she does when she’s scheming to ask something of me.
“Sal, let me take care of the prisoners. I can help them, get them strong enough to move them.
Then we release one. Dario. He would tell the family the same story as this,” she says, brandishing the paper, “that he saw me with his own eyes, that I was okay, and that I’m begging my father to stop. No one could deny it then.”
I can hear the desperation. She’s scheming to save him—the man who came into my house and tried to take her from me. I have no sympathy for him. If he wasn’t suffering, I’d have already ended him, but there’s a satisfaction in knowing he’s down there, languishing.
“Or he says nothing, we end up down a prisoner, and Gio takes the credit for tricking us into releasing him. Just write your letter, Tessa.”
“It’s not a bad idea just because it happens to be merciful! Isn’t this how you told me you operate?
When you have the one thing someone wants, the thing only you can give them…”
I won’t indulge her. I can’t even entertain the thought.
“The family won’t agree. Even if I wanted to let them go, even if it was the smartest play there is, I couldn’t. Your father attacked us at the one place I swore to these people they would be safe. There’s no coming back from that. If I start letting our enemies go on top of that, they will never trust me again. That can’t happen. Cracks in the foundation,” I say, repeating her reasoning back to her.
She lowers her eyes, the frustration visible.
I feel it just the same, even if it can’t show. I know what it is, to walk that tightrope, with wrong choices on every side.
Tessa crumples the letter between her hands.
“What are you doing?”
“Making it perfect,” she sighs. She slides another blank paper toward herself. “If this is all I’ve got, then it has to be perfect.”
When she hands the letter over, it’s a passionate plea, I’ll give her that. Half condolences, half condemnation. I scan for leaks of information or dangerous confessions, but there’s nothing amiss. The way she talks about us—finding a place for herself at my side, wanting to be with me—it spikes my pulse something fierce, making me hyper-aware of my own heartbeat.
But it makes the ugly truth apparent: No one is going to believe this letter, no matter how Tessa pretties it up.
I barely believe it myself and I watched her write the damn thing.
Maybe it will give my girl a little peace, knowing that she tried.
“It’s not enough,” she sighs.
“It never feels like enough. Not until you have someone’s blood on your hands.
Sometimes, not even then.”
She frowns, bathed in the office light, her eyes trailing over the desk.
