Claudio steps forward, as Leone steps back, his face giving away nothing of what is happening inside him. But I'm his twin and I can feel what's happening behind that wall because the twin frequency is roaring and what's coming through it is a sound I've never felt from my brother. A low, constant vibration that isn't anger or sadness but both, fused together, a grief that Claudio will process silently over weeks and months and years.
"You're the thinker," Aurelio says to him. "You always were. Even as a boy. Emilio talked and you watched. Emilio ran and you calculated the distance. You will be Leone’s right hand and also his conscience, and you need to be both, always. Don't let the cold become all of you. Your woman knows this. Listen to her."
"Yes, sir."
"And protect your brother. He'll need it. He doesn't know it yet, but he'll need it."
"Always," Claudio says. One simple little fucking word that he means with everything in him. The most Claudio has ever put into a single syllable, and I feel it through the frequency and now my chest is full and tight and I can't fucking breathe.
Aurelio looks at me. "Emilio."
I step forward and my legs work, which is a surprise because the rest of me has gone numb. I stand beside the bed and look at the man who found two orphaned twins at fifteen and took them in and gave them a name and a purpose and a place in the world that nobody else would have given them. The man who taught me to shoot, to negotiate, to walk into a room and make people listen. The man who slapped me across the face when I was seventeen because I was drunk and about to drive a car, and then sat with me on the curb for an hour while I sobered up and told me that we don’t make stupid mistakes here.
The man who never said he loved me because men in his world don't say that, but who showed it in every assignment, every correction, every time he looked at me and Claudio across a room and nodded, once, which meantgood, you're good, I see you.
"Sir."
"You're the heart of this family." His voice is getting thinner. "You don't think you are. You think you're the loud one, the reckless one, the one who makes jokes because he's afraid of what he'd say if he was serious. But you're the heart. People follow Leone because they respect him. People follow youbecause they love you, and that's rarer and more valuable and you need to stop treating it like an accident."
"I'm not the heart… I'm the idiot."
"You're both, and that’s why we need you." His hand comes up off the blanket, and I take it and his fingers are cold and thin and I can feel every bone and the grip is barely there but it's there and he holds on. "The bartender."
"Savannah."
"Keep her. She's the kind of person who tells a dying man the right thing when his own people won't. That's courage that can't be trained. Don't waste it."
"I won't."
"And stop getting shot. You're not as bulletproof as you think."
"It was one time and the vest caught it."
"It was three times over two years and you think I didn't know because I'm in this bed, but I know everything that happens in my compound, including the fact that you and the bartender had sex on the bar I built in 1987. If you'd broken my counter I'd have killed you myself. She can run the bar. Tell her that she’s family now."
I laugh, but the sound comes out wrong, choked and wet, and I realize I'm crying. I don't know when it started. The tears are on my face, the laugh turns into something else, something that isn't a laugh anymore, and I press my forehead against his knuckles because I can't look at him right now without losing every piece of myself that's holding together.
"None of that," Aurelio says. "Stand up. Look at me. Be brave, Emilio, be brave in life and be brave in love. I’m proud of you, my boy."
I stand up and look at him. His face is blurring through the water in my eyes, but I can see enough. The pride. The finality. The acceptance of a man who has made his peace with the door he's about to walk through. I squeeze his hand and move to stand beside my brother.
He looks at Carmelo. "You haven't moved."
"No, sir." Carmelo's voice is monotone.
"You don't have to stand in the corner. You can come here."
Carmelo pushes off the wall. He walks to the bed and stands at the foot of it and his hands hang at his sides and he doesn't take the hand Aurelio offers. Instead he puts his hand on the old man's ankle through the blanket and holds it there.
"Guard them," Aurelio says. "The way you've guarded me."
"Yes, sir."
"All of them. Including the ones who aren't yours yet."
Carmelo nods.
Aurelio looks at the ceiling again. His oxygen machine hisses as his breathing changes and the room is full of sounds that are keeping him alive, but he's leaving anyway, on his own schedule, the way he's done everything.
