I turn, and there he is.
Salvatore is standing in the doorway to the terrace, one hand on the frame, the other wrapped around a cane. Dark coat buttoned high against the cold, silver in his hair now instead of black, lines around his mouth that weren’t there when I last put my hands on him and knew exactly what they’d do to his face.
He looks older because time has done what time always does, and thirty years is a war nobody wins cleanly. But it’s him. It’s still him.
The same dark eyes. The same impossible, unbearable mouth. The same stillness that always made a room feel like it had become a church or a crime scene, depending on the day.
For one stupid second, I think the vodka’s finally done something useful and killed me kindly. Then he shifts his weight with a small, pained correction, cane scraping stone, and the sound is too human, too ugly, too real.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” I hear myself say.
Salvatore doesn’t smile. “You’ve said harsher things to me.”
Shock curdles instantly into anger because if I don’t get angry, I’m going to collapse to my knees in front of a ghost. “What the fuck are you doing here?” I bark.
He looks at the revolver on the terrace floor, then at the shattered glass, then back to me. “Interrupting your terrible timing.”
That does it.
I take two steps toward him and stop so hard my bad eye throbs with it. “You arrogant, miserable bastard.” The words shake coming out. “You do not get to walk back into my house looking like that and make jokes.”
His face changes then. “I know,” he says quietly.
“Oh, you know.” I laugh, vicious and half out of my mind. “That’s good. I’m glad one of us knows something because I’ve been out here deciding whether I’m pathetic enough to put a bullet through my own fucking skull, and now you appear on my terrace looking like a goddamned resurrection.”
His throat works once. I hate that I notice. Hate that even now, with fury chewing through me and grief, disbelief, and old love all climbing over each other like starving animals, I still see every tiny change in him as if no time has passed at all.
He takes one step out onto the terrace. The rain has stopped, but the stones are still wet and slick, the air bitter with the kind of cold that gets under clothes and into bone. He shouldn’t bestanding out here with that leg. He shouldn’t be here at all, yet he is.
I drag both hands through my hair and pace once, unable to stand still in front of him because standing still feels too much like surrender. “Say it,” I snap.
His brows draw together faintly. “Say what?”
“Why you’re here,” I grind out.
Salvatore looks at me the way he used to look at loaded rooms before choosing exactly where to put the knife. Only tonight, there’s no knife in him. Just age, exhaustion, and something so nakedly miserable it makes me want to hurt him and hold him in equal measure.
“Nikolaj came to see me,” he says.
That makes some ugly sort of sense instantly. My son, with his father’s old face and none of my remaining patience, walked into a Vieri house to shake the dead until they answered. Of course.
I say nothing, and Salvatore takes another step toward me, and then, before I can understand what he’s doing, he lowers himself.
At first, I think his leg has given out. The cane slips sideways, catches on the stone, and his whole body stutters with the effort of controlling the descent. It is not graceful, and it is not dignified. He’s sixty and injured and too proud for anything about this to look natural. His jaw tightens visibly with the pain of it. One hand braces against the wet stone, the other keeps hold of the cane until the last second, then sets it aside.
He kneels, and I forget how to breathe all over again.
This is an old King on his knees in the cold on my terrace, because he doesn’t know how else to tell the truth.
He lifts his face to me. Rainwater on the stone has already soaked the knees of his trousers. His mouth trembles once before he masters it.
There’s no performance left—no father, no Don, and no Vieri. Just the man I lost thirty years ago, with all the wreckage still clinging to him.
“I was wrong,” he says, and the words hit harder than a gunshot.
Because this man does not kneel. This man does not admit fault, not cleanly, not like this, not without wrapping it in strategy or bitterness or enough elegance to keep the room from seeing the throat underneath.
And yet, here he is.
