I’ve been called in to witness the executions too. He knows I won’t divulge his private information to my patients, and since I don’t have anyone under me, he doesn’t do it so I tell my people how it went.
He invites me to them in order to ensure the dead-man-to-be suffers.
He takes them to the edge of death and uses me to bring them back enough to feel the next round of pain. Sometimes, he has me revive them, if their heart stops. If I liked the guy, I tell him the defibrillator did its job, but they were too injured for it to work.
I don’t have a lot of room for mercy. Never have. But when a guy’s biggest crime against Marco is choosing his family over following Marco’s orders, I’m not going to let him go through more torture after death claimed him.
If it’s my neck on the chopping block, who will do the same for me?
No matter. I have a meeting to attend.
I take an hour before I go. In the past few weeks, there was the taped window, Ed’s pocketed cash, a pattern of Marco’s increasingly clipped communications, the two additional men he’s positioned outside my building in the past month.
I don’t know whether they’re supposed to be invisible or not. To their credit, they are stealthy. But I’ve been at this a lot longer than they have, and men in suits don’t linger outside residential buildings for no reason. They also don’t wear lace-upcombat-style boots or usually have the same buzz cuts. That’s ex-military.
Since he’s sent a pair of former soldiers to watch over me, I make sure to wear my suicide shirt for the meeting.
I’ve sewn a tiny ampule of poison into the collar. All I have to do is lean to it and bite down. The poison is a proprietary blend of my own creation and should be relatively painless. I figured it out when I experimented on some of Marco’s doomed men, and by the time I got the formula to where it is now, they have shown no outward signs of pain when they bit it.
There are things I can tolerate. I’ve been interrogated before. I know how to handle certain tortures. But Marco knows all of this about me. I have no doubt he’ll pull out all the stops for a man he thinks has insulted him.
Or for the man he knows could upend his entire organization.
It was mine by right. The old-timers all know it. If I were to make moves against Marco, I believe most of them would back me. But there’s no time to set any of that up now.
The only thing I can do now is prepare. Suicide shirt. My usual assortment of weaponry. Medical bag, so I can pretend I didn’t know any of this was coming. A note for Lena next to a pile of cash and fake passports on our bed.
When you’re driving to what could be your own execution, no part of your brain is on board with it. The urge to drive straight to La Guardia and get the fuck out of Dodge is strong. Every muscle in my body is tense, so I try to shake it out. It takes me a while to figure out why.
Why the fuck am I scared?
It’s not as if this is my first rodeo. Marco has made his threats in the past, and I handled them just fine. So why is this getting under my skin?
Lena and Opal.
When I ask the question, their faces are what spring to mind. Not the pain, not the end of me. Them. I don’t want to leave them. I don’t want them to be hunted next. If Marco kills me, then he won’t leave them alone—they’re potential witnesses.
The thought of picking them up and leaving the country flitters through my mind, but it wouldn’t work. Marco’s not stupid. He likely has guys at the airports. I know he keeps a watch on the bridges out of the city. The man might be into low-level bullshit, but he likes to know the comings and goings of his people. More than that, he’d never stop coming after us, and after he dies, his men would take up that crusade.
I will not force them to live like fugitives.
I arrive four minutes early, which I always do, and I clock the room before I register Marco. Six of his men are present rather than the usual two—Caruso near the window, Bastianich by the door, four others I recognize by face distributed around the perimeter. Their posture is not casual. Nothing in their stances says action is imminent—no hands near weapons, no coiled tension—but the deliberateness of the placement is its own language.
None of them meet my eyes. Not one.
Caruso, who I’ve sutured twice and who carries a debt to me that he acknowledges with a nod whenever I come in, is staring at the window behind Marco with the focused attention of a man following a precise instruction. Bastianich is on his phone. Theothers have found their walls and floors and the distances in between. The entire room has organized itself around the task of not looking at me, which takes effort, which means someone ordered them to do it.
The small hairs on the back of my neck stand.
Marco himself is behind the desk. He looks up when I come in, and he’s smiling—warmly, genuinely, the smile of a man delighted to see a colleague he values. Worrisome.
“Dario. Sit down. How have you been?”
“Well.” I sit, setting my medical bag on the floor. “You?”
“Very good. I thought it was time we cleared the air—we’ve had some friction lately, you and I, and I’d rather address it directly.” He leans back in his chair with the ease of a man at home. “I value what we’ve built over the years. I think you know that.”
“As do I.”
