“You sent Ed and your guards to kill me tonight.” I let him feel the blade. “You think I’ve gone soft. Is my blade soft, Marco?”
“No.”
“No,” I agree. I lean back slightly—not removing the pressure, just settling in, because there’s a conversation to have first. Idon’t know whether his answers will make a difference in the verdict. But I can be reasonable.
I’m not feeling particularly reasonable this morning.
“When my father died, and you took over the organization, I didn’t argue. I went back to medical school because I knew that was what he would have wanted. Do you know why he wanted me to become a doctor instead of a don?”
He swallows, adding pressure to the blade. “Everyone wants a doctor for a son.”
I shake my head. “He didn’t want me running things because he knew I had too much of my mother in me.”
His jaw sets.
“You remember my mother, don’t you, Marco? Angela Scarpetti, before she married. The assassin. The sociopath. Or psychopath, depends on the doctor’s diagnosis at the time.” I shrug. “She was the woman who helped my father build everything he had—silently, invisibly, unless you knew exactly where to look and how to listen. She made him who he was. Her ruthlessness, her patience, her absolute willingness to act while he deliberated. The one smart people feared.” I look at him. “Including you. Even as you wanted her.”
“She was a beautiful woman, Dario. I won’t apologize for wanting her.”
“All you ever saw was a pretty face and a powerful name from the old country.” I pause. “That’s why she turned you down. My father was wise enough to understand her utility, even when his pride resented it. He saw what she was, and he worked with it. You only ever saw the surface.”
But his eyes flash in anger. “I saw who she was. I wanted her for that. The package was pleasing, but the contents… that was the value.”
He’s just mimicking what I said. He doesn’t believe it. I remember how he was in those days, blatantly checking her out while my father was on his deathbed. Those were not the looks of a man with true admiration. He must think I was too distracted to notice.
I noticed.
I press the blade closer. “By all rights, I should be running this organization. We both know it. His blood built it. Her blood built it. Tell me why I shouldn’t cut your throat right now and take what was always supposed to be mine.”
He calculates. I watch him do it—running through his available options, looking for the angle that might work, the information that might buy him something. He lands on something. I can see the moment he decides.
“Renzo is my son.”
I hold still, keep my reaction internal.
Then I start to smile. Slowly. My voice dips low and soft and vicious. “Nice fucking try.”
“You think I’m lying? I’ll take a blood test?—”
“Right. So I leave to get my kit for your blood, and you escape? You’re not as sneaky as you think you are, or I’m not as dumb as you wish I fucking was?—”
“Fine. Kill me, be done with it. But you’ll always wonder.”
I laugh. “My mother got pregnant with Renzo when the family was in Rome. I know this because I was old enough to notice when she suffered morning sickness that ran all day, and I was too young to go anywhere unsupervised, and my father was too busy to take me. I spent the entire summer in an apartment with shoddy air conditioning and a mother who couldn’t stop throwing up.” I look at him. “It was a formative memory.”
“We had an affair before you left for Rome, Dario.”
He’s really trying to sell this bullshit. It’d be impressive if it weren’t such crap. “Before Italy, we were in London and Paris and Salzburg and Minsk and a handful of other cities, conducting business. Then Mom wanted to come to Italy to visit with family. You, on the other hand, were ordered to hold down the fort for collections here and check in with my father every few days. I know this because he had you on speakerphone, and I was usually screwing around in his office when I wasn’t with Mom. Do you want to try a new angle on that stupid lie?”
Marco goes pale, and his mouth forms a horizontal line of frustration and stubborn dignity. “Get on with it.”
I look at him for a long moment. “Tonight, you terrorized the two people I care about most in the world. You must have had an inkling that this would go wrong because you were smart enough to leave Renzo alone in prison. I called him on my way here to check in. Or did you forget about him until you thought you could use him to save your neck?”
“Fucking do it, Dario. I’m done talking to you.”
He forgot about Renzo until he was desperate enough to grasp at straws. Pathetic. “A knife is too good for you.” I withdraw it. “So I’m going to let the feds do their job. They’ll be here in fiveminutes. I called them too. Gave them enough to keep you in prison for the rest of your life, which by the smell in here, won’t be long. What is it? Cancer? MS? Something else?”
“Go to hell.”
