Sal said nothing.
“Good,” the voice said. And then, away from the phone, muffled, to someone in the room with him: “Tell them your name.”
And then her voice.
I have heard Katerina’s voice every way there is. Barking orders across the flour. Going soft and small and young over my lap. Sayings’agapó, agápi mouinto my neck. I knew everyregister she had. And this one I’d never heard, and I never want to hear again as long as I live—thin, scraped, pulled tight over a terror she was fighting with everything she had, the boss in her trying to hold and the Little in her right under it shaking, and she said:
“Tonio. I’m—” A breath. The breath cost her. “I’m fine.”
I’m fine.
My chest caved in. The whole of me folding around the sound of her saying I’m fine when she so plainly wasn’t, and then—right behind it, in the same breath—the other thing came up, and it came up white.
The fury came up so total and so cold that the room went very far away.
“There she is,” the voice said, pleased, and the phone moved, her gone again, and I’d have given my working arm to hear one more word out of her. “Alive and well. As you can hear. She’ll stay that way exactly as long as you’re sensible. Now. The terms.”
“Say them,” Sal said. The only two words he’d given the man.
“One. The bakery.” The voice ticked it off, bored, a man doing inventory. “Signed over, clean, the whole title. The block gets made whole. It’ll be good for the community. That’s the small one.” A pause, and I heard the pleasure in it, the man savoring the size of the next part. “Two. And this is the one your families are going to need to sit down for.”
The room waited.
“Don Arturo steps down.”
Nobody moved. I heard Donatella’s breath go in.
“In front of everyone,” the voice went on, unhurried now, enjoying it. “A full abdication. He names Gianni Scordato as head of the family, publicly, with the other houses to witness, and he hands it over. The whole thing. Sicily, the eastern office, the American footprint, all of it, to his son, where it belongs, where it always should have belonged. Don Arturo gives Giannithe family.” A beat. “And the woman is what he pays to get the girl back. That’s the price of her. An old man’s throne for a baker. I’d say it’s a generous rate, but Gianni is sentimental about family.”
The phone went quiet.
The room went quiet with it, that flat dead quiet I’d been drowning in all night, except now it had a shape. Now I understood the shape.
I’d spent the whole night braced for a number, a ransom, a sum of money I’d have moved heaven and the city to put in a bag. It was never about money. It was never even, really, about the block—the block was a means, the block was the wedge, the block was the thing that put her in his hand. This was a coup. This was a son who couldn’t beat his father with brilliance because he had none, who couldn’t earn the family because he wasn’t good enough and on some level knew it, reaching instead for the one thing that would force the old man’s hand—and finding it, finding the lever, finding the exact weight that would move Don Arturo off his throne.
Her.
The voice came back, one more time, light, almost kind.
“You’ll want to discuss it,” it said. “I understand. Big decision. Lots of pride in the room.” And then the kindness went out of it like a light. “You have forty-eight hours.”
The line went dead.
Forty-eighthours.
The words hung in the dead room after the line cut, and I was already moving.
This time, I didn’ttryto get up. I just fucking did it.
I got my good arm under me and I shoved, and the ribs screamed and the room swung and I didn’t stop, I got my legs over the side of the bed, dragged them over the edge, the gauze pulling, the burn tearing under it so the whole left side of me went white-bright with it, and the doctor was there with his hands on my shoulders saying something about my lungs and the smoke and the ribs and I didn’t hear a word of it because I was getting up.
“Tonio.” Sal’s voice. “Tonio. Stop.”
“No.” It came out of me on a breath that cost me everything. “No. I’m not lying here. Not one more minute. Not while she’s—” I got a foot to the floor and the floor came up at me and the doctor caught my arm and I shook him off and the burn screamed and I planted the foot anyway. “She said I’m fine. You heard her. She lied to my face through a phone so I wouldn’t be scared, and I am not going to be lying in a bed when—”
I made it to standing.
I stood swaying, one hand fisted in the bed rail, the other arm dead and weeping at my side, the room tipping slow, sweat coming up cold all over me, and I stood. It was the worst four feet of vertical I have ever fought for in my life and I won it and I stood, shaking, useless, upright, and I looked at my cousin.
