Page 94 of The Kingpin’s Bride

I let it sit for two days. I told myself it was discipline. That answering too fast would prove I was still the hungry twenty-five-year-old who had put three Vernizzi sons in the ground and called it succession.

Santino would have said the same thing. Stay home. Let the lawyers choke on the technicality. Let the table wonder if I had finally learned how to be quiet.

I lasted until the third morning. Morena watched me from the kitchen doorway while I knotted my tie. Camilla was on the floor with a book she could not read yet, turning pages like the pictures were enough. The cut on Morena’s cheek had faded to a thin line. She looked at my hands as I fastened my cufflinks and knew I was not going to a meeting that ended in coffee.

“You’re leaving,” she said.

“Contract I need to sign,” I said. “It’s urgent.”

“You don’t sign things yourself anymore.”

“I do when they start taking what is mine in public and calling it paperwork.”

She did not ask me not to go. She had already used her one request on Camilla, and I had already given her the version of me that murdered a bloodline for a chair. Asking me to stay would have been asking me to be someone else. “If this is about the call with that man…”

“It is about the call,” I said. “And about the next one they think they get to make.”

I crossed to her. I did not kiss her like a man leaving for war. I put my mouth to her temple and left it there long enough to feel her pulse.

“You do not open the door,” I reminded her. “If I am late, you wait for Santino. Not for anyone else.”

“Please come back, Matteo,” she whispered.

Camilla looked up at the sound of my name. I crouched, careful, and tapped the cover of her book once.

“Keep your sister out of trouble,” I told her. She nodded, solemn, as if I had given her a real job.

I took two men and one car because three cars looked like fear and one man looked like an invitation.

The north-side warehouse sat behind a row of legitimate fronts I still used when I needed the city to believe I moved olive oil and machine parts. The manager who used to take my calls had stopped answering. That was the point of the drive. I wanted his face. I wanted to see whether the silence was cowardice or a bought one.

The street was too empty for that hour. No loading traffic. No bored security on the corner. The kind of quiet that only happens when someone has paid for it.

The first bullet killed the engine. The block of the motor punched the whole car into a dead, heavy silence. The second took the front tire and dropped us hard against the curb. Glass went across my lap in a bright, useless spray.

One of my men dropped before he cleared the door. Center mass. He hit the asphalt and did not get up. The other took a round that was meant for my spine, twisted with it, and still put two of them down before his legs went. Professional. Tight angles. Not street kids with extra ammunition. Men who had been told exactly how much of me to leave alive.

I killed the third as he came around the hood. The shot was clean. He folded like the Vernizzi had folded, and for one stupid second I was back in that warehouse with spent casings in my pocket.

The fourth man shot me through the knee while I was turning. The pain was instant and absolute. My leg vanished out from under me. I hit the asphalt hard enough to taste blood and the wet heat spreading under my thigh.

They didn’t finish it. That was the point. Expensive shoes stopped a few feet from my head. A calm voice said, “Don Salvatore sends its regards. Tread carefully, Ventura.”

Then they were gone.

I dragged myself to the car on one elbow and a ruined leg, got the door open, and hit the emergency channel. The last thing I heard before the dark took me was Santino roaring my name through the speaker.

Iwoke up in the private clinic the families used when they wanted someone to survive, and not be seen. Santino sat in the chair beside the bed with his forearms on his knees and his eyes gone flat the way they only did when he was deciding who to kill first.

I came back in pieces. First the light, too white, too clean. Then the smell, antiseptic and old money and the faint metallic edge that always followed rooms like this. Money, maybe. Then the weight of my own body, wrong, heavy, pinned to a mattress I had not chosen.

My mouth was dry. My tongue felt thick. Somewhere under the drugs a pulse was beating in a place that should not have had a pulse at all.

I tried to move my right leg. Nothing happened.

For a second I thought I was still on the asphalt. Expensive shoes near my head. That calm voice.

Don Salvatore sends his regards. Tread carefully, Ventura.