Chapter 4
Damien was still conscious when she reached him, which told her more about his will than his wound did. Two of his men had arrived — real ones this time, the kind whose faces she actually knew — and one was pressing a folded jacket hard against his shoulder while the other spoke urgently into a phone, requesting a doctor who wouldn’t ask questions the hospital would.
Vanessa knelt in front of her husband and set the case beside her knee.
“You’re pale,” she said.
“You’re barefoot,” he said back, eyes dropping once to her stockinged foot, the missing shoe somewhere on the third floor with a broken man’s face imprinted faintly on the heel.
It wasn’t the moment for either of them to laugh, and somehow they both almost did.
Then his eyes found the case.
The humor drained out of the room like water through a cracked glass.
His voice dropped, careful, like each word cost him something.
“Luca had that made two years ago. I thought it held contract records. Insurance documents.”
He stopped. Started again.
“I never asked what was actually inside it, because he told me I didn’t want to know.”
His jaw worked.
“I let him decide that for me. The way I decide things for you.”
Vanessa didn’t answer that yet.
There would be time.
Right now there was a man across the room she hadn’t noticed until he moved — Sal, Damien’s driver of nineteen years, standing near the shattered service cart with a tire iron in one steady hand and three of Luca’s men zip-tied at his feet, disarmed, subdued, and visibly regretting every decision that had led them into a parking garage with Sal in it.
Sal wasn’t even winded.
“Mr. Moretti. Your car’s out back. Whenever you’re ready to stop bleeding on the antique rug.”
Damien huffed something that wasn’t quite a laugh.
“How long have you been out there.”
“Since the second one of Luca’s boys tried to bribe me to leave the east exit unlocked.” Sal’s face didn’t change, but something old and tired moved behind his eyes. “Eleven years I drove for that man too, sir. He used to buy my kid birthday presents.” He nudged one of the zip-tied men with his boot, gently, almost sadly. “Guess loyalty’s only real when nobody offers you a better number.”
Nobody in the room said what they were all thinking — that Sal could have taken the money and no one would have known until it was far too late.
He hadn’t needed anyone to know.
May you like
That was the whole point of the kind of man he’d chosen to be.
Vanessa crouched beside him and pressed the folded jacket harder against Damien’s shoulder while Sal collected the last zip tie from his belt loop like a man tidying up after a job well done. She didn’t thank him. Some debts weren’t meant to be settled out loud, not in a room still smelling of cordite and spilled champagne, and Sal didn’t look like he wanted the words anyway. He looked like a man who had simply decided, at some point over eleven years, which version of loyalty he could live with — and had been quietly living it every day since, waiting for a night that would finally ask him to prove it.
