Chapter 12
Alessandro looked down at her and saw not a traitor, but a frightened parent cornered by a debt, protecting her child the only way she knew how. He thought of Emma. Cold is still cold. Even the guilty.
“Get up, Rosa,” he said quietly. “You’re going to keep talking to Romano. Every day, exactly as before. Except from this moment on, every word you send him comes from me.”
The enemy’s card had just become his card.
The last night before the deadline, he stood alone in the library where everything had begun, his fingers hovering over the water stain on the armchair without touching it. That’s not a stain. That’s where I was saved. He touched, very lightly, the crayon figure with the yellow hair taped to the wall. Then he sat at the desk and signed every page of the transfer documents — real signatures, real surrender, every dock and route his father had bled for and he had killed for.
“Those were supposed to be decoys,” Luca said, rigid.
“If the plan fails, I trade for real.” Alessandro closed the case. “The whole empire for the two of them. An empire is a thing you can lose. If I lose it, I’m still me. If I lose them—” the lamplight caught something raw in his face— “whatever’s left won’t deserve to be called a man.”
He handed Luca a sealed envelope — succession, accounts, provisions for Sophia and Emma, to be opened only if he didn’t return. Luca, a man forged out of iron who had never bowed his head to anyone, lowered himself onto one knee.
“For fifteen years I followed the don because I was afraid,” he said. “Tonight I follow the don because I am proud to.”
Dawn came gray and quiet. Alessandro walked out in a plain black suit, no weapon showing, nothing in his hands but a leather document case — and on his wrist, absurd against the dark cuff, a child’s wooden bracelet.
May you like
An hour before the appointed time, Victorio went down to see his hostages himself, carrying a bottle and a single glass. He told Sophia and Emma about being nine years old, sold by his own father to settle a gambling debt, standing in the rain, watching the man count the money and walk away without ever looking back.
“That night I learned the only lesson worth learning,” he said. “Family is merchandise. Love is merchandise. Everyone sells. The only difference between people is the price.”
