Chapter 12
Across the length of the long room, through the drifting dust and the smell of cordite and the low moaning of the man with the shattered thigh, Marco Bellini looked up and found Dante Moretti looking directly back at him.
Neither man blinked.
Sophie finally lifted her small face from her lap and saw her mother standing in the doorway.
She opened her mouth and whispered a word.
“Mama.”
Anna moved.
Dante’s hand was no longer on her shoulder. She did not remember when he had taken it away.
She went past him in a low diagonal line across the floor, keeping the row of steel roof-columns between her and the men by the office door, the small pistol tight in her right hand but held low and unraised.
She did not fire. She did not look at anything but the chair in the corner.
Dante walked the other way.
He walked the long diagonal toward Marco.
He walked slowly. He did not run. He kept his pistol down at his thigh.
He did not want to kill Marco Bellini.
He wanted Marco Bellini to see him coming.
Luca shifted sideways to cover Adrien Cross, who had risen from behind the crate with the yellow coat and was now backing toward the industrial window.
“Where are you going, Mr. Cross?” Luca said, almost pleasantly.
Adrien stopped. His hands came up.
Marco’s hand remained on his hip. His pistol was still in the holster.
“Draw it, Marco.”
“No, boss.”
“Draw it.”
Dante stopped eight feet from him.
He raised the pistol. The barrel was level with Marco’s sternum.
“Sixteen years.”
Marco’s mouth moved. The corner of it rose into something that was not a smile.
“Sixteen years.”
“I buried my father with you at my shoulder.”
“I know.”
“I brought you to the first table. I put your name on the second account. I handed you my mother’s phone number so that if anything happened to me on a Tuesday night in Palermo, you would be the first call.”
“I know why.”
Marco looked at him for a long moment. The thing at the corner of his mouth deepened. It was not bitterness, exactly. It was closer to the exhaustion of a man who had been carrying a sentence inside his chest for a very long time and had finally been asked to put it down.
“Because you never saw me, Dante.”
His voice was quiet and clear and almost patient.
“Sixteen years at your shoulder and you never once stood beside me. You stood in front. I stood behind. You made me useful. You never made me equal.”
“That was not the deal.”
“It was the deal you offered. I took a different one.”
In the corner, Anna reached the chair.
She fell to her knees in front of Sophie. Her hands worked at the cloth around the small wrists. Sophie made no sound. She only pressed her forehead into her mother’s shoulder.
Adrien Cross saw his moment.
He broke sideways along the window toward the east stairwell.
Luca shot him in the thigh.
Adrien went down screaming and did not get up.
The fifth man — the one who had stood very still beside the chair with his hand on his pistol — had been forgotten by everyone except himself.
He saw Anna crouched with the child. He saw Dante’s back turned toward Marco.
He drew.
He drew fast. His barrel came up and sighted on Sophie.
Dante’s shoulder shifted perhaps three inches.
He fired once, without looking.
The man’s gun hand went red. The pistol skittered away across the concrete, and he folded over his own arm and went down, screaming.
The sound rolled through the warehouse and died in the rafters.
Marco Bellini had moved his hand two inches closer to his hip during that single second.
He stopped.
He raised both hands slowly.
Raphael came up behind him and put him on his knees.
May you like
In the corner, Sophie’s wrists came free. Anna gathered her daughter into her arms and did not let go.
Dante did not kill Marco Bellini.
