Page 44 of Taking Savannah
Of course. Carmelo doesn't wait to be summoned. He goes where the threat is, and right now the threat is a clock running out, and he's been standing guard over it in the dark for three hours because that's how Carmelo says the things he'll never say out loud. It’s how he shows he cares.
Leone pushes off the wall. "Let's go."
The room smells wrong.
Not bad. Wrong. The smell of a body shutting down. Organs letting go one by one while the machines argue with the process and lose.
Aurelio is in his bed and the rails are up, a blanket tucked around him. The monitors are beeping but the rhythm is different from last time I was here, slower, with gaps between the beeps that are longer than they should be. The IV drip runs and the oxygen machine hisses and the room is full of equipment keeping a man alive who has decided it’s time to go.
He's smaller. Every time I see him he's smaller. The Aurelio I met at fifteen was a big man, broad shoulders, thick hands, a voice that filled rooms without trying. The Aurelio in this bed has hands I can see through, skin so thin the veins look painted on, and his cheeks are gaunt.
Carmelo is standing in the corner. Arms crossed, back against the wall, face showing nothing. He's been crying. His knife isn't in his hands. That's how I know it's bad. Carmelo's knife is his anchor the way Savannah's bottle cap is hers, and the fact that he's put it away means he's decided that the thing happening in this room deserves his full attention, no distractions, nogrounding objects. Just him and the man in the bed and whatever's between them.
We all file in and stand around his bed as his eyes open. They track across the room, face to face, and despite everything those eyes are the same. The mind behind them is fully online. The Don is dying but he hasn't left yet.
"All of you," he rasps. I can hear the effort it takes to push air through his throat. "Good."
Dahlia sits next to him and takes his hand. Her face is still blank, but her hands are shaking and Aurelio sees it and his fingers close around hers.
"You look like your mother," he says.
"You said that already."
"I'll say it until I can't." He looks at her face the way a man looks at a painting he's seeing for the last time, memorizing the details he won't get another chance to study. "I wasted time being angry at you for leaving. Stupid, stupid old man. You left because you needed to live, and I was too proud to see it."
"Papa."
"Let me talk. I don't have time for interruptions." A wet, rattling cough, deep in his chest escapes. The monitor spikes and then settles. "I built this family on discipline and control, and Iapplied those same principles to my daughter, and it was wrong. You are not an empire. You are not a territory. You are my child, and I treated you like an asset, and I'm sorry."
Dahlia's face breaks, but not all at once. A crack runs through the blank expression and underneath is the girl who left and hasn't stopped being angry and hasn't stopped loving him. She never stopped needing him.
She leans forward and puts her forehead against his hand. She doesn't cry.
Aurelio looks at Leone. "Come here."
Leone steps forward. He moves like a man walking through water, each step an effort, and I realize this is the hardest thing Leone has ever done. Not the war. Not the trafficking. Not the Castillo alliance or the attack on the compound or any of the hundred operational crises he's managed in the last year. Walking to this bed. That's the one.
"You're ready," Aurelio says.
"I'm not."
"Nobody's ever ready. I wasn't ready when my father died. I was twenty-three and I sat in a room just like this and he told me I was ready, and I lied and said yes, sir, and then I walked out and threw up in the corridor." He almost smiles. "You won't throw up. You're better than I was. You've been running this family for a year already, and everyone knows it, including me."
"I was running it for you."
"You were running it for them." Aurelio lifts his chin toward the rest of us. Pain crosses his face and gets pushed down, because Aurelio Bonaccorso does not acknowledge pain in front of his people. "For Claudio and Emilio. For Alexandra. For the soldiers and the families and the people who depend on this organization to keep them safe. That's who you run it for. Not me. I'm done. My watch is over."
Leone takes his other hand. The Don's fingers wrap around Leone's the way they did in the war room weeks ago, the grip that surprised me then with its strength. It surprises me now with how weak it is.
"The Custodian families," Aurelio says, and the room temperature drops. "Kreiss was a node. You know this. What you don't know is how deep it goes. I've kept things from you, Leone. Things I thought I had time to explain." He coughs again, longer this time. The monitor screams for two seconds before settling back to its slow, gapped rhythm. "The folder in my desk. Bottom drawer, left side. The key is in my watch case. It has names. Real names. The families who sit above the networks, above the handlers, above the Kreisses of the world. I gathered them over thirty years of off the record deals and trades. I met with one of them, the Harrison brother, you can trust them, they want the same as we do. I want you to have the information because I was never brave enough to act on them."
"Why not?"
"Because they're bigger than us. Bigger than the Castillos. Bigger than both families combined. Now that Kreiss is dead, pen a letter to him in my name, tell him it’s over and we’re even. Take the information and make our family stronger." His eyes find the ceiling. "That's my failure. Don't inherit it. Open the folder. Read the names. And do what I couldn't."
Leone nods. He doesn't trust himself to speak. I can see it, the way his throat works, the swallow he can't control.
Aurelio turns to Claudio. "Come."
