Page 48 of Taking Savannah
She's in one of my sweatshirts, the sleeves rolled three times so her hands stick out, and sweatpants she's pulled from somewhere, and her hair is down and her face is puffy and she's carrying two cups of coffee. She doesn't ask how it went. She doesn't say I'm sorry. She doesn't say anything. She walks across the roof and sits beside me on the ledge and hands me a cup and the coffee is hot and black, which is exactly what I need.
And somehow she just knows what I need..
We sit on the roof. The coffee steams in the cold air. The city blinks below us and the sky gets lighter and somewhere inside the building a family is waking up to a world without its founder and the work of holding it together falls on the shoulders of people who aren't ready for it and will do it anyway because that's what the dead man asked them to do.
Savannah's shoulder presses against mine.
"He said I'm the heart of this family," I say. The words come out rough and broken and I don't try to fix them. "He said peoplefollow me because they love me. I don't even know what to do with that."
"You don't have to do anything with it. You just have to keep being it."
"I don't know how to be it without him."
"Yeah, you do." She takes a sip of her coffee. "You just don't know you know. That's the annoying thing about you. You're better than you think and you refuse to believe anyone who tells you."
"You never tell me."
"I'm telling you right now, asshole."
“I told you everything you say is a compliment.” I don’t smile as I say it, but I look at her and it’s like the world makes sense again. The light is hitting her face, and her eyes are brown and tired but filled with love. I lean my forehead against her temple and close my eyes. She puts her hand on my thigh, and we sit on the roof while the sun comes up.
Aurelio Bonaccorso is dead.
The empire he built is in the hands of the people he trusted to carry it.
I'm sitting on a roof with a woman who brought me coffee and called me an asshole, and for the first time all night I can breathe.
Chapter Sixteen: Savannah
TheyburyAurelioona Thursday in the compound courtyard, under a sky that can't decide between rain and sun, with thirty-armed men standing in rows and a hole in the ground that's too small for the man going into it.
I stand beside Emilio. His hand is on my lower back, and it hasn't moved since we walked out here, and I get the feeling it's not there for me. It's there because he needs the contact the way I need my bottle cap, which is in my left hand, pressed into my palm hard enough to leave a mark.
The courtyard has been cleared. Vehicles moved, equipment stored, the asphalt swept clean. Someone put flowers on the low wall near the gate, white roses and something purple I don't know the name of. The arrangement is careful and wrong in the way all funeral flowers are wrong. Too neat for the mess underneath.
Leone stands at the head of the grave in a black suit. He's shaved. First time in weeks he's looked put-together, and the effort itself is a statement. The man standing over this grave is not the sleep-deprived, red-eyed one who held Aurelio's hand three nights ago. This is the Don. He's put the Don on the way you'd put on armor, piece by piece so the seams don't show.
He waits until the courtyard is still… until the wind dies down and the soldiers stop shuffling and the only sound is the flag on the perimeter wall snapping in the breeze.
"Aurelio Bonaccorso built this family from nothing." Leone's voice carries without force. He doesn't need volume. The courtyard is holding its breath. "He was twenty-three years old when his father died, and he stood in a room full of men who were older and harder and meaner than he was, and he told them he was in charge. Half of them laughed. The other half tried to kill him. Within a year, every man in that room was either loyal to Aurelio or in the ground."
A murmur from the soldiers as they bow their heads in respect. They've heard this story. It's foundational. The origin myth of the family they serve.
"He built the compound we're standing in. He built the alliances, the trade routes, the infrastructure. He built a reputation that kept this family safe for forty years, not because men feared him, but because men respected him. Fear fades, but respect endures. He taught me that."
Leone pauses and looks at the grave. His jaw moves once, a single flex, and that's the only crack. The only moment where the man beneath the Don surfaces.
"He also built secrets. He built rooms inside rooms, plans inside plans. He played games with people more powerful than we knew existed, and he did it to protect us. Whether he was right to do it that way, whether the secrets were necessary, whether the cost was worth the safety..." Leone stops and takes a breath. "That's not for me to judge. He made the choices he made with the information he had, and he carried the weight of those choices until his body couldn't carry anything anymore."
I watch the soldiers' faces. Some of them are old enough to have worked for Aurelio directly. A man in the second row, mid-fifties, has tears running into his beard and isn't wiping them. Another, younger, is staring at the grave with his fists at his sides, the knuckles white. These men don't cry in public. The fact that they're doing it now says more about Aurelio than anything Leone could put into words.
"I'm not going to stand here and tell you he was a good man. Good isn't a word that fits any of us, and he'd be the first to say so. He was who he was. He was ruthless when ruthlessness was required and generous when generosity served the cause. He loved this family the only way he knew how, which was by controlling everything in it, and the irony of a control freak dying in a bed where he couldn't control his own lungs is not lost on me."
A chuckle ripples through the crowd.
"I will tell you what he was to me. He was the man who found a lost kid running the streets and saw something worth shaping. He didn't ask if I wanted the life. He simply didn't give me a choice. He told me to sit down, shut up, and learn, and I did, because Aurelio Bonaccorso was not a man you said no to." Leone's voice changes. The Don is still there, but the kid underneath it shows for a second. The one who got pulled off the streets and turned into a leader. "He taught me how to run an organization. How to read people. How to make decisions that cost something and how live with that cost. He taught me that leadership isn't about being liked, it's about being right more often than you're wrong, and admitting it when you're wrong. He wasn't perfect at that last part. Neither am I. But I learned it from him, and I'll spend the rest of my life trying to be better at it than he was."
Beside me, Emilio's hand presses harder against my back. I can feel the tension running through his arm, into his fingers, into me. He's holding himself together with the pressure.
