Page 65 of Taking Savannah
The room goes quiet. Everyone arrives at the same conclusion at different speeds, but everyone gets there.
"A treaty bride," Claudio says.
"We don't know if Antonia is willing or if she's being traded," Leone says. "We don't know if Matteo is aware of the plan or ifhe's being positioned without his knowledge. What we know is that someone is building this arrangement and both families are being steered toward it."
"And our response?" I ask.
"Our response is to watch and prepare. To understand the full picture before we act." Leone stands. "The Harrisons are handling the Replication Initiative. We're handling the Castillo situation. And when Matteo shows up at our door, and hewillshow up, we'll be ready to have the conversation Aurelio never had with his own son."
The briefing ends and people file out. I stay for a minute, looking at the maps on the wall, the territory lines, the pins that have been moved and removed and repositioned over weeks of operational planning.
Aurelio's son is coming. Not today, not tomorrow, but soon. The forces that put him on this path are losing their grip as the Harrisons restructure the Silent, and a man without handlers is a man who has to make his own choices for the first time. When that moment comes, he will either reach for the Bonaccorso name or run from it, and Leone wants to be standing there when the choice gets made.
A treaty marriage between Matteo and Antonia Castillo. Two bloodlines, two families, two organizations that have been killing each other for years, bound together by a union that neither side chose and both sides might need. It's the kind ofstrategy that works on paper and destroys lives in practice, and whoever designed it doesn't care about either of those things.
I think about Savannah. About the woman who chose to stay, who chose me, who chose this insane, violent, beautiful family without being traded or positioned or placed. She's behind the bar right now, pouring drinks and organizing bottles and telling soldiers to mind their manners, and she chose to be there. Nobody made her. Nobody arranged it. She walked into a room and claimed it and that's the difference between a real marriage and a treaty one.
The difference ischoice.
I leave the room and head for the bar because the only place I want to be right now is wherever she is.
She sees me come in and sighs, pouring a whiskey and sliding it across the counter before I sit down.
"What now?" she asks.
"The Harrisons are handling the Westpoint thing. Leone's watching the Castillo situation. Matteo is being set up for a treaty marriage with Marco Castillo's daughter, and nobody involved in the arrangement seems to have asked either of them if they want it."
She leans her forearms on the bar and looks at me. "And us?"
"Us?"
"Yeah. Us. While the world does its thing and the families play their games and the shadow government restructures itself. What about us?"
I reach across the counter and take her hand. Her fingers are warm and her nails are cut short and there's a callus on her palm from the bottle cap and she is, without a fucking question, the most beautiful Goddamn woman I have ever seen in my life.
"We're good," I say. "We're better than good. You're behind that bar and I'm on this stool and the whiskey is decent and my arm is healing. I love you and you love me and none of the shit outside this room changes any of that."
"That's a lot of ands."
"I'm a lot of man."
"You're a lot of something." She squeezes my hand. "Drink your whiskey, asshole. I've got customers."
I drink. She pours. The bar fills up the way it does every evening, and someone starts the music. Charlotte and Claudio are in their corner. Alexandra with her laptop. Carmelo at the end of the bar, eating wings, his new knife on the counter beside his plate.
Savannah moves through the space with the ease of a woman who knows every bottle on every shelf and every face at everystool and has decided that this room and these people are hers to take care of. The rag over her shoulder. The pencil behind her ear. The bottle cap in her pocket that she touches when she thinks nobody's watching.
Except me. I'm always watching.
The war isn't over. It's changed shape, and the shape it's taking is bigger and stranger and involves names and bloodlines and shadows that none of us fully understand yet. Matteo is coming. Antonia is being positioned. The Harrisons are restructuring an empire, and somewhere on the eastern seaboard, a building is going up that the Harrisons will tear down because Aurelio trusted them to and Leone trusts Aurelio.
But right now, in this room, none of that matters.
Right now there's whiskey and a woman who loves me looking at me like I’ve got food on my face. I’ve got everything. Looking around, all I see are people who chose to be here. A family that's bruised but standing.
And we will make it just fine.
Chapter Twenty: Savannah
