Page 143 of Ruthless Sin
“I told you in the back room what I did in Moscow,” I say. “I told you what I’ve been carrying. I told you who she is.”
“You did.”
“You didn’t ask why I didn’t come to you.”
“I didn’t ask in front of the family.”
A beat.
“I’m asking now.”
I look at the floor. The rug Papa bought in Tunisia the year before Mama died. The rug Dante kept.
I don’t get to look away.
I look up.
“I was afraid.”
Dante doesn’t move.
“Afraid he’d do what he said. Send men, find them, find her. That I’d lead him to her. Told myself I was protecting her. Told myself I was protecting you.”
I stop.
“I was protecting myself. I couldn’t go back in that room. So I lied. Three years.”
Don’t be sick.
“Broke my word to her on the floor of a concrete room. Broke my word to you in this study. That’s the answer.”
Dante doesn’t speak.
The signet ring turns once on his finger.
Then he says, quiet.
“You’re the bravest man I know, Niccolò. You’re also the most scared. I’ve always known both. I knew it the day Papa pressed Mama’s cufflinks into your hand and you didn’t drop them and you didn’t cry and you were nine years old.”
My throat closes.
He’s known since I was young. He watched me come back from Moscow hollow and he waited. He sat behind that desk and said nothing and he waited for me to come to him. Dante always waits. He gives his brothers room.
I came too late.
My eyes burn. I don’t let them go.
“You should have come to me three years ago. I would have killed him in Moscow. I’d be sitting at this desk with that on me instead of you sitting in that doorway with this on you.”
“I know.”
“Fix it.”
Two words.
The same words he said in the back room. Different register now. Brother. Not Don.
“How.”
