Page 88 of The Mad Don
“You’re lying.” But his eyes have changed. There’s a tremor in them now.
“You’re me, Fabiano. No family. No blood. No name worth saying out loud. Only you’re slower than I am.” I hold his gaze and let him see I mean every word. “Why would they ever choose you over me?”
The grin flickers back on, but it’s twitching at one corner. “What are you saying?”
I stand.
The rope is still around my wrists, but I roll my shoulders, flex my hands, and I make sure he is watching me do it.
“Do you know why I made youcapo?”
His chest is rising and falling fast. “Because you looked down on me. Because you wanted something under your boot. Someone to step on whenever you —”
The rope snaps, and his gun jerks up. I whistle.
Every weapon behind him turns on him.
Fabiano’s head whips around. His mouth falls open. “What, what are you doing? He’s the enemy. He is the enemy?—”
“The only enemy,” I say, working the blood back into my fingers, “is the one who can’t keep a promise.”
I look at him. His gun is still raised, but his hands have started to shake, and the barrel trembles in the air between us.
“I made youcapobecause you were the weakest man I could afford. I couldn’t have a second with ties to a strong house.I couldn’t have one too clever to control. I needed someone competent enough to be useful and small enough never to become this.” I tilt my head. “And here you are. Become this anyway. Almost impressive.”
His lips are moving without sound.
“When I took the chair, I went to the low-income families, not because I couldn’t outmaneuver the powerful ones.” I take a step toward him, and he doesn’t fire, his eyes darting between me and the guns at his back. “Because I know the thing the powerful never have. Loyalty. The rich buy men. They never own them.” I smile. “If you hadn’t shot Zaki today, Fabiano, he’d have shot you by sundown and put his own nephew in this seat.
“Where are my men?” His voice cracks down the middle. His eyes sweep the ring of barrels pointed at his spine, wild, hunting for one friendly face and finding none. “These are my men —”
“They’re your men,” I agree. “Though I did mention to them, some time ago, that when the families turned you away, and we both knew they would, they could come to me, and I’d let them keep their heads on their shoulders.”
The sound that comes out of him isn’t a laugh. It starts as one and collapses into something gasping and high, his shoulders jerking, his eyes glassing over as they rake the yard.
“It doesn’t matter,” he wheezes. “It doesn’t. I beat you. I won. These — these are technicalities; they don’t change anything, I still —”
I walk to him, I take the gun out of his shaking hand, and I press the barrel to his chest.
“You can’t kill a man with nothing left to lose so easily, Fabiano.”
He nods, and then something terrible settles over his face; the panic drains out of him all at once, leaving behind an awful calm.
“And you can’t kill a man with everything to lose so easily either.”
He tears his shirt open. A vest is strapped across his chest, the wires taped down, a small light blinking red over his heart. His thumb is already on the remote in his fist.
“We die here, Mondi. Today. You and I. Together.” His mouth stretches into something that wants to be triumph and lands on madness. “Just the two dogs who came up from nothing.”
I look at the light on his chest. I look at his thumb. I look at his eyes, and there’s nothing left behind them to bargain with.
“My fucking pleasure,” I reply. One of us had to die, and if I were going to die, I would take him with me. I began to squeeze the trigger of my gun when tires screech at the gate.
Four cars come through it hard and fan out across the courtyard with engines roaring, and Fabiano’s men break into confusion, the guns swinging away from him toward the new noise. A door is thrown open before the car has come to a stop.
Yana jumps out, wearing a vest and a gun, calling my name. “Giovanni!”
She sees me and stops dead. Her chest is heaving, her eyes go wide and bright and wet all at once, and her lips part around my name a second time without sound coming out.
