Page 86 of The Mad Don
I’m polishing my gun and whistling when the shooting at my gates starts. I don’t stop whistling. I knew this was coming the moment I left the hospital. It was only ever a matter of time, so I used the days I had. I rested, and I prepared. I let the wounds close as much as they would.
Fabiano disappeared three days ago, taking most of my men with him. I’m not surprised. I’d have done the same in his place. It doesn’t matter. What matters is already done. Yana, her brother, Lucia, they’re in the air, or close to it, somewhere over an ocean, heading for a city where none of this can reach them. All I have left to do is handle Fabiano and let them live.
This is where it ends for me. I’m ready for it. I made my peace with it the night I painted my own sister’s face the color of the dead.
The gates come down. A voice goes through the house.
“I want Giovanni Mondi dead!”
I chuckle.
I set the gun down, I stand up, and part the curtains to reveal Yana’s sculpture. I look at it, and I think of the first time I saw her across that gallery, the only person in the room who looked at me and saw something wrong. She wormed her way into a place in me I’d kept sealed since I was a boy on a cold floor.
“We go together,” I tell it.
I whistle. I pick up a bottle of wine off the table, half full, and I walk down the stairs, drinking it as the men swarm up. I shoot a few of them without much care, the bottle in my other hand, wine spilling down my shirt, a man with nothing left to lose and no reason to aim well.
Someone gets close enough to kick the gun out of my hand. The bottle goes with it, smashing on the stairs. Several of them grab me and haul me down the rest of the way and drag me out into the courtyard to where Zaki and Fabiano are sitting like they own the place.
Zaki stands.
“Don,” he says, “we finally meet.”
“Long time no see.”
I’ve never met him in person, but I know his name. Zaki opposed me from the day I took the seat. He’s the muscle behind Fabiano. The reason acapowith a grudge became a capo with an army.
Zaki cocks a gun.
“I’d love to keep you alive a while,” he says, “but I need my new Don in his chair.”
His finger settles on the trigger. My hand moves toward my waistband as I steady myself.
The shot rings, but Zaki drops. He dies before he hits the stone; his eyes open.
Fabiano steps over and kicks the body once.
“Stupido,” he spits.
“It’s you and me now, Don,” Fabiano says. He laughs.
I look back down at Zaki on the ground.
“Look at me!” Fabiano screams.
I look up.
“Yes,” he says. “I killed him. I killed him. How dare he think he gets to be the one to take you out after everything, after all theyears I —” His voice cracks open. He hits me across the face with the gun.
I go back. He’s on me before I recover, his boot driving into my side, into the wound that hasn’t closed. I grunt.
“On your knees.” He’s shaking. “On your fucking knees!”
I look up at him with blood in my mouth, and I smile.
“I don’t feel like it. Make me.”
He’s foaming now. “Get him on his knees!”
