Page 86 of Ruthless Daddy
Tonio sat down, at the far end, opposite Dante. Olimpo padded over and dropped his head on Tonio’s foot.
The argument did not stop. Santo went again. Sal again. Marco kept his counsel and watched. The words for what I had done piled up on the table between us — reckless, romantic, juvenile, indulgent, the worst of all of them said quietly by Sal, who said it without heat and therefore meant it: unprofessional. I let them say it. Angela’s hand stayed on my thigh under the table thewhole time. She didn’t squeeze. She just kept it there, a steady palm, the way a person kept their hand on a horse’s neck.
When the noise had run itself down, I spoke again.
“I told her I would not lie to her,” I repeated. “I told her that before I touched her. I told her again last night, after I touched her. I meant it then and I mean it now. And this morning I had to choose between keeping my word to her and keeping my word to you. I chose her.”
Nobody answered.
“If that costs me my place at this table,” I said, “that is what it costs. I made the choice with my eyes open. I came here to tell you so. I did not sneak. I did not run.”
The room sat with it.
Dante was looking at me. He had been looking at me, I realized, for some time.
I held his eyes.
“Would you have used her like that, Don Caruso?” I said. “If she were Gemma? Would you have used Gemma like that?”
The silence ran long enough that I thought he was not going to answer at all. The fire popped again. Olimpo sighed, the long full-body sigh of a large dog settling in for whatever this was.
Then Dante spoke.
“No,” he said. Slowly. The word had weight on it, the way Dante’s words always had weight, but more of it than usual. “I would not.”
The room shifted.
It was a small shift. Sal’s hand came off the folder. Marco straightened a quarter-inch where he leaned against the counter. Santo, against the brick, made a sound through his nose that was not a laugh and not a sigh and was the closest thing to acknowledgment Santo had in him.
Sal cleared his throat.
“The operational logic was sound,” he said. He said it the way he said everything—flat, careful, the words placed down one at a time like coins on a counter. “I am not defending the ethics. I am not — I am saying the operation, as designed, gave us our best probability of reaching Enzo. The intelligence was clean. The window was real. The crew was reading her routine and the routine was natural because she did not know. The plan was good, Pietro. I would design it again.”
“Would you?” I said.
“In a vacuum. Yes.
“Would you have run it on Gemma?”
Sal did not answer.
“Would you have run it on Cora?”
“Pietro.”
“Would you have run it on Serafina?”
“Pietro, this is not the moment for—“
I hit him.
I did not plan it. I had not gone in there intending it. My hand came up off the table and across before I had decided it was coming and it landed clean on the hinge of Sal’s jaw, one short closed knuckle, the kind of punch you throw when you mean to make a point and not a hole. His head turned with it. Someone made a sound—Marco, maybe—and Santo was off the wall in a beat but did not come forward because Dante’s hand had come up half an inch and stopped him.
Angela did not move. I felt her not move beside me, and the absence of her flinch was its own thing.
Sal did not return it, instead, he just touched his jaw.
“I deserved that,” he said. Very quietly. Sicilian, not English.
