Page 71 of Crowned in Sin
I know because I check my watch when the wheels leave the ground. It’s an old habit. Eleven minutes from a phone call to altitude. I've moved men and money slower than I moved my wife tonight.
She's in the seat across from me with her knees pulled up, arms wrapped around them, staring at the window like there's something out there besides black sky. I watch her for a second longer than I should and then go back to the phone, because right now that's the only thing I can actually do for her.
"Talk to me," I say to Anastasio.
"She's stable. Sedated. They pumped her stomach. Doctor says another twenty minutes and it goes different."
Twenty minutes. I don't say that number out loud.
"Frank?"
"Not at the hospital. Not answering his phone."
Of course he isn't.
"Find him anyway. I don't want him near her when she wakes up. If he shows, your men keep him in the hallway and call me before anything else happens."
"Understood."
I hang up and sit with it for a second. Bianca on a bathroom floor with pills in her system and her husband nowhere near enoughto notice, and somewhere under the fact of that is the other fact, the one I learned less than a day ago over dinner with Lydia's hand shaking in mine. Years of Frank selling that woman to men in uniform like she was a line item on a budget. Years of it, and last night I told Lydia I would kill him for it and I meant it completely.
I make two more calls after that. One to my lawyer in New York, telling him to have papers ready that I'm not going to explain over the phone. One to Anastasio again, telling him I want a full list of every officer who ever set foot in that house, going back as far as records go. He doesn't ask why. He never does.
By the time I put the phone down, my hand aches from how hard I've been gripping it.
I look up. Lydia hasn't moved.
"Piccola."
Nothing. Not even a flinch at the name.
I unbuckle and cross the small aisle and sit beside her instead, close enough that our knees touch. She doesn't turn her head. Her eyes are dry, which is somehow worse than if she were crying. Crying I'd know what to do with. This is something else, something that's gone past tears into a stillness I recognize from men right before they either break completely or shut down so hard nothing gets through anymore.
I've seen fear on her before. At the wedding. In my study, that first week, when she thought I might actually hurt her. Small flickers at the edges, gone as fast as they came, because she's spent her whole life learning to bury it before anyone can use it against her.
This isn't a flicker.
This is old, something she's been carrying since she was a kid in that house, listening for whatever sound meant her mother was in trouble again. Tonight just kicked the door open on all of it at once.
I don't touch her yet. I sit there and let her not talk, because some things you don't push, you wait out.
The plane levels off. Somewhere behind us Rome falls away and there's nothing outside the window but dark ocean and dark sky with no line between them.
I think about Capri. A day ago now, my mother told me I'd become him, Leo D'Ambrosio in a better suit, his blood in me winning out no matter what I told myself. I told myself she was wrong. I still think she was wrong, but I'd be lying if I said the question didn't follow me onto this plane.
Leo never protected anything in his life. He collected people, money, territory, and when they stopped being useful, he put them in the ground or worse. He would never have gotten on this plane. He wouldn't have sat with someone's silence instead of demanding she speak.
I look at the woman beside me, silent, white around the mouth, holding herself together because there's nobody else doing it for her right now, and I understand something I didn't have words for on Capri. Protecting somebody and destroying somebody can use the same hands. What scared me on Capri was thinking that made them the same thing. Sitting here, I know the difference is who you're doing it for.
I'm doing this for her.
"Lydia."
She blinks, slow, like she's coming up from somewhere deep.
"What," she says. Flat. Not a question really.
"We'll be on the ground in six hours. Anastasio has men at the hospital already."
