Page 87 of Crowned in Sin
He walks off down the hallway whistling something I don't recognize, phone heavy in his pocket with my husband's wholehidden life folded up inside it, and I stand there until I can trust my legs again before I go in.
She looks smaller every time.I know that's not possible, not really, that a body can only shrink so much before it stops being a body at all, but every time I walk into this room she takes up less space in the bed than she did the last time.
I pull the chair up close, take her hand, the one without the IV line running into it, and don't let go.
"Hi, Mom."
Nothing. The machines keep their rhythm. I knew there'd be nothing. I sit with it anyway.
"I did something today," I say, and then I stop, because I don't know how to say the rest of it out loud, even to a woman who can't hear me, even now.
But I start anyway, because if I don't say it here I'm never going to say it anywhere, and it has to live somewhere outside my own head or it's going to eat me alive.
"I think Nico killed Dad." My voice comes out so quiet I almost don't hear myself say it. "I found something today that makes me almost sure of it. And I didn't tell him I know. I just... I took what I found and I gave it to Frank instead. The one thing Nico's never shown anyone. I handed it over like it was nothing."
I press her hand against my cheek. It's warm, at least. Someone that warm can't really be gone yet.
"I told myself it was for you. That's true. It is true. He's holding your power of attorney over my head like a leash, and I don't have time to fight him the slow way." My throat closes and I push through it anyway, because this is the one room in the world where nobody's watching me perform being fine. "But that's not all of it, Mom. Some part of me wanted him to lose something. Because I think he took Dad from us, and I wanted him to feel that, even a little, even unfairly, before I know for certain. And I don't know what that makes me. I don't know if it makes me like Frank. I don't know if it makes me like Don Leo. I just know I did it, would probably do it again, and hate that more than I hate anything Frank's ever done to us."
I say something else out loud too, quieter than the rest. That I chose this, twice, in the same day, and I'd probably choose it again tomorrow if it came to that.
"I don't know if any of this is going to be worth it," I tell her. "I don't know if I just wrecked the one good thing I've got left to save the only other good thing I've got left, and I don't know if you'd even want me to make that trade if you could hear me say it."
My stomach turns again, slow and sour, and I press my free hand flat against it like I can hold the feeling still if I just don't let it move.
I keep telling myself it's guilt.
I stay until the light outside the window goes from gray to grayer, holding her hand, saying things I've never said to anyone. None of it fixes anything, and none of it makes the sick feeling in my stomach go away. I don't leave anyway. I just sit there with her, spent and queasy, nothing resolved, not for her, not for Nico. Whatever I've just made of myself in this hospitalhallway on this particular day stays unresolved too, and I hold on to her hand like it's the only thing in the whole building that's still mine.
31
NICO
The call comesin at six fourteen in the morning, and I know before I answer it that something is dead.
"Terminal 7," Anastasio says. No greeting. "They hit it an hour ago."
I'm already pulling on a shirt. "Who."
"OCCB. Full unit. Officers on the door, a van in the alley, they've got the safe cracked open and they're carrying boxes out onto the sidewalk like it's a block sale." A pause. "It's shut down, Nico. Pending investigation. However long that means."
I don't say anything for three full seconds. I make myself count them.
"The books," I say. "The real books, not the ones we show the state."
"Gone. All of it. They knew exactly where to look."
That's the part that sits wrong in my chest. Cops come. Cops sniff around every club in this city looking for a reason. Whathas never once happened in six years of running that place clean on the surface and careful underneath is a raid that walks in and goes straight for the one hiding spot that matters.
Somebody handed them a map.
"I'm coming down there," I say.
"Don't." Anastasio's voice drops. "There's nothing to come down for. It's a crime scene. You show up, you're a guy standing outside his own raided business looking guilty as hell."
I hate that he's right.
I sit on the edge of the bed with the phone against my ear, look at the wall, and clench my jaw. Vinny got that place started for me. I'm the one who's spent every year since actually running it, building it into something clean, legitimate, and mine.
