Chapter 16: The Warehouse
District
He found it two nights later — the actual site,
still standing after all these years, quietly
converted into storage for a shipping company
that had no idea what its floors had once
witnessed. Romeo walked the perimeter alone,
unarmed except for the folder still in his jacket,
needing to stand in the exact place where his
life had ended and, in some unrecognizable
way, begun again in the same terrible instant.
An old man was waiting there when he arrived.
Not Salvatore. Enzo.
"I wondered when you'd finally come here,"
Enzo said quietly, stepping out from the
shadow of a loading dock. "I was young when
it happened, Romeo. Younger than you are
right now, if you can believe that." Romeo's hands curled into fists so tight his
knuckles went bloodless and white.
"I carried the gasoline that night," Enzo said,
and his voice didn't waver, as if he'd rehearsed
this confession a thousand times in the privacy
of his own guilt and simply never found the
courage to deliver it. "I'm not telling you this to
save myself. God knows I don't deserve saving.
I'm telling you because you deserve the whole
truth before you do whatever it is you came
back here to do. Salvatore gave the order. But it
was never your father he wanted dead that
night. It was a rival named Costa, meeting your
father here to close a deal Salvatore couldn't
allow to happen. Your parents were never the
target, Romeo. They were simply in the wrong
place at the worst possible moment. Salvatore
has lived with that mistake for seventeen
years. It is the only job in his entire career that
he has genuinely, privately regretted."
It didn't undo anything. It didn't bring his
parents back, didn't erase seventeen years of a
childhood spent grieving a lie. But it cracked,
just slightly, the clean and simple shape of the revenge Romeo had been carrying like a
second skeleton since he was seven years old.
(I'm starting a new story soon.)
(Name: The bet on her heart)