Chapter 18: The Reckoning
Salvatore Ferrari looked smaller behind his
own desk than Romeo remembered, as if the weight of what was finally coming had already
begun quietly compressing him from the inside
out.
"I know why you're here," Salvatore said, before
Romeo had spoken a single word. "Enzo told
me he found you at the warehouse. I have
rehearsed a hundred versions of this exact
conversation over the years, Romeo. I never
once expected to actually have it with my
daughter's bodyguard."
"Say it," Romeo said, standing rigid just inside
the doorway, Isabella a half-step behind him.
"All of it. Every word."
So Salvatore did. The rival, Costa. The deal
gone catastrophically wrong. The fire meant
for men who had, unbeknownst to anyone
giving the order, left the building nearly an hour
before it burned — taking two innocent people
instead, people who had simply been renting
warehouse space for a small textile business
that had nothing to do with any of it. "I have
spent seventeen years trying to become a man
who deserved forgiveness for that night,
Romeo, and knowing full well I never fully would. When I eventually learned who you were
— when I put together your name with your
history, which took me longer than it should
have, I'll admit that — I told myself hiring you
was a form of penance. I told myself that
protecting my daughter through you was the
closest I would ever get to making any of it
right."
"That's not an apology." Romeo's voice was like
stone, flat and unmoved. "That's a story you tell
yourself so you can still sleep at night."
"I know." Salvatore didn't flinch, didn't reach for
an excuse. "There is nothing I can give you that
fixes what I did. If you want to end this the way
you came here tonight intending to end it, I
won't fight you, Romeo. I have been waiting
seventeen years for someone to finally come
collect."
Isabella stood between them, tears sliding
freely down her face now, watching the man
she loved hold the entire fate of the man who
had raised her balanced in his two hands. Romeo looked at the gun he hadn't drawn,
hadn't even reached for. Looked at Isabella, at
the fear and hope tangled together in her
expression. Looked, finally, at the old man
across the desk who had just handed him,
without resistance, the exact ending he'd told
himself for half his life that he wanted.
"I'm not going to kill you," Romeo said quietly,
and the words seemed to surprise even him as
they left his mouth. "Not because you deserve
mercy, Salvatore. You don't, not really. But if I
do this — if I pull that trigger tonight — I
become the man who taught me to hate you in
the first place. I won't give you that
satisfaction. And I refuse to give it to her." He
nodded toward Isabella without looking away
from her father. "You will live with what you did.
Every single day, for however many you have
left. That is a far worse sentence than anything
I could hand you tonight with a gun."