Complete Corruption (Corruption #1-3) (87 page)

Valentina fell apart, but I couldn’t—

So I went to them. Antonio looked up and said—

I didn’t know what Lorenzo and Simone were up to. Enzo Priole appeared. There was some conflict. Some questions that hadn’t been answered.

Jesus Christ, she’d been gutted. I just—

“Can you kill me?” Antonio’s question was absolutely sincere.

He was losing his mind, and I couldn’t blame him. I couldn’t even process a story around what I was seeing. He had blood pouring from his head, and his bruised and welted torso was bare to the winter air.

“I’m not killing you.”

I knelt by her. I thought I looked calm. I pushed back the creeping emotions, but I’d feel them later. I knew that. I was a heartless asshole, except when I wasn’t.

“How did this happen?” I asked. Even in death, she was beautiful. I touched her face. I didn’t care if I got blood on my hands.

Antonio just shook his head. He was in shock.

“Spin.” Lorenzo stood over us.

“Get the fuck away from me,” Antonio shouted. “You’re so fucking lucky you’re not dead.”

“The Sicilians. Their boss is dead. She—”

Antonio sprang up, took Lorenzo by the collar, and slammed him against a wall. “This is on you, Zo. On you. You got ambition and no brains.”

“If you’re gonna kill me, just do it!”

“I can’t!” Antonio let him go, and Lorenzo dropped.

“Her people are coming. Donna’s dead.” Lorenzo pointed at Theresa. “She did it, and she’s dead. What the—”

“Fuck you!” Antonio was beyond reason.

Lorenzo had a point. If Theresa had killed Donna, a crazy thought I had to just accept at face value, and Donna killed Theresa, the Carloni family had no leader.

“There’s a power vacuum,” I mumbled, leaning close to Theresa’s face.

“Say you done her,” Lorenzo said. “Say it, or they’ll crush us. Take charge.”

“No! No more. I’m done!”

Their fight fell into the background as I bent over Theresa. I’d seen so many dead people, and the one thing I could say about them was that they looked like statues of themselves. Glass blue eyes and hard lips. I put my thumbs on Theresa’s eyelids and closed them, and I felt something I shouldn’t have.

Warmth.

“You stupid motherfucker,” I said, standing. “There is no power vacuum.” I had only a second to see Antonio’s red eyes on me before I stared at my phone, trying to figure out who to call.

“What?” Antonio said.

“She’s alive.”

antonio

 didn’t realize how crazy I was until I came out of it. It was like being on a descending airplane with compressed ears that whooshed until I yawned or swallowed. Then everything cleared up. I didn’t even think I was foggy and deaf until the pressure equalized.

Daniel saying she was alive was that pop. I didn’t know what I’d been feeling or doing. I only knew what I couldn’t do, which was kill Lorenzo. I’d promised her I wouldn’t. Not being able to take him out meant I didn’t have a distraction. A little shiny violent thing to experience or a problem to solve. I had to lose her and feel it without diversion. I didn’t think I could live through actually feeling that level of pain.

I was a child. I’d been naïve and inexperienced. I thought I’d grieved before, but no—I hadn’t allowed it. In the seven or so minutes that I lost Theresa, all I saw was a long descent into oblivion. I despaired for myself as much as I did for her. I couldn’t handle it. I didn’t have the tools to comprehend a part of myself getting ripped away. I couldn’t even finish a sentence in my head. I was half a man. Half a human. Immobilized by a promise and sucked dry by the only death that mattered.

That all came to me after the pop.

She was alive and broken. She could still die, but what I’d been missing in those minutes filled me. Hope. It was the nature of clarity. It set off everything against it. In that tension between what I hoped for and everything else, the world was in focus. I came to myself. I had something to
do
.

I put my hand over Daniel’s phone.

“Who are you calling?” I asked.

“Nine one one. We can’t move her.”

“Trust me.”

I made the call crouched over her, noticing the signs of life I’d missed in my despair. The team from Marymount who had taken shrapnel out of Bruno’s hand were coming. They were discreet and expensive. I prayed while I told them where we were. I prayed they’d be quick, that I hadn’t delayed too long.

Enzo came to me when I got off the phone. “Zo wants—”

“Keep him out of my sight.”

“Are you taking charge? Is it you?”

I pulled Enzo away from Daniel. “Did I kill Donna Maria?”

“How should I answer that?” he asked.

“The truth. Who killed her?”

He pointed at Theresa timidly, as if afraid to say.

“There’s your capo. Now back up. I said I wouldn’t kill anyone. I made no promises about shooting your legs out from under you.”

***

In the minutes before the ambulance arrived, Zo, Simone, and Enzo whispered. Two of Donna Maria’s men showed up. I heard a car in the driveway, and my three crew, the three betrayers who now officially worked for Theresa, subdued Donna Maria’s men. Daniel fidgeted. We were both holding back a panic that Theresa’s life was pouring out of her and we couldn’t do anything.

“You should go,” I said, bending over her, afraid to touch her for fear of something broken inside her.

“Fuck you.”

“No, fuck you. Get Valentina out of here.”

He nodded. “This won’t stay under the radar. Too big. It’s too big.”

The sound of the siren reached us.

“Go,” I said.

He took one last glance at Theresa then jogged into the house, passing a cluster of mob soldiers as if we were all commuters on the same train.

theresa

ain. I remember pain. My insides. My bones. The place where the needles were. And the itching. The itching was so intense, I thought I’d go mad. But I couldn’t move, or talk, or even control my own breathing. I was half conscious, immobilized, in a fog as thick as peanut butter.

I knew I was moved. I knew I was cut open and sewn up. I smelled alcohol and latex, so I knew I was in some kind of hospital. But none of that was important. My body became the responsibility of other people, and my job was to stay still and endure it.

I knew I wasn’t alone. That was what was important. That kept me from a confined madness. Margie was there. And my mother. Deirdre. Even Daniel.

But Antonio wasn’t. I loved my family. I wanted them, craved them. But I had a creeping concern in my half consciousness that my demand that he not take vengeance wasn’t the end of the story of that day.

I prayed for him a lot. Every day that passed with the light coming in, diffused by my eyelids and warming my face, my worry grew. He wouldn’t just leave me. Something had to have happened. Something terrible.

“Sit.” Margie’s voice came through. I didn’t think she was talking to me.

“I’m on my ass all day.” Jonathan. This was his second visit.

“You had a heart transplant three weeks ago. Your ass isn’t half finished.”

A chair scraped. “I hate this.”

“I’ll be an old woman one day, and you can make me sit down when I need to.”

I listened for a third person, but no one came. Not one of the hundred doctors. Not a nurse. Not Antonio.

Where’s Antonio?
I tried to say it and failed.

“You’re never getting old, Margaret. Not if you can fix it.”

“There are some things a fixer can’t even fix.”

Every time they came and went, I forgot then remembered. They bickered and joked. They did it out of rote. All of them except Deirdre, who’d prayed out her sense of humor. Even Mom could cut deep with a single word, and just that day, I couldn’t bear it.

Antonio
.

“You need to put that as an exclusion in the contract,” Jonathan quipped.

“Once I can get some blood out of you to sign it in.”

Antonio. Please
.

“Did she just say something?” Margie asked.

A chair creaked.

“Sit down,” Margie snapped.

I opened my eyes. The light felt like knives in my head and my tear ducts went into production mode, fogging everything. I blinked. I felt the drops rush down the side of my head. When I opened my eyes again, Margie’s face blocked the light.

“Well, hello.”

Antonio.

“Eyes open,” she said to Jonathan then looked back at me. “How are you?”

“Antonio.” I couldn’t believe I got the word out. Every syllable was exhausting.

“He’s fine.”

“Swear?”

She held up her hand. “Pledge open.” She pulled two of my fingers off the sheets.

“Open,” I whispered.

“Antonio is alive and healthy. He walks, he talks, he is very, very worried about you. I’ll tell him you asked about him. He’s going to shit a brick with joy, but he can’t visit. Don’t be mad at him.”

“I’m not.”

“All right. I’m going to call a doctor to look at you.”

“Tell him…” I swallowed. I didn’t know what to say. Everything. “Tell him he’s my capo.”

“Funny you should say that. He says the same about you. Pledge closed.”

I had more to say. More questions. More statements. More more more.

But I didn’t even have the energy to close the pledge. Consciousness left and was replaced by a worry-free sleep.

theresa

 would only ever ask Margie about Antonio, and she constantly reassured me that he was fine. She promised she’d tell me everything. She changed the subject. She told me not to say more because I couldn’t see who was in the room.

“Talk to me, or I’ll scream.” I couldn’t have screamed if I wanted to, but the threat was enough to get her to lean over and look at my face.

“Oh, someone’s feeling better,” Margie said.

“I can feel my body.”

“You’re so lucky you’re not paralyzed. Have I mentioned that?” She pulled her chair close.

“Can you tell me where he is? Did he go home? To Italy?” I swallowed. I couldn’t do much more than swallow and blink.

“No. He’s in California. And by California, I mean… the state of.”

California. Huge state. In the geography of love, it was a nanostate. In the geography of need—it was massive.

“Just tell me.”

“It can wait,” she said.

“Tell me. Please.”

She leaned over me, deep in thought, then sat down. I had a view of the grey ceiling again.

“I want you to remember, as I tell you this, that he’s fine.”

My chest constricted. Had he run off with Valentina? A machine beeped somewhere.

“Easy, kid. If you make the doctors come in, this conversation ends.”

I breathed. I felt the ends and edges of my body, calming them. I’d done that when reporters asked me about my cheating fiancé. I’d done it when talking to Donna Maria for the first time. I’d done it my whole life, and I did it on that bed.

“Okay,” I said when I was ready.

“Okay.”

“Go, Margie. You’re stalling.”

She sighed then continued. “There wasn’t a mob doctor in California who could help you. He made a choice. He turned himself in. He and Daniel hammered out his story. He said he stabbed you in a lover’s quarrel and you fell off the veranda. Everyone in the house corroborated. Valentina said she ran the fence in a jealous rage. No grand jury. No indictment. No nothing.”