Page 109 of Tide of Treason
We were the ones buried here. Spine by spine. Blood by blood. Vito had cut his teeth on Sforza brick. He bled Sicilian red and carried two knives at his waist. Leaning back against the hallway’s cool wall, I watched Maury drag a dead plant out of the vestibule. The brown terracotta pot wobbled and clinked against his thigh, tilting with each disgruntled step.
“Elio,” I said, voice tasting of dust and sarcasm. “Give mesome good news.”
“Your hair looks expensive.”
“It is expensive.”
He tilted his head, flicked a switchblade, and popped the top off his Pellegrino. “They think it’s going to be tonight,” he added, offhand.
“The vote?”
Elio didn’t answer, choosing to click his tongue and spin the knife once between his fingers, and somehow, that told me everything.
I really hated this house sometimes. Il Cigno—our beautiful, overfed swan—had become a living thing. Breathing. Seething. The halls echoed with too many footsteps and none of them innocent. The marble floors, usually pristine, had started to show wear in strange places: where Mamma paced, where Papà shouted, where too many shadows gathered at once and left something behind. Not footprints. Not exactly. More like a residue. Tension, maybe. Rage in particulate form, grinding into the grout like bone dust.
I slipped past Elio’s lazy sprawl and shouldered open the study door without knocking. Lucius stood with his back to me, tense in the shoulders, jaw tight. Papà sat behind his desk. Neither of them looked at me when I entered, but apprehension buzzed the air.
“Sergius knew he’d lose,” Papà said, voice so soft it scraped bone. “So he figured if he had to go, he’d drag the alternative down with him.” Slowly, he turned to me. “Challenged him to the gun.”
Adrenaline snapped through me. “You said yes?”
Lucius’s gaze was steel and regret, locked in a lover’s stalemate.
“I had to.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“I had to.”
My palm moved before the thought finished forming. The slap cut the silence wide-open. He let it happen, jaw tight, eyes flicking away from mine. I wasn’t sure what pissed me off more, that he didn’t stop me, or that he thought he deserved it.
I should’ve known.
This morning, he’d made me toast. Burned to hell. Dry as sawdust. Lucius handed me a plate with a muttered “Eat,principessa,” like he hadn’t just torched both slices to the seventh circle. I remember the way he hovered while I bit into it, awkward and hesitant, waiting for me to mock him. I didn’t, of course. My throat was full of something thicker than bread. Something I couldn’t swallow.
Now the outline of my hand bloomed red on his cheek, and the sight hollowed me clean. I realised too late that I hadn’t struck him out of anger. I’d done it because I was scared. Because somewhere between his ribs and mine, we’d grown the same heart, and I knew if his stopped beating, mine would too.
The realisation settled low in my belly, curling in like a stretch of winter across warm skin. Cold, invasive. A truth with sharp edges and nowhere to put it. I couldn’t carry it in my hands, so it spilled down my wrists instead, invisible bloodleaking through invisible wounds.
Mamma held myhair while I threw up like it was 1997 and we were co-stars in a VHS with a very different ending. I’d eaten nothing but toast and adrenaline all day, but somehow my stomach still managed to contort itself into something violently operatic.
“Don’t act like this is normal,” I managed.
“It is normal,” she said, and pressed her thumb to the back of my neck in slow, hypnotic circles. “It’s just inconvenient timing.”
That was her way of saying she wished I’d gotten knocked up by someone easier.
Still, she stayed. Handed me my toothbrush. I rinsed my mouth twice, even though nothing would erase the sour film of dread. Then I stood, still unsteady, and ran cool water over my wrists, trying not to cry like a Victorian widow over a man who refused to flinch when a gun was in his face but still got nervous handing me burnt toast.
I caught her reflection in the mirror. Red mouth. Gold earrings. Jaw like a Roman statue. Most people thought we were sisters, and to be fair, it wasn’t totally inaccurate. Mamma had me at eighteen, looked twenty-eight on a bad day, and had the attitude of someone who aged backward whenever someone told her no.
“Did you know?” I asked. “That the daughter you were giving birth to would kill your father one day?”
“I prayed she would.”
That stopped me cold.
Mamma looked back at me, spine straight, beauty lacquered in regret, and not a trace of apology in her gaze.
