Russo Blood Debt Chapter 05
The Truck
The truck is a hospital on wheels.
Matteo lays me on a padded table in the back and a woman in scrubs is already cutting my dress off with shears. Two more medics on either side. IV in my arm before I can blink. Oxygen mask on my face.
“BP sixty over forty —”
“Hemorrhagic shock —”
“Fetal distress, decel to seventy —”
“Cesarean. Now.”
A man’s voice — I don’t know him — “The mother’s vitals can’t take —”
Matteo cuts him off.
“Do it. Anything happens, it’s on me.”
I find his hand. My fingers don’t have enough strength to grip.
“Save the baby. Save her first.”
His face is wet.
“Principessa, don’t talk. Save your breath. Your father’s plane just landed at Teterboro. He’s coming.”
The monitor screams.
“Flatline — pushing epi —”
“Fetal heart’s gone — go go go —”
Someone presses the mask harder over my face and the world goes black around the edges and the last thing I hear is a man crying —
“We’re losing them both —”
—
Black.
Not sleep. Not death. Just — nothing.
Then —
Light. Cold. The smell of antiseptic and something else under it, something green — eucalyptus. My father’s house always smells like eucalyptus.
“She’s awake —”
“Get the Don —”
I open my eyes.
The ceiling is mine. The Tuscany ceiling. The hand-painted vines my mother’s mother had done in 1962. I’m in my childhood bed.
Faces lean in. Men I’ve known since I was small. Matteo. Vincenzo. Old Beppe with his white mustache, who used to slip me almond cookies when I was four.
They’re all crying.
My father walks in.
Lorenzo Vitali. Don of the Vitali Family. Sixty-two years old.
Last week he had black hair.
Today his hair is white. All of it. White like he aged twenty years in a night.
He sits on the edge of the bed and takes my hand and his mouth opens but nothing comes out.
I already know.
I already knew when I went under in the truck. Mothers know.
“She’s gone. Sì?”
He nods. The tears come.
“Placental abruption. The baby — she — the cord —” He chokes. “Two minutes longer and we’d have lost you both. They tried, cuore mio. They tried everything.”
I don’t cry.
I don’t scream.
I feel a precise, cold weight settle behind my ribs where my daughter used to kick me.
She had a name. I never told anyone. Not even Dante. Especially not Dante.
Aurora.
My father is shaking. Sixty-two years old, Don of one of the Five Families, and he’s shaking on my hand like a child.
“Where is Dante,” I say.
Papa’s eyes go cold.
“With the widow. She delivered a healthy boy. Eight pounds, four ounces. The whole Russo clan is at the hospital with champagne. The old man is crying. They named him Marco, after the dead brother. The husband hasn’t asked about you once.”
I laugh.
It hurts everywhere it can hurt, but I laugh.
“Good. That’s good.”
Papa stares at me.
“Cuore. I’ll burn the clinic to the ground. Tonight. The Commission — the council that runs the Five Families — they know what the Russos did. They’ve already signed off. The Russo clinic is mine to burn. Dante walks out of that hospital, he doesn’t walk past 86th Street. Say the word.”
“No, Papa.”
“No?”
I push myself up on the pillows. Every muscle in me is glass. I do it anyway.
“A bullet is too quick. A bullet — he’s drunk on champagne tonight. He doesn’t even feel it.” I look at my father. The Don. The man who taught me what we do to people who hurt us. “I want him to lose everything. Slowly. I want to be sitting somewhere watching, with a glass of wine, while he suffers, while he figures out who took it.”
Papa smiles. Slow. Cold.
“And what do you need from me.”
“A body.”
“A body.”
“A corpse that looks exactly like me. Postpartum. Hemorrhaged out. Cold in the morgue when Dante pulls the drawer open.”
He doesn’t blink.
He’s the Don of the Vitali Family. He’s done worse for people who deserved it less.
“I can have it by tonight.”
“Grazie, Papa.”
He kisses my forehead. Stands up. At the door, he turns back.
“Sera. You’re sure.”
I look at him.
“He let me bleed out in a basement so a boy could be born clean. Yes, Papa. I’m sure.”