Russo Blood Debt Chapter 01
Crowning
The baby’s head is crowning. My husband tells me to push it back in.
Because his dead brother’s widow is having a son next door, and only a son inherits in the Russo Family.
“Hold on, amore,” Dante says, squeezing my hand. His eyes are soft. They’ve been soft for nine months. “Just a little longer.”
I’m screaming. Sweat in my eyes, blood on the sheets, and I know — I have known since the second contraction came thirty seconds after the first — that something is wrong with this delivery. The pain is too sharp. Too fast.
A nurse walks in with a syringe.
I think it’s the epidural.
Then Dante lets go of my hand. Steps back from the bed.
The needle goes in. He checks his watch.
“Adjust the dose,” he says, calm as ordering a drink. “She has to wait until Bianca delivers.”
The room tilts.
“Bianca’s at six centimeters,” he tells the nurse. “Buy me two hours.”
I open my mouth. Nothing comes out. Whatever’s in that syringe is already in my blood — my contractions stop mid-clench, like a hand closing around my uterus from the inside.
The pain doesn’t stop. The labor stops. The baby — my baby — is stuck.
I look at him. The man I married. The man who put his hand on my belly every night for nine months and whispered to her through my skin.
His face is blank.
I don’t cry. I don’t beg. I memorize his face exactly the way it looks right now — and I start counting every single thing I’m going to take from him.
—
They wheel me out of the delivery suite and down. Down past the lobby. Down into the basement of the Russo Family’s private clinic in Brooklyn.
Gia is waiting at the door of what used to be a storage room. Dante’s little sister. Twenty-three years old, manicure fresh, holding a scalpel between two fingers like a cigarette.
“Don’t blame Dante, cara,” she says, smiling at me. “Bianca’s carrying Marco’s son. The first male Russo of this generation. You understand.”
I do understand. I’ve understood since the syringe went in. But I let my face do what they expect — wet, weak, terrified.
“Even if you popped her out first,” Gia goes on, “she’d still just be a girl. The bylaws are the bylaws. No daughter wears the ring. So the boy comes out first.”
She crouches in front of me and taps my cheek with the flat of the scalpel.
“Get the doctor,” I rasp. “Please. She’s coming.”
“She’s not coming for another three hours, sweetheart. The drug holds that long. Bianca’s already in the OR.” She stands, brushes off her knees. “Be a good girl. When her son is breathing, you can have yours.”
To the soldier at the door: “If she screams, gag her.”
The door shuts. One bare bulb. Concrete floor. My dress is already soaked through.
They took my phone at admissions. Radiation, Dante said. Bad for the baby.
I curl onto my side and breathe. In. Out. Counting.
Three months ago, Dante’s older brother Marco wrapped his Maserati around a guardrail on the Belt Parkway. Left a wife three months pregnant. At the funeral, old Don Salvatore Russo — Dante’s grandfather, the Nonno, the head of the Family — gripped Bianca’s wrist with both hands and wept.
The Russo name cannot die. You give us this boy.
I remember standing there in black, twenty-six weeks along, putting a hand on the old man’s shoulder. Nonno, our baby will love you too.
He didn’t look at me.
I should have known then.
I did know then. I just didn’t want to.
Another contraction rips through me — the drug is fighting it, but my body is fighting back. I drag myself to the door and pound on it.
“Help me — please — the baby’s coming —”
A bored voice on the other side: “Shut up. Miss Gia said wait.”
“My baby —”
“If she dies, she dies. Shouldn’t have been a girl.”
I slide down the door.
I am not crying.
I am making a list.