Russo Blood Debt Chapter 12
The Dirt
He stays on his hands and knees for a long time.
When he speaks again his voice is very flat. Very quiet. The voice of a man reading off a list.
“Everything that happened to me. The suppliers in Calabria. The bank pulling the line. Customs in Newark. The Genovese thinking I crossed them. The old man’s stroke. The buyer in Singapore who lowballed Nonno’s ring.”
I don’t answer.
“All of that was you.”
“All of that was me.”
“Three months.”
“Ninety-three days. I watched every move. Every breakfast. Every bottle. Every time you came to my grave.”
He puts his face in the dirt.
He does not cry. He’s past crying.
A sound comes out of him — small, broken, the laugh of a man who finally heard the joke.
“Cara. I let Don Vitali’s only daughter bleed out in a basement. So another man’s son could be born clean.”
“You knew, Dante.”
He looks up.
“You knew the second the needle went in. You looked at your watch. You said adjust the dose. You knew.”
“Sera —”
“You hoped you’d get away with it. That’s not the same as not knowing.”
His face crumples.
“If you’d told me who he was —”
“Stop.”
“If I’d known —”
“Stop.”
I take one step closer. Matteo’s hand stays at his hip.
“Tell yourself the truth. Just once. If I had been the nobody you thought I was — the girl from nothing, with nobody to call — Aurora would still be cold. You wouldn’t be on your knees apologizing to a Vitali. You’d be in the brownstone holding your nephew. Wouldn’t you.”
He doesn’t answer.
“Wouldn’t you, Dante.”
“Sera —”
“Say it.”
“Yes.”
It comes out of him like a tooth.
“Then you didn’t love me. You loved the deal. The good little wife who’d never raise a hand. The girl with no Family behind her.”
“Sera —”
“And the second I cost you something — a son, an heir, a seat — you let me bleed.”
“Madonna, I’m — I’m sorry —”
“I know you are.”
Something flips in his face.
Not grief. The Russo anger. The bred-in entitled anger of a boy who had everything and got told he couldn’t keep it.
“So you played me.”
“Excuse me?”
He’s getting to his feet.
“Three years. You sat at my dinner table. You let me put a baby in you. You let the old man bless you at Marco’s funeral. The whole time —”
“I was your wife. That’s what I was.”
“You were a spy.”
“I cooked for you, Dante. I waited up. I felt our daughter kick and I put your hand on my belly so you could feel her. That was real. Every cruel thing you did to me — that was the lie.”
“You let me grieve a corpse —”
“Yes.”
“You watched me on cameras —”
“Yes.”
“And you felt — what, exactly, cara —”
“Nothing.”
It comes out true.
He flinches like I hit him.
“Nothing, Dante. The girl who would have cried watching you cry — she died on the basement floor with our daughter. You used her up that night. You don’t get her back.”
He lunges.
He’s drunk, underweight, three months past sleeping. Matteo’s on him before his second step. One hand on his collar, one knee on his spine. Face in the dirt of my grave. Vincenzo’s gun is out, low, professional, not aimed.
Dante doesn’t fight. He just lies there with his cheek on the dirt.
“Sera. Sera don’t —”
“Goodbye, Dante.”
“Don’t go — cara —”
“My name is Serafina Vitali.”
I turn.
I walk toward the gate.
Behind me he starts to scream. Not words. The noise of a man whose last thing got taken.
Matteo holds him down till the noise wears out.
I don’t look back.
—
I get in the car. Beppe’s already in the driver’s seat. Engine running.
Matteo gets in two minutes later, brushing dirt off his knees.
“Principessa. What about him.”
“Leave him there.”
“In the dirt?”
“In the dirt.”
He starts the car.
We pull out onto Metropolitan Avenue. Three-thirty in the afternoon. The sun is lower than it should be for October.
I look at my hand. The Vitali ring is back on. The glove is in my lap.
I am not crying.
I have not cried in ninety-three days.
I am not going to start over a man face-down on my own grave.
“Principessa.”
“Sì, Matteo.”
“You did good.”
I don’t answer.
I look out the window at Queens going by — the diner Dante took me to on our second date, the church where we got married, the house we lived in for three years — and I let all of it pass like it belonged to somebody else.
It did.
It belonged to Sera Russo.
She’s the one in the ground.