Chương 2
A spark climbed through his foot.
The toe moved.
Barely.
The nail shifted against the cloth by less than the width of a coin.
Nina saw it.
Her face opened with delight.
“See? This one heard me.”
Massimo did not look down immediately. His right hand tightened around the wheelchair’s armrest. He looked first at Dean.
The whiskey glass had stopped turning.
Camille had taken half a step backward.
Carla was staring at his foot.
“No,” she whispered.
Nina laughed. “Do it again.”
Massimo forced his fingers to loosen. He had lived because he knew how to conceal pain, fear, and anger until other men mistook restraint for emptiness. Hope proved more difficult. It rushed through him so violently that for a second the room seemed too bright.
Dr. Hale had tested his feet that morning with a pin, a tuning fork, and a rubber hammer.
No response, the doctor had said.
Nothing unexpected.
Nina reached into the pocket of her dress.
“I found this.”
She placed a white tablet on the folded towel beside Massimo’s heel.
“The doctor dropped it yesterday,” she said. “Is this what makes your feet sleep?”
The fire settled with a soft collapse.
No one laughed.
The tablet was small and oval, scored through the center. A faint blue mark had been stamped on one side. Massimo had swallowed dozens of pills since the ambush, but he had never seen that one.
Carla looked from the tablet to her daughter.
“You picked that up?”
“It was lonely.”
“You never put medicine in your pocket.” Carla snatched her hand back before touching it. “Nina, medicine can hurt you.”
“I didn’t eat it.”
Dean set his glass on the cabinet.
“Probably something Hale dropped from his regular kit.”
“It fell out of his coat,” Nina said. “Not the bag.”
Camille turned toward Dean. It was a small movement, no more than a glance, but Massimo saw it.
Dean’s expression stayed relaxed.
“A child’s memory is a creative thing.”
Nina frowned at him. “I remember.”
“I’m sure you do, sweetheart.”
“I’m not your sweetheart.”
Carla made a strangled sound.
Massimo picked up the tablet.
The pill was warmer than it should have been after sitting in Nina’s pocket. He closed it inside his fist.
“It isn’t mine,” he said.
Dean shrugged. “Then throw it away.”
Massimo looked at him.
“I may.”
Nina touched his knee. “Your toe moved.”
He bent toward her until his voice would not carry beyond the basin.
“Let it sleep a little longer.”
She blinked.
“It woke up.”
“Only you and I know that.”
“Mommy saw.”
Carla’s eyes snapped to his.
“Then only the three of us.”
Nina considered the arrangement. Secrets were still games to her, things hidden behind pillows or whispered under blankets.
“Why?”
Massimo glanced at Dean, who had picked up his whiskey again.
“Because sometimes,” he murmured, “sleeping things hear more.”
Nina nodded with solemn understanding she did not possess.
Carla possessed enough for both of them.
Her hands began to shake.
Massimo placed his bare foot back on the metal support and lowered the trouser leg.
“Thank you, Doctor Bennett.”
Nina smiled, showing a small gap between her front teeth.
“I’ll do the other one tomorrow.”
Camille left the library without saying good night.
Dean watched her go. Then he lifted his glass toward Massimo.
“To medical progress.”
Massimo’s face remained still.
“To patience,” he replied.
That night, he waited until the security staff changed shifts at midnight.
The estate settled unevenly. Pipes knocked behind old walls. A dishwasher hummed in the staff wing. Somewhere on the second floor, Camille walked across her room in heels, stopped, then walked back. She had been sleeping there since the week after the shooting, telling Massimo that his nurses needed the adjoining bedroom more than she did.
At twelve fifteen, Dean’s car passed through the east gate.
Massimo watched from the library window until the red taillights disappeared behind the hedges.
He locked the door.
The pill sat in a clean envelope on his desk. He had used the corner of a business card to move it, an old habit from a life in which fingerprints sometimes mattered and sometimes did not, depending on who owned the evidence.
He removed the blanket from his legs.
His right foot lay in a pool of firelight.
“Move,” he told it.
Nothing.
He tried again. His jaw tightened until the muscles ached.
Nothing.
The brief sensation in the afternoon began to feel childish. Warm water. A shifting cloth. A muscle spasm anyone could mistake for movement.
He shut his eyes.
Lavender still clung faintly to his skin.
A memory came with it—not of childhood or his mother, but of Brooklyn Avenue. Dean’s body across his. The shriek of metal. A voice over the gunfire saying, “Low, low, take him low.”
For six months Massimo had believed the words belonged to one of the Bellandi shooters.
Now he could not remember why.
He concentrated on his toe.
A muscle flickered beneath the skin.
The toe bent.
Massimo stared at it until his eyes watered.
Then he reached for the second phone hidden beneath the bottom shelf of his desk.
Only one number was stored in it.
Salvatore Moretti answered after four rings.
“You had better be dying,” Sal said.
Massimo looked at his moving toe.
“I may have been.”
Silence replaced the sleepy irritation.
Sal had run security for the Rinaldi family for seventeen years. Two weeks after the ambush, Dean had dismissed him for failing to prevent it. Massimo had approved the decision from a hospital bed because grief demanded someone to blame and Sal had been the easiest man available.
“Where are you?” Massimo asked.
“Not Long Island.”
“Can you come without being seen?”
“That depends. Are you asking as my former employer or the man who let Foster call me a traitor in front of my sons?”
Massimo lowered his eyes.
May you like
“As the man who was wrong.”
Sal breathed through his nose. In the background, a television crowd cheered at something neither of them was watching.
