Chapter 19 - The Blood Debt Settled
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The autumn wind whistled through the vineyard rows on the hillside above the Hudson.
Thirty yards down the slope, Rico casually stepped between little Lily and the chapel hill, turning her attention toward a pair of monarch butterflies on the stone wall so she wouldn't see or hear the three adults standing by the graves.
Vittorio Drago stared down at the fresh earth covering Chiara Vance’s memorial stone. He looked ten years older than he had at the Plaza Hotel on Saturday—a seventy-year-old monument of old-world pride hollowed out from the inside.
He didn't reach for the Colt .45 beneath his coat, and he didn't signal his driver down by the gate.
"Dante was my only boy," Vittorio whispered, his gravelly voice breaking into raw pieces. "Five years ago, when he came to my house in Bensonhurst and told me he had fallen in love with a girl from upstate—and that she had convinced him to walk into the federal building on Monday morning and hand over forty years of Brooklyn family books so they could go into Witness Protection—my blood turned to fire."
"You killed your own son in Little Italy?!" Lorenzo’s voice dropped to a lethal rumble, his right hand sliding inside his suit jacket to close around the grip of his Beretta.
"No!" Vittorio looked up, agony etched into every deep wrinkle of his face. "I swear on my mother’s soul, Lorenzo, I never touched a hair on Dante’s head! I locked Dante in my upstairs study that night to stop him from going to the Feds—and I sent a man upstate to scare the girl into leaving the country without him. My man tampered with her brake lines to stage an accident—he didn't know she had left the baby with her sister Clara! And the next morning, when Dante heard on the news that Chiara’s car had gone off the Bear Mountain Bridge... my boy walked into that restaurant in Little Italy and put a bullet through his own heart before my guards could stop him! I told the Commission it was a rival hit to cover the shame!"
Two heavy tears tracked down the old Don’s weathered cheeks.
"For five years, I lived in a tomb of my own making," Vittorio rasped, letting go of his silver-headed cane so it fell onto the grass, and spreading his empty hands wide at his sides in front of Lorenzo’s chest. "I didn't know Chiara was Sofia Bellini’s daughter. And I didn't know the child survived until you threw Dante’s dragon charm on that desk on Friday morning. Everything I own—every pier in Brooklyn, every building, every dollar in my vaults—I signed over to an irrevocable trust in Lily’s name at nine o’clock this morning with my lawyers."
The old man dropped to both knees in the damp grass at the foot of Chiara’s grave, bowing his white head before Clara and Lorenzo.
"Put the bullet in my head right here, Lorenzo," Vittorio whispered. "Bury me in the dirt outside this fence. Just don't ever tell that little girl down the hill what her grandfather did to her mother."
Lorenzo drew the matte-black Beretta from his coat and leveled the barrel six inches from Vittorio Drago’s forehead.
Every law of the underworld—and every drop of Bellini blood in Lorenzo’s veins—demanded that he pull the trigger and end the Drago line right here on this hill.
Then Clara’s warm, bandaged hand came up and rested gently over the top of Lorenzo’s fist on the gun.
"Look down the hill, Lorenzo," Clara whispered.
Lorenzo glanced down the sunlit vineyard path, where five-year-old Lily was laughing out loud—for the first time since Tuesday—as she held up a crown of yellow dandelions she had woven for them.
"Thirty years ago, your father started a war on a lie and bricked your mother into the dark," Clara said softly, looking into Lorenzo’s eyes. "If we shoot him today while Lily is fifty feet away, we build her life on another grave. Let him live in that empty house in Bensonhurst knowing he can never come within a hundred miles of her again. That’s a worse hell than a bullet."
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Slowly, after three agonizing heartbeats, Lorenzo engaged the safety on the Beretta and slid it back into his coat.
"Get in your car, Vittorio," Lorenzo said coldly. "Your territories in Brooklyn belong to my captains starting at noon. If you ever cross the river or speak Lily’s name before the day you die, I won't use a gun—I’ll brick you into what’s left of my father’s cellar myself."
