CHAPTER 7
The Debt — Final Scene
Marco's hand closed around Franco's arm—not painfully, but with the unmistakable implication that pain was available upon request. Franco allowed himself to be escorted toward the stairs, his loafers clicking pleasantly on the stone, his pocket square still perfectly arranged.
"Franco."
He looked back. Dante was still seated, still holding his wine, still wearing that expression of quiet, predatory amusement.
"Your daughter," he said. "Isabelle. Does she know you hate her?"
Franco paused. The question was a scalpel, precise and probing, and for just a moment his mask slipped. Underneath was something cold. Something ancient. Something that had calcified long before Isabelle was even born.
"She knows she's unlucky," he said quietly. "The specifics are just details."
Dante raised his glass in a mock toast. "To details, then. The most important things we never bother to learn."
Marco shoved Franco up the stairs. The door closed behind him with a heavy, final thud.
—----
The alley behind Vespri was exactly as unappealing as Franco had imagined. Damp cobblestones. Overflowing dumpsters. The distant wail of a siren that was probably heading somewhere more interesting. He adjusted his flamingo tie and breathed in the cold night air. It smelled like garbage and victory.
He'd done it. Two hundred thousand dollars in debt, and all it had cost him was a daughter he'd never wanted in the first place. Elena would be thrilled. The boys wouldn't even notice. And Isabelle—
Well. Isabelle would survive. She always did. Resilient little thing. Like a cockroach in sensible heels.
Franco pulled out his phone, already composing a text to his wife. Dinner at
Bolognese tomorrow? Celebrating. Will explain later. He was halfway through typing when he heard the footsteps behind him.
He turned.
Marco stood in the alley doorway, silhouetted by the dim light spilling from the cellar stairs. He was holding something. Franco squinted.
"Did I forget my—"
The gunshot was surprisingly quiet. A sharp crack, like a branch snapping underfoot, and then Franco Moretti was on the ground staring up at a sky he couldn't quite focus on. The cobblestones were cold against his back. His chest felt wet. That was strange. He'd just had this blazer dry-cleaned.
Marco's face appeared above him, blocking out the stars. He looked bored. The kind of bored that came from doing something so routine it no longer registered as violence.
"Mr. Vitale wanted me to give you a message," Marco said, tucking the gun back into his jacket. "He said, and I'm quoting here because he made me memorize it, 'A man who sells his own daughter can't be trusted to keep his mouth shut. And I don't leave loose ends.'"
Franco tried to speak. His mouth moved, but the words wouldn't come. Something was wrong with his chest. Something was wrong with everything.
Marco knelt down, his knee pressing into the damp cobblestones. He studied Franco with the detached curiosity of a man watching a spider drown in a sink.
"He also said to tell you that your daughter will be well taken care of. He's going to marry her. Protect her. Give her everything you never did." Marco paused, tilting his head. "And she'll never know you died. She'll think you abandoned her. Again. Fitting, don't you think? Your last act on earth is disappearing from her life, and she won't even be surprised."
Franco's vision was swimming now. The sky was getting darker. Or maybe that was just him. He thought about Isabelle. Her ridiculous earrings. Her nervous laugh. The way she'd looked at him when she was twelve, before she'd learned to stop expecting anything.
He'd never told her he was sorry. Not once. Not for Elena. Not for the years of cold silence. Not for the night he'd stood in the hallway while his wife packed Isabelle's bags and told an eighteen-year-old girl she was no longer welcome in his home.
He'd never apologized for any of it.
And now he never would.
"Anyway," Marco said, standing up and brushing off his knees, "that's the message. Consider it delivered."
He walked back toward the cellar door, his footsteps echoing in the empty alley. The last thing Franco Moretti saw before the darkness swallowed him completely was the faint, flickering glow of candlelight from the cellar below.
Somewhere inside, Dante Vitale was still drinking his wine.
Somewhere in Brooklyn, Isabelle was probably asleep. Probably dreaming of spreadsheets and taco earrings and a boss who looked at her like she'd invented sunlight.
She would wake up tomorrow and her father would be a missing person.
She would wake up in a few weeks and her father would be a ghost.
And she would never know that his last thought, the final flicker of consciousness before the darkness took him, was not of Elena or his sons or his precious restaurant venture.
It was of her.
The daughter he'd never wanted.
The daughter he'd just sold to a monster.
The daughter who would never visit his grave because there wouldn't be one.
Franco Moretti died alone in an alley behind a restaurant that served overpriced pasta, and the world did not mourn him. The only person who might have—the only person who'd ever tried to love him despite everything—was currently asleep in a studio apartment in Brooklyn, her succulent Gary perched on the windowsill, her taco earrings sitting on the nightstand.
She didn't stir. She didn't feel the shift in the universe. She didn't know that her father was dead, that a contract bore her name, that a man with slate-grey eyes was already planning the exact moment he would take her.
She just slept.
And somewhere in a wine cellar, Dante Vitale finished his glass and smiled.
"Phase one," he murmured to the empty room. "Complete."