“Bibiana, what’s taking you so long?” Tommaso bellowed as he trudged down the staircase. He paused when he spotted me. Bibiana quickly hid the poison vial in her bathrobe.
“I’m sorry for disturbing you,” I said. “I only wanted to make sure Bibiana knew I’m alright. I don’t have much time though. I need to get back home.”
“Dante called for a meeting of the entire Outfit. Just got the email. I suppose you can’t give me details about what went down?”
I shook my head. “I should really go.” I gave Bibiana a smile, then I turned on my heel and walked back to the car. The last thing I heard was Bibi telling Tommaso she would make him a quick breakfast before he left.
This was the second man I’d condemned to death. This time, however, there was no guilt.
***
“Valentina, I’d like to talk to you,” Dante said before disappearing back in his office. I hesitated. This was the first time that Dante had actually asked me into his office for a conversation. All the times before, I had to seek him out.
Worry gnawed at my insides as I stepped into his office and closed the door behind me. Dante was facing the window but turned to me. For a long time his blue eyes searched my face. “Tommaso didn’t show up at the meeting I’d called.”
I forced my face to stay expressionless. “So?”
“The men I sent over to get him found him dead in his living room. Poisoned.”
“What about Bibiana?” I asked, trying to sound worried and shocked. She hadn’t sent me a text or tried to call me. It would have been too risky anyway.
“She’s with her parents now, but I’ll have to drive over there now to question her.”
I froze. “Why?”
“Because as Capo I need to investigate when one of my men gets killed.” Dante slowly advanced on me. “Of course, I’m fairly sure I know what happened.”
I raised my chin as he stopped in front of me. “You do?” I held his gaze, anything else would have looked guilty, even if it was probably too late for that anyway.
“You are best friends with Bibiana and you wanted to help her.” I didn’t say anything but he didn’t seem to expect me to. He continued in the same quiet, smooth voice. “Antonio gave you poison when he asked you to kill me, didn’t he?”
I considered lying to him, but I needed him on my side and he wouldn’t take being lied to kindly.
“Yes,” I said softly.
“You didn’t tell me about it because you knew it was your chance to help Bibiana, so you took it to her and told her to blame it on Raffaele.”
“Did she say that?”
“She mentioned Raffaele visited them yesterday when my men took her to her parents, but she was too hysterical to say much.”
Was Bibi regretting what she’d done? Or had her breakdown been for show? “So why don’t you believe it was Raffaele?”
Dante’s eyes narrowed. “Because he would have mentioned it when I interrogated him.”
I nodded. “So what now?”
Dante shook his head. “Goddamnit, Valentina. You should have come to me.”
“I came to you. I asked you if there was something you could do against Tommaso, but you said there wasn’t.”
“You asked me to kill him and I told you I couldn’t because he wasn’t a traitor.”
I scoffed. “As if that matters. You are a killer, Dante. You can kill whoever you want. Don’t tell me you’ve never killed for other reasons than protecting the Outfit.”
Dante gripped my shoulders, bringing us even closer. “Of course, I have. But I told you ‘no’ and you should have listened to me.”
“Because your word is law,” I said mockingly.
“Yes,” Dante said in a low voice. “Even for you.”
“I would do it again. I don’t regret freeing Bibi of that cruel bastard. I only regret that I had to go behind your back but you left me no choice.”
Dante’s eyes flashed. “I left you no choice? You can’t go around killing my men!”
“He deserved it. You should have seen what he did to Bibi. You should have wanted to kill him for how he treated an innocent woman, wife or not.”
“If I killed every man in the Outfit who treated women badly, I’d be left with half of my soldiers. This is a life of brutality and cruelty, and many soldiers don’t understand that as Made Men we should protect our family from it, and not unleash our anger on them. They know I don’t approve of their actions. That’s all I can do.”
“But I was handed the chance to do something and I did.”
“You helped a wife murder her husband. Some men in my position would find it unsettling to be with a woman who doesn’t hesitate to use poison.”
My eyes grew wide. “I gave Bibi a chance, a choice. That doesn’t mean I would kill you. I would fight you if you ever treated me like Tommaso did with Bibi. Tommaso preyed on Bibi’s weakness. She was given to that old bastard when she was only eighteen and she never knew how to defend herself against him. He’s had four years to be a better man, to treat her decently. He failed. Our marriage has nothing to do with theirs. You don’t need to beat and rape me to feel like a man, and I wouldn’t let you. And anyway, I’m not vengeful, or I wouldn’t have swallowed how you treated me in the last few months, how you accused me of cheating. And Bibi never loved Tommaso, so…” I trailed off, clamping my lips shut. The last part wasn’t supposed to slip out.
Dante’s fingers on my shoulders loosened. I looked away from his penetrating gaze, unable to stand it.
“I’m not worried that you’d poison me. As I said before, I trust you,” he said after a while, dropping his hands from my shoulders. “But I’ll have to investigate Tommaso’s death.”
“You won’t punish Bibi, will you?” I asked, terrified. “Please, Dante, if you care about me at all, you’ll rule that Tommaso’s murder was related to the traitors and that Bibi is innocent. She’s gone through too much already.”
“There might be people out there who won’t believe Bibiana wasn’t involved in Tommaso’s death exactly for the reasons you stated before. She had reason to hate him. She had reason to kill him.”
“Then blame it on me. I could have done it behind Bibi’s back to help her.”
“And then what?” Dante asked quietly.
“Then you punish me and not her.”
“And what if punishment for such a crime would be death in turn? Eye for an eye, Valentina.”
I stared, tears brimming in my eyes. “Don’t hurt, Bibi. Just don’t. Without me, she would have never found a way to kill him. It was as much my fault as it was hers. I will share whatever punishment you inflict on her.”
“I fear you’re saying that because you know I won’t punish you,” Dante said, a dark smile on his lips.
“You won’t?”
Dante kissed me hard, then pulled back and lightly brushed my abdomen. Was it because of our baby?
Or was I reading too much into the gesture? Or maybe he’d touched my stomach by accident. “As long as I rule the Outfit, you won’t be harmed.”
He stepped back. “I need to go talk to Bibiana now.”
“Let me go with you,” I said hastily.
“Your father and my Consigliere will be there as well, so don’t interrupt. I don’t want them to suspect you. Your father would overlook it, but I would hate to have to force Rocco into silence over this.”
***
It had been a while since I’d been at Bibiana’s childhood home. I never liked her parents much. That hadn’t changed when they’d forced Bibi into a marriage with an old man. My father and Rocco Scuderi were waiting in front of the door for us. When we walked up to them, Papà pulled me into a hug, kissed my temple and pressed his palm against my abdomen. “So how are you?”