Page 46 of Sapphires and Snakes
She tilts her head, that damning gaze trailing from my head to my toes and back up again, finding me lacking. “Why did you leave the Gallo Family?”
“I couldn’t walk for the better part of a year.” My knee pulses with the racing beat of my heart, my hand on the table sweating so much I know it will leave condensation behind on the porous wood.
“No.” Zarina kneels down in front of the safe. It’s old-fashioned, the dial needing three correct numbers to unlock the door. “That’s why you took a break. You didn’t leave this life behind after you healed.”
I don’t reply. There’s no need to confirm the obvious. And I think if I open my mouth again, I’ll do something worse thangaslighting, worse than evasion. I might beg her to let it go, might fall to my knees and plead.
“Why leave the Gallo Family to start your own?” Zarina spins the dial.
My body trembles. I watch her try to open the safe, and a heavy trickle of dread drips down the back of my throat. There’s no way she’ll crack it. No way.
“Why buy up Gallo properties?” She tries to open the door, but it doesn’t budge. I want her to get annoyed, to give up, but she just spins the dial to reset it and tries again. “Why agree to my deal, which endangered your family and risked your business?”
“Zarina.” The pleading tone is there in my voice, even if it’s a quiver under the warning steel. I don’t know if she can hear it.
She spins the dial back for the second number. “For the favor? For the ten percent of Gallo territory? For the chance to watch the Gallos, my family, burn?” Finally, emotion thickens her voice, and it rips up my spine to cleave through my chest, my heart. “To watchmeburn?”
“No,” I implore, “not you,neveryou?—”
“That, Andrea Maria Tamayo,” she cuts me off, as if she cannot hear those words from me, whether honest or not, “is the theory.”
And then she pulls the handle, and the safe clicks open.
I gape and take a half-step forward as she pulls out a heavy accordion folder. My heartbeat is so loud in my ears, it threatens to burst the drum. “How the fuck?—”
“The date the Gallos shattered your knee.” She sits on the ground, my oversize hoodie swallowing her until she appears small and fragile in its folds. Chaos surrounds her as she pulls out a stack of deeds.
There’s nothing for me to do, no way to stop her without hurting her. I watch as she lays out the evidence of my scheming,every step I’ve taken to bring the Gallo Family—her family—to its knees in ruination held in her hands. “How’d you know?”
“I didn’t. Until now.” She skims over each deed held together by binder clips.
“And the date?”
“Rita.”
I frown until it hits me—the first time we visited Alphabet House, Rita showed Zarina its history, my history, in that photo album she keeps in her office. Each one lovingly labeled with who, what, when, and where. I slump into a chair. “Her photos.”
She organizes the deeds as she goes through them, according to some system that makes sense to her. I swallow back the urge to vomit as she stacks them, one after another showing my targeted, patient acquisition of property in Gallo territory over the last ten years.
“Revenge,” she breathes.
I’m stuck, unable to move. A decade of planning and executing. A decade of vowing to return the favor the Gallos paid me. A decade of cutting down anyone in my path. And all of it is crumbling in front of me, the debris scattered around the Gallo princess in front of me.
If it’s falling apart before me, I might as well fall apart with it. In for a penny, out for a pound never felt as heavy as this moment, even in that alley so many years ago.
I speak softly, answering the unasked questions I can feel building under her tongue. “I was seventeen when I found out a made-man was skimming off the top. I told my capo, Leo—I believe he’s your cousin.”
I don’t chance a look at her for fear of the glare, the judgment in her gaze. And more, I can’t see the room in front of me. I’m in my memory, walking into that back office of the nightclub I was too young to get into. The air is heavy with smoke, the smell of tobacco and spilled liquor sunken into the fabric of the rug, thechairs, the wallpaper. I swallow as hard as I did that day. “Thing is, I didn’t know he was in on the scheme. And I didn’t know it was at the direction of your mother.”
Zarina’s hand fists around the deed in its grip.
“She was there when I told Leo.Thankedme for letting them know.” And then twelve hours later, in the back alley of that club, music vibrated through my bones as they shattered. Each boom of the bass was like someone pressed directly onto my wounds. The ground was gravel under my hands, my back, wet with the slime of tossed beer bottles and congealed food. My mouth full of blood, my eyes hazy, boots so distant in my perception I barely comprehended their weight as they kicked and stomped.
“They were my family. I thought I was theirs.” My body shudders from my scalp to my toes as I breathe through the onslaught. I wish I had water, whisky, something to clear the taste of pennies off my tongue. “And they tossed me like garbage, treated me worse than my own parents. Left me to bleed out in that alley as if I was nothing. As if I wasn’t willing to pledge my life and death for them.”
Zarina rises to stand in front of me, blocking the last vestiges of golden sun filtering through the window. Her hands are empty, her feet shoulder width apart, like she’s bracing for a fight. Against me. I stare past her, unable to face that battle. Not while stuck in the clutches of the moment that startedeverything.
“And for that,” she whispers, voice straining against an emotion I cannot meet her eye to verify, “the entire Gallo Family must pay? Every soldier and capo?” She pauses, and I can hear her throat bob in the silence. “Me?”
