Page 62 of Blood Orange Christmas
We hit the cut by the culvert. It’s a slit in the hill barely wide enough for a man with a box. Rocco slides through first and drags a heavy grate into place behind us. The sirens bounce off the stone like bats. We have twenty seconds before the world remembers we exist.
“Up,” Harrison says, and we climb. The hill throws frost and old leaves at our ankles. Vines snag. A branch flicks my cheek like a warning, and I taste copper. The sky opens—black, cold, clean—and the villa drops away behind us, a warm wound howling blue.
I don’t look back again. I tuck Marco into my chest and follow the breath just ahead of mine.
We run into the hills until the gunfire becomes a rumor and the only sound left is our lungs scratching and an old dog trotting at our heels because he belongs to whoever remembers to feed him.
We don’t stop until the earth tells us it’s time.
25
DANTE
The chapel sits where the hill folds its hands, stone on stone, the door weathered soft by a hundred winters and the prayers of people who didn’t have better choices. It smells like wax, rain dust, lemon oil rubbed into pews by a careful hand. The priest meets us with a nod and the kind of calm that makes my pulse slow two beats. He doesn’t ask names. He doesn’t glance at the guns. He opens the side door and lets my family in.
We move together through a night that stops fighting as soon as the wood closes behind us. Serena’s face is pale under the shade of her shawl, a streak of blood on her cheek that isn’t hers. She sets our son down on a pallet near the altar—a simple bed of folded blankets and a thin mattress that appears like miracles should, without noise or fuss. Marco is asleep before his head finds the pillow. Children run out of batteries faster than men do. The nanny sits on the stone step by the side door and pulls her sweater tight around her shoulders. Harrison takes the back pew with his eyes on the hinges. Luca steps into shadow and becomes less a man than a principle.
I sink into the pew beside my son. The wood is cold but honest. I rest my elbows on my knees and breathe—through my nose, count to four, out through my mouth, count to eight—until my hands stop shaking enough to be useful again. Twelve hours on the road, two ambushes, one cousin dead on my marble, blue lights at my gate, and still, the only thing that makes my stomach turn is the memory of Serena’s small hand leaving my arm to pick up a pot of hot oil.
Marco stirs, opens one eye. It shines in the candlelight like a coin at the bottom of a fountain. Then the other eye opens, slower, like the second hand of a good clock. He squints at me, and his mouth makes a little unsure line.
“Will you leave us again?” he asks.
Everything I am goes quiet. There’s a story I could tell here, the one with routes and cousins and the way men like me inherit rooms that smell like smoke and ghosts. I could say “No” the way I’ve said it a hundred times to men who wanted a promise I couldn’t keep. It would be a lie if I said it before I knew what it cost and how to pay.
I can’t speak at first. I shake my head. No.
He watches my face for the trick inside the word and finds none. “Okay,” he says, simply, like the way a door opens when you turn the right key. He leans into me without ceremony, small and warm and absolutely sure that gravity is a friend. The weight of him against my ribs reorders the room. I put my arm around him and feel something in my chest unclench that has been locked since before I knew his name.
Serena stands behind us, arms crossed tightly, jaw set in a way that says she used up all her fear and all her rage and is runningnow on discipline and lemon oil. The priest brings her a cup of hot water, and she nods a thank you that looks like a vow. She moves to our pew and sits so close her shoulder touches mine, then sets a hand lightly on Marco’s hair. It is the smallest thing. It’s also the biggest—like sliding a bolt across a door you didn’t know you had.
“You never stopped being his father,” she says, low, more statement than mercy. “But you need to decide if you want to continue being one.”
I look at her. The candlelight puts gold in her eyes and draws the scar on her wrist like a map line I should have followed four years ago. “I just killed my cousin on my dining room floor,” I say. Truth has to start somewhere. “And the state wants to take my house apart stone by stone. If I step off this road, it won’t be a walk in a park. It’ll be a climb in a storm. Men will reach for me because it’s easy and because they don’t know how not to. The Morettis will say pretty words now because I saved a patriarch and didn’t spill their blood, but pretty words can break when they’re hungry.”
She nods. “I know.” She looks at the altar, the cracked fresco of a saint who looks tired of being right. “And I also know this life will follow me even if I run. I tried. It followed. So the most I can do is win while I’m here. Win by picking our battles. Win by choosing where you stand. Win by cooking soup and not poison. Win by teaching a boy to tell the truth even when it shakes the room.” She looks back at me. “So. Decide.”
The priest moves quietly in the side chapel, lighting a thin candle and setting it before a small icon. He doesn’t watch us. He’s seen more men at crossroads than I’ve seen streets.
My phone buzzes once, soft and obscene in this room. A message from Camilla.
Carabinieri still at gate. Moretti consigliere sent word: “We saw what mattered. Handle your house. We will keep the wolves fed.”
It’s not a truce. It’s a grace period. Two days, maybe three, before the market remembers it was insulted and tries to even the ledger with somebody else’s blood.
“Before we left,” I say, keeping my voice for her and not the room, “the old man looked at me. He gave me a nod I’ve never had from him. It was permission to leave the table and a promise to keep my seat. For now.” I let out a breath that tastes like metal. “I can use that. I can hand routes to men who aren’t snakes and put locks on doors with names on them. I can turn off the music and ask the boys to go home. It will cost. It always costs.”
“Pay,” she says. No drama. Just the bill.
I look down at Marco, asleep again like the question took all his energy. He has my mouth when he’s serious. He has her steadiness when he’s spent. I touch the brave car under his hand, the little chipped paint at the fender. “If I say yes to your question,” I tell her, “I will burn it all for him.” I swallow and add the thing that makes the sentence true. “For you.”
Something in her face loosens. It isn’t forgiveness. It’s a door. “Good,” she says, and her voice gets softer at the edges. “Because I don’t need a Don. I need a man who can tie a shoe and make a sauce stand up. I need a father who shows up when it’s boring.”
“I don’t know how to be boring,” I say, and it almost makes me laugh.
“You’ll learn.” She slides closer, the warm press of her thigh against mine, and takes my bruised hand in both of hers. Her fingers trace the split skin over my knuckles like she’s tasting a spice. “You’re stubborn. That helps. You make a plan and keep it. That helps more. And you have people who will kill for you. Now you need people who will tell you no and mean it.”
I turn my hand and lace our fingers together. “I have one,” I say. “She threw hot oil at my cousin.”
