Chapter 2 - River Mud and Empty Coffins
“You're dead,” Dominic whispered. His hands, usually as steady as a surgeon's scalpel, clawed helplessly against his own thighs. “I buried you. I held your mother while she tore her hair out. I burned every warehouse the Moretti family owned to the ground. I put twenty men in the dirt for you!”
“I know,” Sadi replied softly. She tapped the ash off her cigarette, letting the gray flakes flutter down onto the floor. “The news reached me even out here. You made the city bleed, Dominic. You were very romantic with other people’s blood.”
“Why?” The word broke out of his throat, raw and bleeding. “Sadi, *why*?”
He began to push himself up from the floor, his long legs trembling under the tailored fabric of his suit. The moment his weight shifted, the small black barrel of the Smith & Wesson lifted. It didn't aim at his chest; it aimed directly at his right knee. The gesture was calm, surgical, and unmistakably serious.
“Stay on the floor, Dom,” she said, her voice dropping into a register of icy fatigue. “I mean it. If you take one step closer to me, I will shatter your kneecap, and we both know you’ll bleed out before your boys can figure out what to do.”
Dominic froze, suspended halfway between kneeling and standing. He looked at the gun, then back to her eyes. The woman who used to fall asleep against his bare chest, who used to laugh until tears ran down her cheeks whenever he tried to cook, was completely gone. In her place sat a feral animal that had survived winter by chewing off its own foot.
“Let me look at you,” he pleaded, his voice cracking into a hoarse whisper.
“You are looking,” she said. A ghost of a bitter smirk brushed her chapped lips. “I look terrible, don't I? Dark circles, skinny as a stray dog. And look at you—you’re going gray at the temples. The tailored suits can't hide it anymore. You look tired, Dominic.”
“The car went off the bridge,” he choked out, ignoring her insults. His mind was spinning wildly, replaying the rainy November night three years ago when the police divers had hauled a crushed, empty sedan out of thirty feet of freezing black water. “The divers said the current took the body out to the bay. They found your blood on the shattered windshield.”
“My head hit the steering wheel, yes,” Sadi said. She took another slow pull from the cigarette, savoring the smoke as if it were the only oxygen left on earth. “The Moretti boys rammed me from behind twice. When the car smashed through the guardrail, I didn't freeze. You taught me that, remember? *‘Panic gets you killed, Sadi.’* That’s what you used to whisper when you taught me how to shoot behind the stables.”
Dominic shut his eyes, a tear cutting a hot, clean line through the grime on his cheek. “You got out.”
“I kicked the driver’s side window out with my boots before the car hit the river. The water was like needles, Dom. February ice. It knocked every cubic inch of breath out of my lungs. I went under. I thought about letting go. I really did. But then I imagined you standing over me, your little mafia prince ego swelling because your woman died like a tragic martyr in your little turf war. And I got angry.”
She leaned forward, her hollow cheeks catching the harsh pink slash of neon.
“I clawed my way through the mud for half a mile under the surface until I found an industrial drainage pipe. I crawled into the sludge, Dominic. I spent three days inside a concrete tube, vomiting river mud, freezing, listening to the sirens on the bridge above me. I listened to your cars racing back and forth. And while I lay there, shivering until my teeth cracked, I realized something wonderful.”
“What?” Dominic whispered, his chest aching as if crushed under a hydraulic press.
“As long as I was Dominic Russo’s wife, someone was always going to put a gun to my head,” she hissed, her voice cutting through the hum of the neon sign. “As long as I belonged to you, I was a target. A pawn. A pretty little trophy for the Morettis or the Lucianos to snap in half just to watch you cry. The only way for Sadi to live was for Sadi to die.”
Dominic shook his head violently. “I would have protected you! I wiped them out, Sadi! The Morettis don't exist anymore! I hung their underboss from the underside of the same bridge they ran you off! There's no one left to hurt you!”
“There’s you,” she said plainly.
The words struck Dominic harder than any bullet ever had. He staggered backward, his spine slamming against the broken doorframe. “I loved you. I destroyed myself for you.”
“No,” Sadi said, her eyes dead and cold. “You destroyed yourself for your pride. You couldn't stand the idea that someone took what was yours. If you loved me, Dom, you would have walked away from the docks. You would have left the blood money behind. But you didn't, did you? You took their territory. You expanded. You became Don Russo.”
She snubbed the cigarette out against the cheap wood of the headboard, grinding the butt into ash.
“So don't kneel there and play the heartbroken widower. You got your empire. And I got my grave. Until tonight.”
Dominic stared at her, the fog of shock beginning to give way to the sharp, terrifying reality of their situation. “Why are you here, Sadi? Why this motel? Why Frankie?”
May you like
Sadi lowered the revolver just an inch. “Because Frankie didn't steal that money from your docks, Dominic. He took it for me.”
***
