Chapter 12: Without a Ledger

I got to him before anyone else did.

I dropped onto the stone beside Cassio and pressed both hands over the place his fingers had been.

It was hot and wet and too much of it.

"Fabio," I said. "Get the car."

"Vivi, Edoardo's right there."

"I don't care where Edoardo is."

I looked up.

Edoardo still had the pistol raised.

Silvia had her hand on his arm, and she was shaking her head.

"Not here," she said, in a voice I had never heard from her. "Edoardo, there are neighbors. The baby is here."

For a long moment he didn't lower it.

Cassio's four men had their weapons out and trained on him, and my brother Carlo, of all people, had stepped between them with both hands open.

"Put it away," Carlo said. "Put it away, or I'll tell the families what you did to my mother."

Edoardo lowered the gun.

He looked at me, and at the blood on my dress, and he didn't say a thing.

He took Silvia by the elbow and walked back to his car.

My father went with him.

I didn't watch them go.

The hospital in Lugano was white and quiet and smelled of floor cleaner.

I sat on a plastic chair in the corridor with Cassio's blood dried to brown on my wrists.

My mother sat next to me, holding my hand.

She hadn't said anything in an hour, and I was grateful.

The surgeon came out at nine and said it had missed the lung.

He said it in English, and then again in Italian, to be sure I understood.

They let me in at midnight.

Cassio lay on his back with a drip in his arm and a pale line of stitches I could see at the edge of the sheet.

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