Chapter 4 - THE MIDNIGHT CONFESSION
By midnight, the dead had been removed.
Carmine’s clean-up crew had arrived in two unmarked commercial vans. They carried out the bodies in heavy canvas bags, stripped the bloody parquet flooring from the landing, and patched the bullet holes in the ceiling with quick-drying plaster. By ten o'clock, the only evidence of the assault was the sharp, eye-watering stench of bleach and the black scorch marks on the lower driveway where one of Valenti’s Escalades had burned out.
Lucian Valenti had not been in the cars. He had sent six soldiers to test our defenses. Four were dead. Two were in the basement of our warehouse in Long Island City, where Carmine was currently spending his evening with a blowtorch and a pair of bolt cutters.
The house was empty. The guards were stationed outside in the rain, circling the perimeter with Dobermans. Mrs. Gable had taken three Valium and locked herself in her quarters on the ground floor.
Only Fay remained on the third floor.
I sat in my chair by the window, the Glock resting on the low table beside me. The storm had worsened, the wind howling off the bay, rattling the heavy glass panes until they groaned in their lead frames.
My body was exacting its revenge.
The violence of the morning, the sudden surge of adrenaline, and the tension of holding myself rigid behind the desk had triggered a massive neurological backlash. The severed connections in my lower spine were firing wild, phantom signals into my hips and thighs. It felt as though someone had poured gasoline down the bone marrow of my femurs and set it alight with a match.
My hands gripped the wheels of my chair, my knuckles white, my jaw clamped so tight that my molars ground together until powder coated my tongue. A cold sweat soaked through my undershirt.
*Don't make a sound,* I told myself. *Don't you dare give this house the satisfaction of hearing you scream.*
A soft knock came at the door. Not Carmine’s code. A gentle, single rap.
The door pushed open.
Fay stood there. She had washed her face; a small butterfly bandage covered the cut on her cheekbone. She was wearing an oversized gray hooded sweatshirt that smelled faintly of laundry detergent and mint tea. She carried a basin of steaming water and a rolled towel under her arm.
“I told you to take the car home,” I said, the words dragging out of my throat through clenched teeth. “Carmine assigned two men to drive you to your apartment.”
“My apartment doesn't have a deadbolt anymore,” she said, walking in and setting the basin on the desk. “And my landlord is waiting for his rent. I’d rather sleep in the guest room down the hall.”
“Fay. Get out. I’m not... I don't want company.”
She didn't answer. She walked straight toward me, took one look at my posture—my rigid back, the tremors running through my shoulders, the gray pallor of my skin—and dropped down to her knees in front of the chair.
“Spasms?” she asked.
“None of your business.”
She reached out and placed her palm flat against my right quad.
The muscle beneath the flannel was as hard as petrified wood, vibrating with a high-frequency tremor that made the fabric hum.
“Don't,” I hissed, trying to pull my upper body away from her. “Don't look at me like this.”
“Like what?” she asked, her voice dropping into that strange, clinical calm that drove me insane. “Like a man whose body is short-circuiting? I spent two years watching my sister’s bone marrow fail, Mr. Corso. I watched her vomit blood into plastic tubs while her hair fell out in clumps. I’ve cleaned things you couldn't imagine with your expensive suits and your guns. You don't disgust me. And you don't intimidate me.”
She dipped the towel into the hot water, wrung it out with quick, practiced twists of her wrists, and draped the steaming cloth over my thigh.
The heat penetrated the wool, hitting the locked nerves with an almost violent shock.
I let out a low, ragged groan that I couldn't swallow. I dropped my head back against the leather headrest, my eyes rolling shut, breathing through my nose in short, shuddering gasps.
Fay leaned her weight forward, placing both forearms across my knees, using her entire body to anchor the limb against the involuntary violent jerks.
“Breathe into it,” she said softly. Her face was inches from mine. I could feel the warmth of her breath against my collarbone. It smelled of peppermint and cold air. “If you fight the contraction, the muscle tears. Let it happen. Let the nerve burn itself out.”
“It feels like... knives,” I choked out, the admission tearing through my pride like shrapnel. “Every five seconds. Behind the kneecap.”
“I know.”
“You don't know anything.”
“My sister had peripheral neuropathy from the vincristine,” she said, her voice steady in the dark room, competing only with the lash of the rain against the glass. “She used to tell me it felt like someone was skinning her feet with an oyster knife. Every night at three in the morning, I’d sit on the edge of her hospital cot and rub mineral oil into her arches until she fell asleep.”
She adjusted the towel, pressing deeper into the hip joint where the sciatic nerve was pinched against the scar tissue.
“Why didn't you become a nurse?” I managed to ask, the agony slowly dialing down from an eight to a dull, throbbing five.
“Nursing school costs nine thousand dollars a semester,” she said simply. “County General took every penny my parents left when they died in a highway pileup on I-95. By the time Clara passed, I owed eighty-four thousand dollars to the hospital collections department.”
She looked up at me. In the dim light of the single desk lamp, her eyes were huge, deep pools of exhaustion and iron.
“People like you,” she said, “think money is about cars and silk ties and paying men to shoot people who insult you. For people like me, money is oxygen. If you have it, you breathe. If you don't, you drown while people step on your head to reach the dock.”
The pain in my leg began to subside, replaced by a deep, hollow ache that felt like lead.
I looked down at her hands. They were small, raw-knuckled, the nails clipped short and unpolished. They were still resting on my knees, steady and warm.
“I had a brother,” I said. The words slipped out before my guard could come up. I hadn't spoken his name in twelve years.
Fay didn't move. She waited.
“His name was Vincent,” I continued, staring out into the dark lawn where the headlights of a patrol car swept slowly across the pines. “He was two years younger than me. When our father went to Lewisburg for tax fraud, the Valenti family tried to take our dry-dock operations in Brooklyn. Vincent thought he could negotiate. He was twenty-one. He wore a gold chain and thought because he had the Corso name, he was bulletproof.”
My throat tightened.
“They found him in a storm drain near the Gowanus Canal. They had used piano wire. He had thirty-four cents in his pocket.”
I reached down, my fingers brushing against the rough wool of Fay’s sleeve. I didn't push her away.
“I spent ten years killing every man who was in that room with him,” I said, my voice dropping to a whisper that sounded cold even to me. “I took their businesses. I took their houses. I put their sons in the ground. And when I was done, I thought I was untouchable.”
I looked down at my useless legs.
“Then an eighty-dollar tire iron and a stolen van proved I was just another piece of meat.”
Fay was silent for a long moment. She lifted the towel, folded it neatly, and laid it across the rim of the basin. Then she did something that stopped the breath in my lungs.
She reached up, her fingers light and cool, and touched the scar that cut through my left eyebrow—the thick, jagged ridge of tissue where the windshield had split my forehead to the skull.
Her thumb traced the line of the scar down to my cheekbone. It was not a gesture of pity. It was the touch of someone inspecting a cracked wall to see if the foundation could still hold the roof.
“You’re still breathing, Dominic,” she said softly, using my first name for the first time. “My sister would have given her soul for another six months of breathing. Don't waste it feeling sorry for yourself because you have to sit down to do your killing.”
She stood up.
My skin felt ice-cold where her fingers had been.
“I’m sleeping in the room across the hall,” she said, picking up the basin of cooling water. “If your leg locks again, throw the carafe. But don't throw it at the wall. Throw it at the door so I hear it.”
She walked to the threshold, her small frame silhouetted against the amber light of the corridor.
“Goodnight, Mr. Corso.”
“Fay.”
She paused, looking back over her shoulder.
“Lock the door to your room,” I said. “Not because of me. Because the men in this house are wolves.”
A tiny, razor-thin smile touched the corner of her lips.
“I’ve lived with wolves my whole life, Dominic. They don't bite unless you run.”
The door closed, and for the first time in six months, the silence in my room didn't feel like a cage.
May you like
It felt like a fortress waiting for a siege.
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