Chapter 134 -
Don Emilio arrived at 11am in a black car with no escorts. He had decided that at this point in his life, the things that were going to come for him would not be stopped by extra bodies, and he was no longer interested in pretending otherwise.
He was older than he had been the last time Nia saw him or perhaps she was looking at him differently now. He moved more carefully getting out of the car, the cane taking more weight, and the lines in his face had deepened overnight the way grief deepened things. He had aged in the hours since the call from Leo. But his eyes were what they had always been, dark and still and absolutely relentless.
He saw Nia on the front steps and he stopped.
"You walked into that building yourself," he said.
"Yes."
"For your friend."
"Yes."
He looked at her for a long moment. The morning light was cold and flat on the estate grounds.
"My daughter would have liked you," he said.
He went inside .The main hall was assembled by noon. Every senior man in the Cimmera's Pearlbot operation, twenty-four men in dark suits standing along the walls and at the table, none of them speaking. Rosa had made coffee and placed it on the sideboard and nobody had touched it.
Christian stood at Leo's right shoulder. Micheal stood at his left. Lucia sat along the wall with Gabriel, who had been brought down because Don Emilio had specifically asked for him, and who sat very straight and very still with his hands folded the way the adults did and his eyes moving between the faces in the room.
Leo stood at the head of the table. He had slept three hours and changed into clean clothes and let Rosa look at his wound, and he looked like what he was: a man who had been to war and come back and was now doing the quieter, harder thing.
Two of the guards brought Santiago up from the lower level .His hands were cuffed in front of him now, wrists together. He looked at the room, at the faces, at his uncle at the far end of the table. Something moved in Santiago's face when he saw Don Emilio just for a moment.
Don Emilio rose and the room went completely still. The only sound was the Don's cane on the floor as he came to stand before the table, and nobody moved to help him and nobody spoke.
"Three years ago," he said, "my daughter was murdered." His voice was what it had always been, the voice of a man who had never needed to raise it to be heard.
"For three years I have waited for justice. I was told by every man in this room, at one point or another, that justice was coming, that we were close." He looked across the assembled faces.
"The only person who actually delivered it was a woman from outside this world who had no reason to risk her life for any of us."
He looked at Nia, and the room followed his eyes, and Nia had the particular experience of having twenty-four men look at her simultaneously. "She has my gratitude and my respect. Both of those things are unconditional and permanent."
He turned to Santiago.
"Nephew," he said.
Santiago held his gaze. Whatever he was, he was not a coward. He stood straight and looked at the man who had raised him and did not look away.
"I loved you," Don Emilio said. "That is the thing you have to understand before I say anything else. I loved you from the time you were born. I watched you grow. I was proud of you in ways I perhaps never said clearly enough."
He continued. "And you used that love as a tool. You stood in my house for three years while I grieved my daughter and you knew what you had done and you said nothing."
The room went pin-drop silent.
"Andrea was twenty-one years old," the Don said. "She was kind. She was fierce. She wanted a life beyond the Cimmera and I was working toward giving it to her." He stopped. His jaw moved. "She deserved to grow old."
Santiago said nothing.
"I could kill you," the Don said. "I have killed men for far less. Every person in this room would call it justice and none of them would be wrong." He put both hands on the head of the cane. "But you are my blood. And I am an old man who is tired of choosing death when the other choices have not been properly exhausted."
He looked at Leo.
"Leonardo."
"Sir," Leo said.
"Your recommendation stands. Exile." He turned back to Santiago. "You are removed from the Cimmera. Your name is struck from every record we hold. Every alliance you built, every asset you accumulated, every favor owed to you is dissolved as of this moment. You leave Pearlbot by midnight tonight. You do not contact this family, this organization, or anyone connected to it."
His voice did not shake. It never had, in thirty years of difficult decisions. "If you are found within Pearlbot's borders after midnight, I will send Leonardo, and it will be the last thing you see."
Santiago looked at him.
"Is that all?" he said.
"Yes," the Don said. "That is all."
Something crossed Santiago's face briefly, and only if you were watching very carefully, like the face of a boy who had wanted something specific from his uncle and understood now, too late, that he was never going to get it.
"Then I'll go," Santiago said.
Micheal unhooked the cuffs. The guards stepped forward. Santiago walked past the table, past the assembled men, and stopped for one moment in front of Leo.
"Take care of the organization," he said. "You'll be good at it."
"I know," Leo said.
Santiago went to the door. Lucia was on her feet without quite deciding to stand, her amber eyes tracking him across the room. He looked at her once as he passed. She did not look away. Then he went out, closing the door behind him.
Don Emilio stood at the head of the table and looked at the closed door for a long moment. Then he turned to the room.
"Now," he said. "We have work to do."
Gabriel put his hand in Lucia's. She looked down at him. He was watching her face with the careful attention of a child who had learned that adults needed checking on too, sometimes.
She held his hand. She pressed it once, firmly and looked at Christian across the room. He was already looking at her.