Chapter 133 -
Leo went down to the lower level alone.
Micheal caught him at the stairs and stood in the way with the very specific expression he used when he had decided he was going to object and had already accepted that it wouldn't work.
"The Don gets here in two hours," Micheal said.
"I know."
"You should sleep. Eat something. Let Rosa look at your side."
"I need twenty minutes."
"With Santiago."
"Yes."
Micheal stepped aside. It was either that or physically stopping him, and that had never worked in thirty-two years of trying.
The lower level corridor was stone and fluorescent light and the smell of old concrete. Two guards stayed outside as positioned with two inside. Leo told the inside pair to wait in the corridor. They looked at each other, looked at him, went.
Santiago was sitting on the narrow bed with his back against the wall, shoulder freshly bandaged, hands cuffed to a ring in the wall beside the bed. Long enough that he could sit comfortably, not enough to stand fully. He was still wearing the ruined dress shirt. He looked like a man who had decided the situation was beneath his concern.
Leo pulled the single chair in the room to the center of the floor and sat down. For a while neither of them said anything.
It was Santiago who broke it. He always broke silences. He had never been able to help himself.
"You look terrible," Santiago said.
"You look worse."
"Fair enough." Santiago looked at the bandage on his shoulder, rotating it slightly, testing the pull of it. "The doctor is competent. Your estate is well-staffed, as always."
"Santiago."
"Yes."
"Why Andrea?"
The name sat in the room between them. Santiago looked at Leo with the steady attention of a man who had thought about this question and its answer for three years and had decided exactly how much of the truth he was going to give.
"Because she was going to marry you," he said. "That's the whole of it. The Don was going to give you everything that should have come to me. His blessing. His name behind yours. The Cimmera after him."
He shifted against the wall. "I grew up in this organization. My grandfather helped build it from nothing, sat at that first table when the Cimmera was three men and a plan. I was brought up knowing that one day I would lead it. That was not ambition. That was what I was told."
He paused. "Then your father died, and the Don took you in, and within five years you were more trusted than I had ever been. You were faster, colder, more loyal. You never broke a rule he gave you. And I watched him look at you the way he never once looked at me."
"So you killed her?"
"I had her killed," Santiago said. "There is a difference."
"There is no difference."
"Philosophically, there is. Practically, there is." He tipped his head. "You know, the thing that astonishes me most about you is that you have spent three years believing this was about revenge. About Andrea specifically."
"It wasn't?"
"No. Andrea was simply the most efficient move. Remove her and you spend years looking for her killer instead of building power. The Don loses faith in you slowly, the way faith erodes, not in one moment but across months of nothing found, no justice served, no answers. I step into the vacuum while you are looking down."
He looked at his hands. "It was never personal. I had nothing against Andrea. She was kind and she made you laugh and she deserved better than what I arranged for her. But she was in the way of something I had decided would be mine." He said it the way a man admitted a thing he had made peace with. Clean and matter-of-fact and somehow worse for it.
"Don't," Leo said. His voice had not changed volume but something in it shifted, went flat and hard. "Don't sit there and call what you did an arrangement."
"What would you call it?"
"Murder and cowardice."
Santiago looked at him for a long moment. "You're going to carry this for the rest of your life," he said. "The guilt of not finding me sooner. You will be the head of the Cimmera and you will wake up in the night thinking about what those three years cost and what you could have done differently."
"Probably," Leo said. "Three years is a long time. There's no clean way through that." He looked at Santiago directly. "But I know what I built in those three years too, and I know what I have on the other side of tonight. So yes, I'll carry it. And it will not break me."
"It'll break you eventually."
"It won't."
"How do you know?"
"Because I'm not going to carry it alone."
Something shifted in Santiago's expression.
"The Wallace woman," he said.
Leo said nothing.
"That's the part I miscalculated," Santiago said. "I factored in your discipline. Your loyalty. Your intelligence. I didn't factor in the possibility that someone would walk into your house and change the weight of things for you." He almost sounded admiring. "She's something, isn't she?"
"Yes," Leo said.
"An ordinary girl from an ordinary life. No family, no connections, no training, just herself." Santiago rotated his shoulder again. "She stood in that warehouse and looked at me like I was a mere inconvenience instead of a threat."
"Because you were," Leo said. "By the time she walked through that door, you were already finished. She just had to keep you talking long enough for it to show."
Santiago smiled. It was the first fully real thing he had done since Leo came into the room.
"I like her," he said. "I want you to know that. She's the one person in this entire story who played it clean."
"She played it the only way she knew how," Leo said. "She just didn't know how to be anything other than honest. You built your whole plan around people who could be managed and she couldn't be managed because she didn't want anything you had."
Santiago looked at the ceiling. "And what happens to me now?"
“The Don decides."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I have," Leo said. "And honestly, Santiago. It's the only one you deserve."
He stood, replacing the chair against the wall before knocking twice on the door for the guards.
"Leonardo."
He stopped but didn't turn.
"For what it's worth," Santiago said. "You were the better man. I knew it before the Don did, that's why I moved when I did." He paused. "I thought knowing that would bother you. I was wrong about that too."