Chapter 138 -
The Don asked for Leo alone.
Rosa showed him to the study and closed the door behind her. Don Emilio was standing at the window with his back to the room, the cane in his right hand, the afternoon light making him look thinner than Leo had seen him look even two days ago. Like something was being used up from the inside.
Leo sat .The Don remained at the window for a long moment. Then he turned and made his way to the chair across from Leo with the careful deliberate movement of a man who had decided not to let himself be watched struggling.
"I have something to tell you," he said. "I should have told you three months ago. I was not ready."
Leo waited.
"My heart is failing," the Don said. "Dr. Ricci has been watching it since last spring. There is a valve issue, structural, not the kind that improves on its own. In October he stopped hedging and gave me a timeline. He showed me charts and numbers and I looked at him and told him to put the charts away and tell me plainly."
He looked at Leo steadily. "I've got eight months or perhaps less. There is a procedure that might extend it, open the chest, repair what can be repaired. But I am 61 years old and I have seen what those procedures do to a man at my age. I would rather have 8 months as myself than 18 months like a living corpse."
He said it without self-pity, the way he said every difficult thing. "I have made my peace with the timeline. What I have not made peace with is the state of the organization if I leave it before the succession is settled."
Leo looked at him, the man who had taken him in at thirteen after his father's funeral, who had taught him to read a room, hold a line, carry a loss without letting it hollow him out. Who had sat at that first dinner and put a glass of wine in front of a grieving boy and said nothing except that food was on the table and grief required fuel. Who had made him into something cold and necessary, and who had known what he was doing the whole time.
He had spent years being angry about that. He was not angry now.
"You should have told me," Leo said.
"Yes," the Don said. "I should have. I was protecting you from the information which was foolish. You don't need to be protected from hard things. You need to be given them in time to prepare."
"How many people know?"
"Dr. Ricci. Now you." He paused. "You will tell the rest, in the time and order you see fit. That is a decision for the head of the family to make, and I am passing that role to you now, formally, before the council is assembled."
He held Leo's gaze. "I wanted you to hear that from me directly. Not from a letter. Not from a gathering. From me, in a room, looking at you."
Leo was quiet for a moment.
“The council meeting," he said.
"Next week. I want it done while I can still stand in front of that room and make it clear that this is my decision and not a transition forced by circumstance."
The Don settled back in the chair. "There will be resistance. Garza will make noise. Two of the eastern seats will push back. They have been waiting to see if there was an opening and Santiago's removal has made them feel bold."
He paused. "None of them will push hard enough to matter once I have said your name in that room and made clear what happens to the boldness of men who challenge the Don's final directive."
"And after?"
"After, it is yours entirely. The decisions, the alliances, the debts, the obligations, the men who need managing and the ones who need replacing. All of it."
He looked at Leo with the same steady attention he had used for twenty years. "I don't apologize for the life I shaped you for. I chose you and I shaped you and the organization is stronger for it. But I want to say this plainly before the end. You deserved to be given the choice at the beginning. You never were. You were thirteen and grieving and I put you into something before you were old enough to refuse."
"I know," Leo said.
"Does that anger you?"
Leo thought about it. "It used to," he said. "It doesn't anymore. This is what I am. The question is what I do with it going forward."
The Don nodded. Something in his face that might have been relief.
"The Wallace woman," he said.
"Nia."
"She is what you want."
"Yes."
"Then keep her," the Don said. "Not for the Cimmera or appearances or alliances or what it signals to the council. Keep her because she is what you want and because men in this life who find that particular thing and release it to be sensible die alone and correct, with nobody left who knew them before the title."
He looked at his hands resting on the head of the cane. "I let that happen to me once. There was a woman before Andrea's mother. I made a practical choice instead of an honest one and I have thought about her every year since, which is its own kind of haunting."
He did not elaborate. Leo did not bother to ask.
"I will need a doctor at the estate," the Don said after a moment. "Someone permanent. Not Ricci, he is too far."
"I'll arrange it," Leo said.
"Good." He looked at Leo. "I want to be here when you get married. That is not a request."
Leo looked at him. "That's not decided yet."
"Yes it is," the Don said. "You decided it in the warehouse when you went in after her instead of coordinating from outside."
Leo said nothing.
"You've got eight months," the Don said. "Don't waste them."
He stood, slowly, with the cane. Leo stood with him. The Don crossed to the door and then stopped with his hand on the frame.
"You will be better at this than I was," he said. "I want you to know I believed that before tonight."
When he left, Leo stood on the empty study for a long time. The afternoon light had gone flat and grey outside the window. On the desk lay the cold coffee, the unread file. The ordinary furniture of a day that had become something else entirely.
He just had eight months to decide.
He had spent twenty years learning to work with whatever time was given, to plan inside constraints, to find the best available outcome and execute toward it. This was no different in its mechanics. But the mechanics had never felt this personal before, never carried this specific weight of wanting to get it right before someone he loved left the room for good.