The Rossi vow

Episode4

Sins We Keep

Damian

Vincent's study smelled the way it always had — leather, cigar smoke, the faint sweetness of the scotch he only drank after nine. Damian had spent half his childhood in this room, doing homework at that same desk while his uncle took calls in Italian too fast for an eight-year-old to follow, and some traitor part of him still felt, walking in, like coming home.

"You pulled the Ortiz file," Vincent said, not looking up from his glass. "Sit."

Damian sat. He hadn't done that — sat on command — in probably a decade, but old muscle memory didn't care about decades.

"I'm writing it off."

"So Marco tells me." Vincent finally looked up, and his face did the thing it always did, the thing that had comforted Damian at a funeral seventeen years ago and had comforted him a hundred times since — a warmth that felt, on the surface, entirely real. "You're marrying the girl instead. Bold. Even for you."

"It settles the debt cleanly. It buys goodwill in a neighborhood we're expanding into. It's good business."

"It's also," Vincent said, swirling his glass, "the first genuinely unpredictable thing you've done since you took over this family. I find I like it. Keeps people guessing." He smiled, warm as ever. "Your father would have hated it. Too sentimental for his taste. He always did think you had a soft heart under all that ice, you know. He worried about it."

Damian had heard some version of this sentence his entire life — his father worried, his father wondered, his father would have wanted — always secondhand, always filtered through Vincent, because his father wasn't alive to correct the record himself. He'd never once questioned it until this exact moment, sitting in this exact chair, watching his uncle's hands stay perfectly steady around a glass of scotch while he talked about a dead man like he'd known him better than his own son had.

"Why did you care about that file, Vincent?" Damian asked, quiet. "Two million on a nine-year-old ledger. You've never once asked me about a write-off in seventeen years. Why this one?"

Something moved behind Vincent's eyes — so brief, so well-managed, that if Damian hadn't spent his whole life learning to read the smallest tells in the most dangerous men in the city, he'd have missed it entirely. Then it was gone, replaced by mild, avuncular concern, the same face Vincent had worn at every holiday, every hospital visit, every birthday since Damian was old enough to remember.

"Because your father authorized it personally," Vincent said smoothly. "Some of the last paper he ever signed. I suppose I've always felt a certain responsibility toward the things he touched last." He set down his glass. "Sentiment, Damian. The very thing you're accusing me of not understanding."

It was a good answer. It was almost certainly a lie.

Damian had built an empire on knowing the difference between a good answer and a true one, and for the first time in his adult life, he found himself unable to tell which one he'd just been handed by the only father figure he had left.

"The girl," Vincent said, changing tracks with the easy grace of a man who'd never once been caught mid-lie, "what's she like? Manny's daughter."

"Sharp," Damian said. "Stubborn. Doesn't scare as easily as she should."

"Sounds like her father." Vincent's smile didn't reach anywhere near his eyes this time, and Damian, watching for it now, actually saw the gap — the half-second where the warmth was a performance instead of a fact. "Manny never did know when to leave well enough alone either."

"What does that mean?"

"It means," Vincent said, standing, effectively ending the conversation the way he'd been ending conversations with Damian since before Damian could form full sentences, "that some men don't know how to accept a kindness when it's given to them. I hope, for her sake, the daughter is smarter than the father."

He clapped Damian once on the shoulder on his way past — warm, familiar, the same gesture he'd used a thousand times — and Damian sat alone in the study for a long time afterward, turning over a sentence that could have meant nothing at all, or could have meant something he wasn't ready to hold yet.

His phone buzzed. Marco.

Pulled the old case files on Manny's accident. Something's off with the police report. Two different responding officers, two different timelines. Not saying it's anything. But it's not nothing either.

Damian read it twice, standing in the doorway of the study his uncle had just walked out of, humming faintly down the hall the way he always did after a good glass of scotch — content, unbothered, a man with nothing on his conscience heavier than a difficult nephew.

He thought about a girl with flour under her nails who had agreed, hours ago, to marry a stranger to save the only thing her father had left her.

He thought about the two nights before Manny Ortiz died, when the man had called him personally and Damian had told him Thursday could wait.

He thought about warm hands and a steady voice saying your father would have wanted, and for the first time in seventeen years, standing in the hallway of the only home he'd known since he was sixteen, Damian Rossi let himself consider — fully, deliberately, without flinching away from it — the possibility that the man who'd raised him after his father died might be the reason his father was dead in the first place.

He didn't have proof. He had a bad feeling and a mistimed police report and a phone call three years too late to matter.

It would have to be enough to start with.

He texted Marco back: Pull everything. Quietly. If I'm wrong, no one ever hears about this. If I'm right—

He stopped typing. He didn't finish the sentence, because he didn't yet know what came after if I'm right, only that whatever it was, it would cost him something he wasn't sure

he could afford to lose twice.