The Rossi vow

Episode12

The Dockyard Invitation

Damian

Marco arrived at midnight with a laptop and a face that told Damian everything he needed to know before a single word was spoken.

"Teddy Russo," Marco said, dropping into the chair across from Damian's desk without waiting for permission, "has three bank accounts we didn't know about. All three receive quarterly deposits from the same shell company that paid off the cop who filed Manny Ortiz's accident report. Same company that paid your uncle's off-the-books 'consulting fees' for the last twelve years."

"How long has Teddy been on the payroll?"

"Best I can tell? Since he was twenty. Before he ever drove a single car for this family. Vincent recruited him." Marco turned the laptop screen toward Damian. "There's more. Teddy has a juvenile record, sealed, that took me three favors to unseal. Assault. He put a man in the hospital at seventeen, over a girl who didn't want anything to do with him. Vincent made the charges disappear. Been making Teddy useful to him ever since."

Damian sat with that for a long moment, feeling the last of his uncertainty curdle into something harder and more useful. He'd spent his whole life underestimating Teddy the way everyone underestimated Teddy, because that was precisely the point of him — the friendly, forgettable face nobody looked at twice, doing the ugliest work in the family for a debt of gratitude that had apparently never once been allowed to expire.

"There's one more thing," Marco said, and something in his voice made Damian's stomach go tight before the sentence even finished. "Vincent's called a family gathering. Dockside warehouse, the old Rossi shipping property. Says it's a toast to the marriage, a chance for the extended family to properly welcome Camille. Three days from now."

"That's the same property where my father used to meet Manny Ortiz. Before either of them died."

"I know."

Damian stood and walked to the window, the city spread out dark and glittering below him, and thought about his father standing in exactly this spot decades ago, building an empire he'd apparently never fully controlled, trusting a brother who'd been quietly circling the throne for longer than Damian had been alive to notice.

"He's not inviting Camille to welcome her," Damian said slowly. "He's inviting her because he knows, or suspects, that we're getting close. He wants her somewhere isolated. Somewhere with water on three sides and exactly the kind of privacy that makes bodies difficult to find."

"So we don't go."

"If we don't go, he knows we suspect him, and he moves up whatever timeline he's already working on. If we do go, we're walking directly into the one place in this city built specifically to make problems disappear." Damian turned back to Marco, feeling the particular cold clarity that had made him good at this — the same clarity that let him plan a hostile takeover or a war with equal detachment, now turned toward protecting the two people in this city he could least afford to lose. "We go. But we go prepared, and Camille and Bella don't go anywhere near that dock without four times the security Vincent will be expecting."

Marco was quiet a moment. "You really think he'd try something with half the extended family standing right there?"

"I think a man who paid off a cop and groomed a killer from the age of twenty doesn't think in terms of what he can get away with in front of witnesses. He thinks in terms of what story he tells afterward." Damian's jaw tightened. "I think he's been telling stories about the people who got in his way for seventeen years, and everyone in this family, myself included, has been stupid enough to believe every single one of them."

His phone buzzed — Selene, of all people, a text he almost ignored before the first line stopped him cold.

Heard about the dock thing. Vincent's been weird about it for weeks — kept asking if I'd be there, if I could "keep Camille occupied" for part of the evening. Thought that was strange. You should know.

Damian read it twice, feeling something sharp and certain lock into place. Selene had no idea what she'd just handed him — no idea she'd been used, for years probably, as an unwitting piece on Vincent's board, valuable precisely because she'd never once questioned why her family's oldest ally kept finding small, useful ways to involve her in things that had nothing to do with her.

He typed back three words. Stay away Thursday.

Then he sat in the dark of his office for a long time, turning over every version of the next seventy-two hours, trying to find the one where everyone he cared about walked off that dock alive — and finding, with growing unease, that in most of the versions he could construct, at least one of them didn't.

He thought about calling his uncle right then, hearing that warm, familiar voice one more time before everything between them changed permanently, if only to know, for certain, whether any part of the man who'd raised him had ever been real. He didn't make the call. Some questions, he was learning, were better answered by evidence than by giving the person who might lie to you one more chance to do it convincingly.

Instead he sat with the weight of it until the sky outside his window started, faintly, to grey toward morning — a man rebuilding, piece by careful piece, an entire understanding of his own family, while the only people he had left to trust slept two floors below him, unaware of exactly how close Thursday was going to bring all of them to finding out the truth the hard way.

Somewhere in that long, grey hour before dawn, he found himself thinking not of strategy but of Camille — the particular steadiness in her voice when she'd handed him the envelope, the way she'd trusted him with the most dangerous truth of her life instead of running with it alone. Whatever else Vincent had taken from him over the years, he found he still had that: the strange, unearned gift of someone choosing to stand beside him instead of against him, and he intended to spend every resource this family had left to make sure that choice didn

't cost her everything.