The Rossi vow

Episode 10

The Same Ghost

Damian

Marco laid the file on Damian's desk without a word, which was somehow worse than any preamble could have been.

"Talk to me," Damian said.

"The responding officer on Manny Ortiz's accident report — the one who filed the original timeline — retired eight months later. Moved to Florida. Bought a house in cash he shouldn't have been able to afford on a detective's pension." Marco's jaw was tight, the easy humor gone entirely from his face. "I found a payment. Routed through three shell accounts, but it traces back, eventually, to a Rossi holding company. One Vincent set up personally, four years before that. One your father never knew existed, as far as I can tell."

Damian sat very still, the way he'd learned to sit still as a boy whenever his uncle's voice got quiet and careful, back when quiet and careful meant someone, somewhere, was about to be in trouble.

"He paid off a cop," Damian said slowly, "to falsify a report on a car accident that killed the father of a woman I've now married."

"That's what the money trail says. I want to be wrong about it as much as you do."

"But you're not."

Marco didn't answer, which was its own kind of answer.

Damian sat with it for a long moment, the weight of seventeen years of trust settling and resettling against something that no longer fit the shape it used to. He thought about his father's funeral, Vincent's steady hands, the words your father would have wanted repeated so many times over so many years that Damian had stopped questioning where they'd actually come from. He thought about a phone call three years old, Manny Ortiz's voice tight with something Damian had mistaken, at the time, for ordinary business stress. It couldn't wait for a meeting, Manny had said. Damian had told him Thursday.

He wondered, with a cold, sick certainty that settled into his stomach like swallowed ice, whether his father's death — sudden, officially a heart attack, never once questioned by anyone in the family because who questions a heart attack in a sixty-one-year-old man under constant stress — deserved exactly the same scrutiny Marco had just turned on Manny Ortiz's accident.

"Pull my father's medical records," Damian said, quiet. "Everything. The autopsy, the toxicology, all of it."

Marco's face went carefully blank in the way it only did when he understood exactly what Damian was asking and didn't want to say it out loud either. "You think Vincent—"

"I don't know what I think yet. I know I've spent seventeen years not asking a single question I should have asked on day one, and I'm done doing that."

Marco nodded once, already reaching for his phone, and paused at the door. "If this is true, Dame — if he really did this, both times — you understand what that means. For the family. For the succession. For everything."

"I understand exactly what it means." Damian's voice came out flatter and colder than he intended, the old ice sliding back into place like armor he'd forgotten he still knew how to wear. "It means the man who raised me killed his own brother to take a seat he was never given, and then killed the one person outside this family who found out about it. It means every warm word he's ever said to me was a performance for an audience of exactly one."

"And Camille?"

The question landed harder than Marco could have meant it to. Damian thought of her the way he'd found her at the fountain the night of the wedding, asking how well do you know your uncle in a voice too careful to be idle curiosity — a question that made an entirely new kind of sense now, viewed through the shape of everything he'd just learned.

She knew something. She'd known something that night and hadn't told him, and he understood, with a fresh, complicated ache, that she'd had exactly as much reason not to trust him with it as he now had reason not to trust his own uncle.

"I need to talk to her," Damian said, already moving. "Tonight."

He found her at the top of the stairs when he came through the front door, standing very still in the low evening light, something crumpled and clutched tight in one hand, her face pale in a way that made his chest go tight with an emotion he didn't have time to examine.

"Camille."

"I need to show you something," she said, and her voice was steady in the particular, deliberate way that meant it was costing her everything to keep it that way. "About your uncle. About my father. I should have told you the night of the wedding, and I didn't, and I'm sorry, but I need you to see this before either of us decides what happens next."

She held out the envelope. Damian looked at it, and then at her — at the fear and the resolve sitting side by side in her face, at the same careful, guarded courage he'd fallen for somewhere between a broken oven and a business card he probably should never have handed her — and felt, for the first time since Marco had walked into his office with a folder that changed everything, that he wasn't standing in this alone.

"Show me," he said, and reached for her hand instead of the envelope first, and for once, she didn't pull away.

They stood there a moment longer than the situation strictly required, her cold fingers laced through his, the weight of everything neither of them had said yet pressing quietly into the space between them. Whatever came next — and Damian understood, with the same cold clarity he brought to every war he'd ever fought, that what came next would be war, the real kind, the kind with no clean way out — he found himself grateful, in a way he hadn't let himself be grateful for anything in a very long time, that he wasn't goin

g to be fighting it alone.