Page 40 of Devil’s Gambit

DANTE

The rain falls like judgment; each drop a cold reminder that the world keeps moving even when yours has stopped. I can't feel my fingers anymore. I don't know if it's from the cold or from gripping this shovel so tightly that splinters have embedded themselves in my palms.

The farmhouse still burns despite the downpour. Stubborn flames that refuse to die. The smoke mixes with rain, creating a thick air that’s nearly impossible to breathe through.

I don’t care.

Two graves. That's what I'm digging. Two holes in the earth for the only people who mattered.

The smaller body lies under a tarp I found in the shed, protecting it from the rain, as if that matters now. But I can't look at it directly. Every time I try, my lungs seize up with a crushing weight that makes breathing feel like drowning in reverse.

That's Bella under there. Or what fire left of her.

The shovel breaks through to clay, harder ground that fights back. My shoulders burn from the repetition—lift, dig, toss. Lift, dig, toss. But the physical pain is good. It's real, something that makes sense, unlike the numbness spreading through my chest where grief should be.

I should be crying. Men cry when they lose everything. When their brother burns alive. When the woman they love becomes a casualty of their own stupid war. But my eyes stay dry, final proof of what I really am: a monster who can't even mourn properly.

I set the shovel aside and drop to my knees beside the tarp.

My hand hovers over where her face should be, but I can't bring myself to lift the covering.

The fire erased everything that made her Bella—those storm-gray eyes that saw through all my bullshit, the way her mouth would twitch when she was trying not to smile, how her hair felt between my fingers.

"I would give anything," I tell the shape beneath the tarp, voice cracking on nothing. "To see you one more time. Even if you were looking at me with hate. Even if you were cursing my name. Just to see you."

Still no tears. I press my palms against my eyes until I see stars, willing something, anything to come. But there's only a hollow ache, like someone carved out the human and left only the shell.

"You were right about me." The words come out broken. "I'm exactly like Sal. Worse, maybe. At least he was honest about owning you. I dressed it up as protection, as love, but I still tied you to a chair. Still took your choices. And you died because of it."

The other body—Marco. My brother, whom I spent half my life protecting and the other half resenting for needing protection. He didn't deserve this. Didn't deserve to burn for my sins, my war, my obsession with a woman who was never really mine.

"You always said I'd get you killed," I tell his corpse. "Guess you were right about that, too, brother."

I return to digging, each scoop of earth feeling heavier than the last. Not from exhaustion but from the weight of what I'm burying. Everything good I ever had or might have had.

Footsteps squelch through mud behind me. Rodriguez, from the measured gait, despite the uncertain ground.

"Boss."

I don't stop digging. Can't stop. If I stop, I'll have to think. "Can't you see I'm busy?"

"The men finished dealing with Paulie's crew. The ones we got, anyway. Burned them where they fell."

"And Hendrik?" The shovel hits a root system, and I hack at it with unnecessary violence. "You said you'd retrieve his body. The man served this family for forty years."

Silence except for rain pattering on leaves.

"The fire's too intense. The structure's coming down. Nobody could get inside without?—"

I spin around, and Rodriguez takes a step back. It must be something in my face.

"So, we just leave him? Let him burn like garbage while we give his killer's men proper handling?"

"Boss, the building's collapsing?—"

"Then it collapses on someone trying to do the right thing!" The shovel creaks in my grip. "That's Hendrik in there. He made every meal my father ate for the last forty years of his life. Taught Marco how to cook eggs when he was seven. He deserves better than being forgotten."

"You're right." Rodriguez's voice is careful, like he's talking to someone standing on a ledge. "But he's gone. They're all gone. And the living need you to?—"

"The living can go fuck themselves." I turn back to the grave and drive the shovel deeper. "The dead deserve something. Even if it's just a hole in the ground and someone who remembers their names."

Rodriguez shifts his weight, mud squelching. "The men want to leave. Feds are all over the Caruso properties. They'll be here soon."

"So let them go."

"What about you?"

"I stay." The shovel breaks through to another clay layer. Everything's harder the deeper you go. "I finish this."

"Boss, when the FBI gets here?—"

"Then they find me burying the woman I loved and the brother I failed." The words taste like ash. "The empire's dead anyway. Everything my father built, everything I expanded—it's all gone. Might as well fall with it."

"That's not?—"

"What? Not what my father would want? My father, who died with seventeen bullets in his back because he got emotional over a woman?" I laugh, but it sounds wrong, dead. "Maybe this is the Caruso way. We all die for women who were never truly ours."

Rodriguez is quiet for a long moment. Rain drums on what's left of the barn roof, creating a white noise that makes everything feel unreal.

"Your father loved your mother until the end," he says finally. "That mistress was just?—"

"Just another woman he thought he could own." I slam the shovel deep, and the old wood cracks. "Just like me. Just like?—"

The handle snaps clean in half.

For a moment, I stare at the broken pieces. Then something erupts from my chest, not tears but rage.

"SON OF A BITCH!" I hurl the broken handle into the darkness. "SON OF A FUCKING BITCH!"

I kick at the grave's edge, sending all that carefully excavated earth sliding back. Hours of work undone in seconds. Like everything I touch.

"FUCK THIS!" The scream tears my throat raw. "FUCK ALL OF THIS!"

Rodriguez steps closer, cautious. "Boss?—"

"Get out of here." My voice comes out dead. "Take the men and go. That's a fucking order."

"Dante—"

"GO!"

He leaves, and I'm alone with the dead and the rain and this rage that has nowhere to go but inward.

The barn stands intact beyond the burning house. Maybe there are tools in there. Another shovel to finish this meaningless ritual that matters to no one but me.

In the distance, I hear a car door shut. But no engine starts. Rodriguez. He’s sticking around to see if he can still help. Probably told the men to hold off too. Stupid, loyal bastard. Doesn’t he understand? I’m beyond help.

My Italian leather shoes—ruined now, like everything I'm wearing—sink into mud with each step.

The suit that cost fifteen thousand dollars is destroyed.

Mud caked into fabric that was never meant for this.

Blood—Paulie's, mine, maybe some of Rodriguez's men—staining the cuffs. My father would be appalled.

" Appearance is armor ," he used to say. " Look weak, become weak ."

Well, I look exactly like what I am now. Broken. Defeated. A man with nothing left to lose, which makes me the most dangerous kind of monster.

The barn door groans open on rusty hinges. Inside, the smell of hay and manure is somehow comforting in its normalcy. The cows are still here, standing in their stalls with bovine indifference to the apocalypse outside.

I approach the nearest one, a Holstein with a white star on her forehead. My hand finds her flank, warm and solid and alive.

"You don't care, do you?" My voice is strange in the barn's quiet calm. "Your owner's dead, and men were murdered fifty feet away, but you just keep chewing. Keep breathing. Keep existing."

She turns those big brown eyes on me, no judgment in them. No disappointment. Just mild curiosity about whether I have food.

When I was eight, I knew all their names. My father would bring Marco and me here on weekends, claiming it was to teach us about the family business, but I think he needed to escape. Needed to pretend we were normal for a few hours.

Marco loved it here. He’d spend entire days in this barn, giving each cow a name, a personality, a story.

" That one's Princess Buttercup ," he'd announce, pointing to a Jersey. " She's in love with that bull on the next farm, but their families are feuding ."

" Cows don't have families like that ," I'd tell him, already too serious at ten years old.

" They do in my world ," he'd say, grinning. " In my world, everything's a story with a happy ending ."

The memory swells in my chest. Pressure builds behind my eyes that won't release.

"What happened to your world, Marco?" I ask the empty barn. "Where did all your happy endings go?"

A cough.

Wet. Pained. Human.

My hand goes for my gun—empty, useless. The knife comes out instead, still dark with Paulie's blood.

Another cough, followed by what sounds like someone trying to breathe through liquid.

I move silently despite my wet shoes, following the sound to the back stalls. Blood coats the straw here, a trail leading to?—

The stall door hangs open. A cow stands placidly inside, but behind her, slumped against the wall?—

My heart stops completely.

Marco. His hand presses to his stomach, where blood seeps steadily between his fingers. His head is down, hair matted with sweat, and worse, his shoulders shake with every breath.

The knife falls from my hand. I hurry over to his side.

"Destiny?" His voice is weak, delirious with pain. "That you, baby? Come to take me somewhere warm? Or wait—" He laughs, then chokes on it. "Is it one of Paulie's assholes? Because I gotta tell you, dying in cow shit wasn't how I pictured going out, but I'm not going without a fight."

"Marco." His name comes out broken.

His head snaps up, eyes struggling to focus. Recognition dawns slowly, followed by that crooked grin that always meant trouble.