Like Father, Like Son

Chapter 30

The morning light filters through the farmhouse windows like a promise neither of us can keep, painting Salvatore's face in shades of gold that make him look younger, almost innocent—as if three months of playing dead could reverse decades of violence.

We've spent the last two hours over breakfast dissecting our escape options like surgeons examining a terminal patient. Switzerland, where his money sleeps in numbered accounts. Argentina, where Italian names blend into the landscape like sugar in coffee. Thailand, where cash buys silence better than threats ever could.

"The Caronte network can have new identities ready within forty-eight hours," Salvatore says, pushing eggs around his plate with the methodical precision of someone planning a resurrection. "Clean papers, backstopped histories that'll pass any scrutiny. We become whoever we need to be."

"And the baby?" My hand finds my stomach instinctively, protecting what grows there from futures we're trying to construct from desperate hope. "What happens when Marco realizes his wife disappeared the same night his father miraculously stopped being dead?"

"Marco won't know I'm alive. To him, you'll just be another woman who couldn't handle the pressure of being married to a monster." His voice carries that particular certainty that's always made men follow him into war. "He'll rage, he'll search, but eventually he'll accept that you're gone. His ego won't let him chase too hard—it would mean admitting he couldn't keep his own wife."

The logic sounds beautiful in this kitchen that smells like coffee and possibility. But I've lived with Marco's particular brand of obsession, felt it in the bruises he left like signatures, the way he'd watch me sleep with the focus of someone memorizing evidence. Men like him don't just let things go—they collect grievances like trophies, polishing them daily until they shine bright enough to justify any atrocity.

"You really believe that?" I study his face, searching for the tell that betrays his doubt. "That we can just vanish? Become some Swiss couple who grows old complaining about tourists and comparing cheese prices?"

"I believe we've earned the right to try." He reaches across the table, his fingers intertwining with mine in that perfect fit that's always felt like destiny mocking us. "Three months of letting you grieve was the hardest thing I've ever done. Harder than ordering deaths, harder than watching Joana slip away. At least with her, I could hold her hand at the end. With you, I had to watch from a distance while you arranged flowers on my empty grave."

The raw honesty in his voice almost breaks my resolve. Almost. But I've already made my decision, felt it crystallize in my chest like shrapnel working its way toward my heart. This beautiful dream he's spinning—this fantasy of anonymous happiness in some foreign suburb—will last exactly as long as it takes Marco to track us down. And he will track us down, because men like Marco treat loss like personal insult, and personal insults require blood to balance the ledger.

"I need some air," I say, standing abruptly enough that my chair scrapes against the floor like fingernails on a chalkboard. "Just give me a minute to process everything."

He nods, understanding what he thinks he understands—that I'm overwhelmed by possibility, drunk on the idea of escape. He doesn't recognize this for what it is: me memorizing his face for the last time, cataloging every line and shadow to sustain me through what comes next.

Outside on the porch, he leans against the railing with his coffee, studying the mountains like they hold answers to questions he hasn't thought to ask. The morning sun turns him into something mythical—this man who orchestrated his own death, who loved me enough to let me mourn him, who thinks love is enough to rewrite the rules of gravity.

God, how I want this life he's offering. Want to wake up next to him in some country where our names mean nothing, where the baby could grow up thinking violence is just something that happens in movies, where we could pretend the blood on our hands washed off with enough distance.

But I know what Salvatore's love has blinded him to—Marco doesn't just want his father's empire. He needs to destroy everything Salvatore ever touched, ever loved, ever chose over him. Finding us wouldn't just be about retrieval; it would be about the kind of devastation that makes examples out of entire bloodlines.

Maybe not today. Maybe not next year. But eventually, when we'd gotten comfortable, when we'd started to believe in our own disappearance, Marco's men would find us. They'd find us in our Swiss suburb or Argentine vineyard or Thai beach house, and they'd make Salvatore watch while they took their time with me and the baby before finally ending him too. Because that's what sons do when they've spent their whole lives feeling second to everything else their fathers loved.

I move before my resolve cracks, sprinting toward my car with the desperate energy of someone fleeing a burning building. The keys are already in my hand—I'd palmed them during breakfast while he was drawing escape routes on napkins like love letters.

The car door slams with the finality of a casket closing. I hit the locks just as Salvatore realizes what's happening, just as he starts running toward me with confusion and betrayal fighting for dominance on his face.

"I'm sorry," I scream through the glass, my voice breaking on words that taste like battery acid and necessity. "I can't be a farmer's wife. I like the crown too much."

The lie lands exactly where I aimed it—right in the soft spot where his love for me lives. His face cycles through disbelief, hurt, rage, before settling on something worse: disappointment. He pounds on the window, shouting my name with the desperation of a man watching his last chance at happiness drive away.

"Lucia! No! This isn't you. This isn't what you want. Please!"

But I'm already spinning the wheel, gravel spraying like shrapnel as I tear away from the farmhouse, from him, from the only clean thing either of us might have built from the wreckage of our lives. In the rearview mirror, he's still running, still shouting, still believing this is about power instead of preservation.

My hands shake as I navigate the mountain roads at speeds that dare physics to intervene. But physics doesn't care about broken hearts or necessary cruelties, so I make it to cell service without wrapping the car around a tree, though part of me wonders if that wouldn't be kinder—dying on the way to war instead of in it.

The phone rings twice before Matteo answers. Salvatore's most loyal soldier, the one who'd take a bullet for him but who's also pragmatic enough to recognize when power shifts require adaptation.

"Mrs. Caruso?" His voice carries the careful tone of someone who's not sure which reality he's woken up in. "We heard you were... indisposed."

"Prepare the men," I say, my voice hardening into something I don't recognize, something forged from grief and fury and the absolute certainty that I'm about to burn down everything to save the only thing that matters. "All of them. The loyalists, the mercenaries, anyone who understands that the Caruso name is about to be under new management."

"What exactly are you saying?"

"I'm saying that tonight, I become a widow for real." The words fall like dominoes, each one knocking down another piece of the life I might have had. "Marco Caruso dies tonight, and I take what should have belonged to better men."