his mouth dropped open. He was smug no longer. “Tu? Mi tradisci?”
Alex’s Italian wasn’t great, but he understood that Cuccia had just had his Caesar and Brutus moment.
Leone said nothing.
“I want you to know this before you die, Ettore,” Nick said, and Cuccia turned to him, snapping his jaw shut. “You have lost everything. As we sit here, the other families of Sicily are killing or turning every man who took your vows. They are dividing all your holdings, all your wealth, your property, your accounts, among themselves. You’ve ruled like a king, and today you are deposed. The other Families do not stand with you. They will dance on your grave.”
With that, Nick looked to Angie. He didn’t nod or make any obvious gesture, but Alex saw something, an understanding, move between them. Angie looked to Giada next. She nodded subtly.
Angie stepped behind Cuccia, grabbed his head in one hand, and shoved a vicious, thin blade into the back of his neck and up. Then Angie shook the blade like he was trying to whip eggs, and Cuccia flailed and chattered, reduced to a puppet on strings.
Alex had gotten a scholarship to a gifted-kid science camp the summer before ninth grade, which had been much more like three more weeks of school than an actual summer camp. No canoeing had happened, or campfire sing-alongs. Mainly just classes, and then stuff like pizza and movies in the evenings. But the classes had been very cool, mad-scientist shit. During the biology and physiology unit, they had studied the central nervous system, and they’d done a similar procedure on a few different animals, starting with frogs. Pithing, it was called—inserting a needle into the brain and scrambling it like eggs, so that the animal remained alive but entirely cut off from the use of its motor functions, gross or fine.
Supposedly, the pain center was destroyed in the pithing, and the animals didn’t suffer. Alex didn’t really believe that. Regardless, the experiments had been horrific and had ended any thought he’d had about becoming a biologist, or any kind of scientist, really.
Angie had just pithed Il Padrino. Alex’s knees felt weak.
The dying old man sagged like a flaccid sack when Angie pulled the knife out, but he was still breathing—which mean Angie wasn’t yet done. There was almost no blood, except for a steady trickle from the narrow entry point of the blade.
Marco Leone looked away.
Nick sat exactly as he’d been, completely calm, his hands stacked on the table before him, his eyes steady on his enemy.
Sonny Romano, his father’s underboss, stood. “If I may, Don Pagano, my family owes the Cuccias some retribution.”
Nick nodded, and Sonny went around the table to Cuccia. He pulled a switchblade from his pants pocket and a white handkerchief from his suitcoat. Then he tipped Cuccia’s head back—Alex saw Cuccia’s eyes were open, and he was blinking—and cut his left eye out of his head.
Cuccia made no sound but the soft rustlings of his twitching body.
Sonny severed the eye from its nerve strings and wrapped it in the handkerchief. He took it to his father and presented it like a gift.
Alex didn’t understand, and didn’t care to.
Donna Sacco turned to Nick then and said, in her strange new voice, “I defer to you. Your loss is the greatest and your need for justice, too, but—”
Nick cut her off. “My justice came when he knew he’d lost. As long as he dies, I have no need for it to be on my terms. He took your voice. He owes you, too.”
“Do you mind if I make a mess?”
When she asked that, Alex happened to be looking at Angie, so he saw Donna Sacco’s husband’s proud grin.
Nick didn’t grin, but there was an appreciative light in his eyes. “We already have. It’ll be cleaned up.”
Donna Sacco stood, walked calmly to the end of the table and took her husband’s stiletto blade from him. She lifted Cuccia’s twitching arm and made a long cut from his wrist up the inside of his forearm. She did the same thing on his other arm.
The guys in the warehouse talked a lot—a lot—about the legend and lore of La Cosa Nostra. Alex knew there was often rhetoric in the way an execution went down. Rats had their tongues cut out. Men who’d put their eyes where they didn’t belong lost their eyes. Shit like that.
He’d never heard of anyone scrambling a brain like Angie had, but those long cuts on Cuccia’s wrists were