She helps me with the businesses when she has time. She mothers our kids. She takes care of me. She has fun with her friends, her family, and she also started and chairs a non-profit that helps domestic violence victims. Her charity helps them reestablish themselves, gives them a safe haven while they do that. I’m very fucking proud of her.
Does she know what I came to do today?
No.
Will I tell her?
Not unless she asks. She hasn’t even brought him up since we were in Tahiti and she caught me looking off into space and knew the shit that had gone down was fucking with me, particularly the shit I dealt with when I got dosed with those drugs.
She asked me to hand her that burden. The burden of stress from worrying as she was held captive. The burden of the nightmares. The burden of guilt from taking a life at seventeen even though I don’t feel like I have guilt, she thought different.
I handed her the burden and she rinsed it away into the ocean before walking me back to our vacation rental where we fucked under the stars. And it worked. Better sleep, no more nightmares. And Raymond Iadanza’s name has not come from her lips since.
She told me if I ever felt a threat to our family again, I had permission to do what I felt was necessary. I figured I’d leave Iadanza at Campo. I figured I was good with that.
But I tossed and turned most of the night when I found out we’re having a girl. Maybe it’s because of what my buddy Dario told me recently about how not long after he got married, he helped take down another dark corner of the underworld and the surviving prisoners there were successfully integrated back into society. They were mostly girls who’d been forced into sexual slavery.
No, it wasn’t the same sort of place as Porto Campo, it was a different kind of hell, but the idea of someone getting bold enough to work at liberating the prisoners there? That, coupled with the news I would have a daughter in a few months is why I reached out and made some calls, knowing I needed to do this.
No loose ends.
Sandra Iadanza is gone. Apparently Raymond strangled her to death a few months after I sent him to Campo. I only know this because Hennessy Baxter, who as a favor to me served as her Porto Campo patron, got word. I was told I’d only ever get word about my own sponsee if he ceased to breathe.
Will I sleep better at night knowing the man that stole three years from us is dead after enduring years of torture on my orders, especially knowing that five years ago she gave me permission to do it if I felt it needed to be done?
Abso-fucking-lutely.
The End