Chapter 9: Collision Course
Looking up at the stoplight blinking red-green-yellow in the cold rain, he saw the ghost of the surgeon’s crisp white coat. The man had flicked his chart at the morning nurse as he worked. Ribs three, seven, and nine are fractures, not breaks, he’d said, his tone detached. The orbital socket cracked, concussion is severe but under control. “You heal, you can fight,” he added, as simply as diagnosing a flu. The statement echoed now in the amber swirl of his bourbon. Every old instruction from his youth—every rule his father had hammered in about absolutes and consequences—now thrummed with urgency in his blood. He’d tried to be the legitimate son, the CEO in a glass tower, before this pulsing, violent clarity seized him.
That split-second realization on the asphalt tasting oil and his own ruined teeth.
That he was unfinished.
They'd left his company's soaring silver logo as the last thing his swollen, glazing eyes had seen under the glare of the parking lot lights. A triumphant final vision they granted before abandoning him as a message. The entire purpose was clarifying cruelty. Every recovered memory of Vito's subsequent silence made his gut knot. No progress. His relentless digital searches were as obvious as they were futile.
Robert Ellis, had simply erased Zariah Hayes from the planet.
A nurse had noticed his rage in the clean, secretive medical suite a few days after he woke, a low-frequency animal pulse shaking the leads taped to his chest. “Zee,” was his first complete word, scraping from an inflamed throat. His brother Alex had paced out into the hall. Leo just looked at the ground. When he’d finally vomited out the whole question - Where? - their shared look weighed his stalled heart. Speculations flew, but he knew.
Robert had arranged it so his absence spread the rot, which made the press bites about a "vanishing CEO" a useful smokescreen. So he enacted his old life with ritualistic precision, running scaling operations for two ships arriving contraband. Each day crawled forward without alteration until Leo stood vibrating near the high-study window on day fifty-two.
Dayne wouldn’t even call him back until Vito came in person later that afternoon.
Leo simply extended the phone, his own knuckles white around the device. "He says it's about Ellis, says you'll want to hear this," he murmured, the words a clipped arrow shot into the tense quiet of the room. Through the line, Gino Rossi—a remnant of the more brutal past Vito preferred to let sleep—described a known transporter now boasting to his bookie about sensitive ‘collection and containment’ jobs deep in the woods past Cold Springs, deliveries for which the customer insisted on total blindness from the crew.
It was floury and insubstantial, but after fifty-two days of nothing, it was a single flake of snow in a vast, empty desert. He turned and saw his father already filling the study doorway like a fault line in a mountain. "We need to talk."
Vito closed the heavy oak door of the study, the click of the latch a final sound. "Your mother, Isabella," he began, his voice stripped of all its usual gravelly command, leaving something raw and unfamiliar. "She wasn't killed in a random home invasion, like I let you believe." Dayne felt the floor tilt, the bourbon glass cold and slick in his palm. "A rival family took her because they knew she was the only thing that could break me," Vito continued, his gaze fixed on the rain-streaked window, "and they were right—I was hollowed out for a decade after they sent her back to me in a suitcase."
The old man finally looked at him, the emerald eyes they shared now windows to a shared, inherited agony. "This grief you carry for Zariah, this feral need to tear the world apart to find her—I know its shape," he said, the words quiet and absolute. "It is the same sickness I carried." Dayne leaned forward, the movement making his fractured ribs scream. "I have a location, a lead in the woods near Cold Springs," he offered, his voice tight. "Give me men, give me the resources to move on it, and I'll give you the Porto family's entire shipping ledger."
Vito’s expression didn’t change, but a sharp dismissal flickered in his eyes. "You think I need your information?" He shook his head slowly, a king reminding a prince of the kingdom’s true reach. "You will have whatever you require—not because of a trade, but because she is yours." He placed his hands flat on the desk, leaning forward, his presence expanding to fill the shadowed room. "And I will protect you both with the only force Robert Ellis will understand: unrelenting, final violence."
Then Dayne shocked Vito. Dayne said he only had one stipulation. "I pull the trigger," Dayne stated, the words chillingly flat in the study's heavy air. Vito knew his son didn't want to be a part of the mafia lifestyle, but he couldn't find it in himself to deny his son’s request; the look in Dayne’s eyes made it apparent to Vito that it wasn't really a request, but a declaration of a debt that would be paid in blood. They’d have to scope out the location for a bit, and although Dayne wanted to go in guns blazing he wouldn't put Zee at risk, unnecessarily, if she was even there, forcing the simmering animal inside him to submit to a colder, more patient calculus.