Page 107 of Masked Don

Even now. After everything. He’s asking.

My face crumples. Everything I’ve been holding since the radio went quiet at the cabin comes out of me at once, and I cry like I haven’t cried in years.

“Yes,” I say through it. “Yes. Please.”

He closes the distance in two strides and drops to his knees in the wet gravel and gathers us both up, bad shoulder and bleeding side be damned. He presses his face into my hair and says something in Italian, over and over, that I can’t understand and don’t need to.

Matthew’s arms go around his neck. “Daddy. You came.”

“Of course I came.” His voice is wrecked. “I’ll always come.”

Matthew pulls back to look at him, grave and enormous-eyed, and holds up the gray rabbit with both hands.

“Mr. Bun had the map.”

Enzo looks at the rabbit. Then at me. Something breaks open across his face that I don’t have a word for.

“Then Mr. Bun,” he says solemnly, “is getting a medal.”

Later, there are medics in hospital blues, and a blanket around my shoulders, and someone cleaning my lip with something that stings.

Two of them are trying to make Enzo lie down on a stretcher so they can look at the hole in his side. He lets them, finally, but only if the stretcher stays close enough for him to keep one hand on Matthew’s foot.

Emilio Vasari stops a few feet away, lighting a cigarette with his left hand. Up close, his ring is gold and worn smooth. That night, I watched it from across a ballroom, on the hand of one of the men at the bar who didn’t laugh.

“Miss Callahan.” He inclines his head. “You noticed my ring. Nobody ever looks at a man’s hands but the help.” Smoke drifts up into the floodlights. “I told your Don I was ashamed of that room. I wanted you to hear it from me. Consider tonight the first payment.”

Then he walks back toward his men, and the dark swallows him.

Near the warehouse door, Michael Accardi raises his cane and raps it once against the side of a car, and every voice in the lot goes quiet.

“You all saw it,” he says. His voice is old and dry, and it carries anyway. “Every one of you. My son walked into that building alone and empty-handed, for his family, and he walked out.” He looks around at the elders, at the soldiers, at Luca’s men on their knees. “For too long, I let this city wonder who sits in the Accardi chair. That was my doing, and it was shameful. It ends tonight.”

He lifts his chin.

“Enzo Accardi is the head of this family. Not my stand-in. Not my heir. The Don. Whatever respect you gave me, you give to him, though I think tonight he earned it without my help.” A dry pause. “As of now, I’m retired. So leave me alone.”

A ripple of laughter goes through the lot, low and surprised.

Enzo doesn’t even look up. He’s on the stretcher with one hand still wrapped around Matthew’s foot, and he isn’t letting go.

He has everything he came for, right here.

CHAPTER 43

STEVIE

Four days later…

Detective Reyes came back two days after the warehouse. He sat in the front parlor with a cup of Marta’s coffee he never touched and asked Enzo about an old Santini warehouse on Newtown Creek that burned to the waterline the same night, about the three bodies the fire department pulled out of it, about a cabin up near Lake George where six men had been found dead. Enzo’s lawyers answered every question. Reyes left with nothing, and on his way out, he looked at me for a long moment, like a man filing something away for later.

I looked right back.

Jack Ketch, Luca’s smooth-voiced counselor, was on a one-way flight to Palermo before the sun came up that night. Nobody stopped him. Nobody needed to.

Vin Donati walked into Carmine’s hospital room the morning after the warehouse, hat in hand, and swore he never knew his Thursday game was the bait. Carmine believed him. Enzo let him keep his hands.

I’m looking out of the study window one morning when I see Michael and Genevieve sitting on a bench in the garden. They’ve been out there for at least twenty minutes so far, sitting side by side, staring at the same middle distance, not speaking.