Page 29 of Masked Don

“If you’re good.”

The room seems designed to make you feel small, and it works. A corner study with two walls of tall windows, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a fireplace big enough to stand in, and a massive antique desk that’s almost completely bare.

Standing at the windows, his back to me, is a man. He’s tall and broad through the shoulders. His hair is a mix of silver and black, and he wears a three-piece suit cut close to the body. It’s obviously tailor-made for him and him alone.

Beside me, Matthew is watchful and silent, the way he gets when he’s reading the room and picking up the vibe in that strange way he has.

The man turns around.

My body reacts to him before my brain does, and the reaction is hot and certain and immediate. It’s a tightness in my belly, a heat blooming low and shameful between my thighs, before even a single thought has formed.

My skin remembers his hands, and my mouth remembers his. My whole body clenches and every other traitorous inch of me lights up at the memory of a voice I’ve spent years trying to forget, to pretend no longer exists.

It’s him. Black pepper and smoked amber, faint across the room. The silver at his temples. The blood-red ink across his knuckles, and the dark script climbing out of his collar. Even without the mask, I can tell it’s him, and I’m standing there, wet and helpless in front of the last man on earth I should feel like this toward.

His name finally forms in my mind: Enzo Accardi. My masked stranger is standing in a shaft of afternoon light with his hands in his pockets, watching me like he owns me.

He stills. He’s neither frozen nor shocked. He doesn’t widen his eyes or part his lips. He’s silent, and what’s worse, the recognition on his face does no more to disturb it than a stone dropping beneath the dark water.

When he speaks, his voice is pitched low. “Good afternoon, Miss Callahan.”

And that’s the proof, his tone, his voice, a voice I can feel in my bones, the voice of the man who slipped a ring on my finger and claimed me in front of Luca and all the rest of the underworld, a voice I’d hoped I’d never hear again.

“Good afternoon.” I will my body not to shake.

“My name is Enzo Accardi. Welcome.”

I could leave right now. I doubt he’d make me stay. I could turn and run, and forget this all happened, but I don’t.

I try to think of something, anything, to say, something smart and sassy that will show him I’m not scared. Before I do, however, his dark eyes drift down to the little man at my side.

He looks at Matthew, who is looking back at him with the same weighing stillness, the same patient study, deciding in his own four-year-old court whether this man is worth his attention.

Both of their faces wear the same expression, and it’s the uncanniest sight I’ve ever witnessed in my life. I stop breathing, because I do not know what Enzo Accardi sees when he looks at my son. Does he simply see a child? Or a mirror?

I expect Matthew to slip behind my leg and go silent, the way he does around men who aren’t safe. He doesn’t. He looks up at Enzo, calm and clear and totally unafraid, his head tipped a little to the side, the way you look at someone you half recognize and can’t yet place.

It’s a case of like meeting like, and that nearly makes my knees buckle, because my son’s instincts have never failed me, and right now, they’re telling him this stranger is safe.

Enzo crosses the room. Then the most feared man in New York gets down on one knee on the rug, three-piece suit and all, until he’s eye level with my son.

Behind us, through the open doors, Marta makes a small sound. I’ve watched a room full of killers part for this man without a word. He doesn’t kneel. Men like him don’t.

He kneels for Matthew.

No man has ever done that. Not once in four years. Men on the train talk over his head. My son has spent his whole life looking up.

He holds out his hand. “Enzo.”

Matthew studies it, then shakes it, very serious. “Matthew. I’m four.” He holds up four fingers to prove it. Then his eyes drop to the red script on Enzo’s knuckles, and he frowns. “Did you draw on your hands? You’re not s’posed to draw on your hands.”

“Why do you want to know?”

Matthew tips his head, exactly the way the man in front of him does. “‘Cause I asked first. Tell me why.”

Enzo goes still. Not the stillness from before. This one goes all the way down. His hand on his knee curls slowly into a fist, and by the door, Carmine actually turns his head.

Then something happens to Enzo’s face that the mask never let me see. For one second, the Don is gone. What’s left is a man looking at a small boy the way you look at something you didn’t know you’d lost until it was standing right in front of you.