Page 33 of Masked Don

“She made an impression.”

That isn’t the word for it. The word for it is the one I don’t say out loud, the one that has kept me up more nights than any war.

Mine.

Not the way a man owns a car or a building. The other way. The way the old men in the portraits upstairs used the word, before it meant anything as soft as love. I looked at her across a room full of predators once and something in me decided. Nothing in the five years since has talked it out of that decision.

Today she walked into my study in a cheap blazer and shoes that pinched her, fuller and softer and more tired than the girl in the rabbit mask, and every cell in my body said the same word it said that night.

Mine.

Then I watched her lift her chin at me like she would rather die than let me see her shake, and I understood the problem.

The thing I want is the one thing I can’t take. A woman like that, you take her, and you lose her. You lock a door on her, and you find her gone in the morning with nothing on the pillow at all.

So I will do the hardest thing I have ever done.

I will leave every door in this house unlocked, and I will make it so she never wants to walk through one.

Then there’s the boy. Small and serious as a judge, with a stillness I recognized the moment I saw it. He studied me, weighed me, and decided I wasn’t dangerous. He’s half right. I’m not dangerous to him.

“Boss.” Carmine’s voice has changed. It’s quieter, tinged with warning. “Whoever she is to you, whatever this is, you need to be careful. You’re bringing a woman and her child into your home. Don’t take it lightly.”

“I know who she is, and I know what I’m doing. Nothing about this is being taken lightly.”

“And the boy?”

I don’t answer that. I’ve known since I was old enough to understand this life: a man like me gets his empire, and solitude comes bundled with it.

And yet, here she is. The only woman who’s managed to make an impression on me is back in my life, and she brought the boy with her. And today, with both of them standing in my study, a small, strange part of me felt a possessiveness that was almost frightening.

I felt like they were mine. Mine to keep, mine to shelter, mine to ruin, if I’m not careful.

Stevie I can understand. Her son is the question I have spent eight months refusing to ask, and I am not going to start asking it tonight.

Either way, I need to be careful. She can work here, and she can bring her son. But they can’t get too close.

They can’t become liabilities.

“Watch the agency,” I tell Carmine. “If anyone starts asking why that woman got this job, I want to know who’s asking.”

“And the part you’re not telling me? Because there is a part you’re not telling me.”

I watch the gate a moment longer.

“I’ll tell you when I’ve figured it out myself.”

The study door opens without a knock, which tells me who it is before I turn around.

“So you hired someone after all.”

My sister, Genevieve, crosses to the sideboard, finds the decanter, and pours herself a measure of my best scotch with the steady, practiced hand of a woman who’s used to starting her drinking early. I check the clock. Not even two.

“Marta’s downstairs acting like Christmas came. There’s a child involved, apparently. You’re collecting strays now?”

“Good afternoon to you, too.”

Genevieve has our mother’s face and father’s eyes, which always struck me as a particularly cruel genetic hand to be dealt: a beautiful face set with the dark eyes of a predator.