Page 49 of Masked Don

Everything in me wants to answer her with power. It’s right there in my mouth. This is my house. That is my face on that boy. You will give me my child.

I don’t say it. I swallow it, and it goes down like broken glass.

“All right,” I say.

She blinks. “All right?”

“When you decide he’s ready, you’ll tell me.” I let her see exactly what it costs me. “Don’t make me wait long, Stevie. Five years used up most of my patience.” I pick up the first folder on my desk and hold it out to her. “In the meantime, there’s correspondence you need to go through.”

She takes it. She studies me a moment longer, suspicious of the surrender, and then she sits down at her desk six feet from mine and opens the folder, and we work in a silence so loud I can hear her breathe.

I sit there all morning. Every few minutes, without meaning to, I look out the window at the boy on the playground, and every time I do, she sees me looking.

CHAPTER 15

STEVIE

By the third week in Enzo Accardi’s house, I know exactly what scares me the most.

It’s not the armed guards at the gates. It’s not the inescapable feeling of being watched by the security cameras tucked into every corner. It’s not even the fact that Enzo’s appointments are all staffed with men who look like they know seventeen different ways to dispose of a body.

No. What scares me the most is that Matthew is happy here.

This morning, we’re seated at the long breakfast table, Carmine at the far end behind his newspaper, Matthew across from me, with one knee tucked under him, stacking his toast into a wobbling little tower while Marta watches.

“Am I in trouble?” he asks, glancing up.

“Not yet, ragazzo mio,” Marta says, eyeing the tower, then the plate under it. “But that is the good china, and you have jam on places jam should not be. So just be gentle.”

“I’m being gentle,” Matthew says.

“Go for it, bub. You’ve earned it. That’s a great, yummy-looking tower.”

“It really is,” Marta agrees. “A man who builds with his own two hands. Very impressive.”

Matthew frowns. “I’m not a man. I’m four.”

“My mistake.” Marta dips her head. “Forgive me, sir.”

I’m still laughing when she fills my coffee without being asked. That’s the problem with this house: it keeps giving me things I didn’t know I was starving for, like good company over breakfast, a garden where Matthew can play without me having to be on the lookout for street crazies, and a kitchen stocked with all of his favorite snacks.

And safety dressed up so prettily, I almost forget to distrust it.

“You’ve gone quiet,” Marta observes, settling into the chair beside Matthew with her own cup.

“Just thinking.”

“That’s dangerous in this house.” Carmine turns a page. “We discourage it.”

I look between the two of them. “How long have you both been here?”

“Since Enzo was a boy,” Carmine says. “We’ve watched him grow up.”

He says it plainly, but his eyes don’t leave the newspaper, and I understand that I’ve wandered up to the edge of something the Rossis don’t discuss with the help they’ve known for all of three weeks.

“He was a serious boy,” Marta says anyway, surprising me. “Like yours. Watchful. Too watchful, more than a child should have to be.” She says it softly, looking at Matthew, and then she looks at me, and there’s a whole conversation in it that neither of us is going to have out loud. “He turned out better than he had any right to,” she finally says. “Better than this house should have allowed. I think you should know that from someone who was here for all of it.”

I don’t know what to do with that information, so I drink my coffee and don’t answer, which Marta lets me get away with.