Page 56 of Masked Don

“Yes,” I say. “He’s yours.”

Enzo goes so quiet I can hear the city through the glass. Then he turns to the window and puts one hand flat against the frame, like a man holding up a wall.

“The condom tore,” he says to the glass, very low. “That night. I found it on the floor the next morning, next to a ring on a pillow. I told myself it didn’t matter. I’ve been telling myself that every day since.”

I stare at his back. For five years, I have wondered how. He knew the next morning.

“Four years,” he says.

“Enzo…”

“You hid my son from me.” His voice is barely there. “Four years. His first word. His first step. The first time he was sick in the night and someone had to hold him. Four years of a person who is half me, and you’d have taken the rest of his life if Luca hadn’t left a box at my gate.”

“I was protecting him.”

“From me.”

The two words just sit there. Neither of us can do anything about how true they are.

He turns around. His eyes are black and wet and absolutely merciless, and I understand, standing barefoot in a sleep shirt in his house, that I am finally looking at the man the city is afraid of. Not the one who built my son a playground. The other one.

“I have killed men for stealing far less than this from me,” he says. “You know what I am. You’ve known since you heard my name through a door. Anyone else on earth who took four years of my child would not be standing in this room.”

“I know,” I whisper.

“Good. Then you also know what it means that you are.” He breathes in, and some of the black goes out of his eyes, though not all of it. “Tell me one thing. What was his first word?”

It undoes me. I didn’t expect it to.

“‘Light.’” I’m crying now. “He’d point at the lamp. I couldn’t afford much. The lamp was the brightest thing in the apartment, and he loved it.”

“Was he scared of the dark?”

“For a while, when he was two. He grew out of it.”

“Who held him when he was sick?”

“I did. It was always just me.”

“Did he ever ask about his father?”

“When he was two. Where daddy? I don’t even know where he learned the word.” I wipe my face with the heel of my hand. “I told him his daddy lived far away.”

Enzo closes his eyes. When he opens them, the grief has been put somewhere I can’t see, and something colder has taken its place.

“Luca Santini is coming for you both now,” he says. “He’s still guessing. So we give him something else to look at.”

“What does that mean?”

“Tomorrow night I have an event. A ballroom at the top of a tower, one of mine, full of the worst people in the city. You’re coming on my arm. Not as my assistant. As yourself. I want every person in that room to see you next to me and wonder what you are to me.” He nods at the box on the dresser. “Most of all, I want Luca to see it. A man like Luca can only hate one thing at a time. The longer he’s looking at you, the less he’s looking at who sleeps on the other side of your bathroom wall.”

“So I’m the decoy.”

“You’re the shield,” he says. “I hate it. But I’d rather he aim at what I can stand next to in a crowded room than at what he could carry out of a bedroom.”

I should say no. I should throw that box at his head and take my son and run, the way I did the first time.

But I think of Luca’s handwriting on that card. I think of him lying awake doing arithmetic about my son.