Page 72 of Masked Don
“You’ve been quiet about it all day.” He gestures at the chair across from him. “I wondered when this was coming.”
I flick my eyes to the chair, then sigh before sitting. “I need to understand what this is, what we’re in. Like, what we’re really in. Because I keep telling myself what I saw down there was a one-time thing, a line that got crossed and won’t get crossed again. And I want you to tell me it’s true. I want you to tell me it won’t happen again.”
He’s quiet for a moment, and I know him well enough now to know that the quiet is him deciding whether to lie to me and then deciding not to.
“I can’t tell you that,” he says.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s not true.” He leans back in his seat. “Men like Luca don’t stop because they’ve failed. They stop when someone forces them to. This ends with one of us putting the other down.”
“There has to be another way. Lawyers, the elders, some kind of…”
“Luca doesn’t give a shit about any of that.” His voice stays calm and level. “You give men like him mercy, and they read it as weakness and come back harder.”
“How? How can you be so calm about what you’re saying?”
“Easy. The alternative is letting people I care about die so I can keep my hands clean. I’d rather be the monster and have you alive than be a good man at your funeral.”
That’s the thing that’s been circling in my mind since last night, finally said out loud. Enzo built a playground for Matthew and sent a boy to the river. And to him, these are just two facets of the same thing. This isn’t a conflict for him. He said it himself. He’s made peace with it.
What scares me is the peace. What scares me more is that I found some of it in myself, standing barefoot at the top of those stairs.
“Okay,” I say. “Then answer me this. And I need you to actually think about it, not just defend yourself.”
He nods. “Anything.”
I lean forward. “Matthew. He’s four. And even if I didn’t already know, it’s so goddamn obvious that he’s your son. He’s got your face and your hair and that stillness, and he watches everything and forgets nothing.”
Enzo says nothing, but his eyes stay fixed on mine.
“And he’s in this house and in this life. What does he become? Do you raise him in this world so he grows up to think love means bodyguards posted at every door? That shooting people in the head is just something you do for family? Is that what he grows up to think is normal?”
Enzo’s jaw tightens. “He learns to survive.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only answer there is.”
He leans forward. “You think I wouldn’t give every dollar I have for him to grow up somewhere soft and safe? But he’s an Accardi. People will come for him because of that name his whole life, and the only thing standing between him and them is me.”
“And if it’s bullets?” I cut in. “If protecting him comes down to bullets, is that what you teach him? Is that the inheritance?”
“If bullets are what keep him breathing,” Enzo says, “then yes.”
I can tell by the way his eyes flash that he sees how this statement lands for me. There’s almost something like alarm in his expression, the realization that he’s just said something he can’t take back.
He opens his mouth. “Stevie…”
“No. Don’t.” My voice is quiet, too. “Don’t walk it back. You meant it. It’s the most honest thing you’ve said to me, and you meant every word. I need to actually hear it, instead of letting you soften it for me.”
“I’m trying to keep him alive.”
“I know you are.” And the terrible thing is that I do know it, that it comes from love, that everything broken in this house comes from love twisted into the wrong shape. “That’s what makes it so hard to explain why you’ve got it exactly, completely wrong.”
“You want to protect us,” I say. “I know. But a cage with a playground in it is still a cage. And he’ll grow up thinking that’s what love is.”
Enzo says nothing. For once in his life, the man with an answer for everything has no answer at all. He just looks at me, and I watch him reach for something to say and find nothing that isn’t a lie, and to his credit, he doesn’t lie.
