Page 92 of Masked Don

Behind him on the stairs, Genevieve has appeared. She’s pale, her arms wrapped around herself, a drink for once nowhere in sight. She looks at her wounded brother and the armed men and the open door that Marta just went through. And for just a moment, despite her nihilism, she looks scared.

“Enzo,” she whispers, “is Carmine…”

“I don’t know yet, Gen. I don’t know.”

She sinks down onto a stair and says nothing else.

Enzo turns back to me, and his good hand finally lands, lightly, carefully, on my arm. “You and Matthew need to be moved. Tonight. Now.”

My whole body stiffens, braces, waits for the order, the command, the you’ll do as I say that every man in my life has always reached for.

“That part isn’t a question.” He doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t have to. “Luca had his one shot to get me head-on tonight, and he failed. Now he’s going to attack through softer targets. That’s you. That’s Matthew. He talked about you tonight in the middle of trying to kill me, and he’s already guessing who Matthew is. So you’re leaving. Tonight. The only thing you get to decide is where.”

It’s an order. I wait for the old panic to come, the one every man in my life has taught me. It doesn’t. Maybe because for the first time, the man giving it is standing between us and the gun instead of holding it.

“Okay.” My mouth is dry. “Where can we go?”

“Candy first,” he says. “Anthony drives her to her aunt’s in Scranton tonight, with two men who stay. Then you and Matthew.”

“There are two options, yours to weigh: There’s a place in the city, a penthouse, secure and close. I can get men there in minutes and myself to you just as fast if necessary. Close is safer in some ways. But it’s closer to Luca, too.”

“And the other option?”

“A cabin upstate on a lake. Three hours away. It’s farther from the city and, therefore, farther from help. But it’s also farther from Luca. It’s isolated, with one road in, nothing around for miles, so it’s easy to see someone coming.” He holds my gaze. “The penthouse keeps you near to me, but the cabin keeps you far from him. And I have my own opinion.”

He leaves me the where. I think about it the way I think about everything now: the way that keeps my son alive.

“The cabin,” I say. “One road in, you said. Nothing around for miles. I want to be far from him. If someone comes up the road, I’ll see them coming, and I’ll have time. Close to the city means close to the man who wants us dead. I’ll take the miles.” I lift my chin. “That’s my choice, the cabin.”

Something eases in his ravaged face, not relief, exactly, but something like it. Respect, maybe. It’s the look of a man who handed over the one choice he could and got exactly the answer he would have given.

“The cabin,” he agrees. “Good. That’s the right call. It’s what I’d have said.” His good hand tightens on my arm. “Pack light, just what you and the boy need for a week. Pyke drives you. He’s the best I have, and Carmine trusts him, which means I do, too. Three more men go with you. Nobody gets up that road without Pyke knowing. I’ll come to see you settled in, but then I have a war to end, and I need to know you’re alive while I end it.”

“Enzo.” I catch his hand before he can turn away, hold it, this bleeding, stubborn, terrifying man. “End it and come back. Those are my terms. You don’t get to keep me safe and die doing it; that’s not the deal. You come back.”

He looks at me for a long moment, and whatever’s between us, unfinished and unforgiven and utterly real, is all there in his face at once.

“That’s the first time,” he says quietly, “you’ve ever asked me to come back.”

“Don’t make me regret it.”

And for the first time in the middle of the worst night yet, we’re just two people, frightened out of our minds, deciding together what to do about it.

CHAPTER 34

STEVIE

The cabin surprises me.

I’d been ready for another fortress, something cold and hard and expensive, just like everything else in Enzo’s world tends to be. But the place Pyke drives us to, three hours north of the city and on the east shore of Lake George, where the Adirondacks begin, is nothing like that.

It’s small, wood-built, warm, with a stone chimney and a porch that looks out over black water and dark trees. There’s one road in, just like Enzo told me. It winds through the pines. Inside smells like cedar and wood smoke. There are quilts on the bed and books on the shelves and a kitchen that looks like somebody meant to use it.

It’s the kind of place a family goes, not the kind of place where you hide from a war.

“Whose is this?” I ask, while Pyke does a slow circuit of the windows, checking sight lines with the slow thoroughness of a man who’s done it a hundred times.

“Mine, technically.” Enzo eases down onto the arm of a chair, favoring the bound shoulder. “Bought it years ago. Told myself it was a safe house. I’ve never once used it as one.” He looks around the small warm room like he’s seeing it for the first time. “I think I bought it because it was the opposite of the house I grew up in. I never let myself come here. It felt like admitting I wanted something I wasn’t allowed to have.”