28. Nico
NICO
The bass hits before the door even opens all the way, and something in my chest unclenches that I didn't know was clenched.
"Boss." He straightens up too fast, drops a hanger.
"Relax," I tell him. "I'm not here to fire anybody tonight."
He laughs like he's not sure if that's a joke. It is. Mostly.
We cut through the main floor, empty this early, chairs still up on half the tables, and a kid I hired two months ago is behind the bar restocking bottles with his hands shaking just slightly.
"You good?" I ask him.
"Yes, sir. Sorry, sir, I just... I thought you weren't coming in till Thursday."
"I'm not staying to work you. Breathe." I reach over, straighten a bottle he's set crooked, more habit than correction. "You're doing fine."
He exhales like I handed him something.
Behind him, a girl in a Terminal 7 shirt is stacking glasses into a rack, humming along to whatever's coming through the speakers, off-key and not caring who hears it. She waves at me with two fingers without breaking rhythm. I wave back the same way.
Lydia watches that too.
Near the back hallway, one of the servers, Dana, catches me before we reach the office. "Nico, can I ask you something? My sister's getting married Saturday, and I know I'm on the schedule, but..."
"Go," I say, before she finishes the sentence. "Tell Marco I said to cover it."
"Really?"
"Really. Go dance at your sister's wedding."
She grins and disappears back toward the floor, and I feel Lydia watching me the whole time, something quiet and considering in her face.
"What," I say.
"Nothing." She's smiling like she's caught me at something. "They actually like you. That's not what I expected."
"They're supposed to like me. I pay them."
"That's not it and you know it." She bumps her shoulder into my arm as we walk. "You're different in here. Looser."
"I'm always this charming, piccola. You've just been distracted by my other jobs."
"Uh huh." She doesn't buy it, but she lets me have it. Something about that, her letting me get away with the deflection instead of pushing, settles low and warm in my stomach anyway.
We get to the office and she's already pulling a folder out of her bag before I've got the door shut behind us.
"Okay," she says, dropping into the chair across from my desk like she owns it. "I've been going through everything again. Frank's precinct roster, complaint records, the guys who show up at Bianca's hospital more than they should."
I sit on the edge of the desk instead of behind it. "Show me."
She spreads three pages out, corners overlapping, and starts walking her finger down names.
"These four rotate through OCCB with Frank, same unit going back nine years.
This one," she taps a name circled twice, "signed off on two of Bianca's old incident reports and buried both of them same week.
I think he's one of the ones Frank's been renting her out to.
This one's newer, transferred in eighteen months ago, and he's the one who visits her floor the most."
"You're sure."
"I cross-referenced visitor logs with duty rosters. He's supposed to be on shift three of those visits." She looks up at me. "I'm sure."
"And this one." I tap a name near the bottom, one I already recognize from Frank's own precinct roster. "He's the one that matters most. He's Frank's oldest friend on the force. If anyone's covering for him at the top, it's him."
"I thought that too." She pulls another sheet from underneath, a second list, smaller. "So I split them. Ones we can hit clean, no blowback on Bianca's case file, and ones where if we move too early, it tips Frank we're already inside his circle."
I look at her a long moment, the careful order of it, the restraint in it. "You thought about protecting the case before you thought about revenge."
"Somebody has to." She says it plain, no drama in it, and I'd say the exact same thing myself if I still trusted myself to think that clearly about her.
I look at the names. Some of them I already know. Some of them are already handled, quietly, before Frank even knows it's happening.
"This is good work," I tell her, and I mean it plainly, no charm in it. "Better than what my own guys pulled."
"Don't sound so surprised."
"I'm not surprised. I'm impressed. Different thing."
She flushes a little at that, pleased despite herself, and folds the pages back together like she's protecting something valuable.
We work another hour, cross-checking, narrowing the list down to the names that matter most, the ones closest to Frank's protection and closest to what he did to Bianca. By the time we're done the list is short and ugly and exactly what I needed.
"Come on," I say, standing, offering her a hand up. "Let me show you the rest of the place properly."
I take her through the back, past the kitchen, up to the mezzanine that overlooks the whole floor, glass and steel and low gold light, my name nowhere on any of it and somehow still entirely mine.
"I always wanted something like this," I tell her, leaning on the rail beside her. "A club. Something that was just... mine. Not Family business, not something my father built and let me run. Mine."
"So you built it."
"Vinny got it started," I say. "Incorporated it, put the paperwork together behind Father's back, before I even knew it existed.
" Saying his name still catches somewhere in my throat, and I let it catch.
"The night my initiation was done, he handed me the deed like it was nothing.
Like it wasn't the biggest thing anyone had ever done for me.
Everything it actually is now, though, the floor, the staff, six years of keeping it clean, that part's mine. I built that up myself, after."
Lydia's quiet, watching me.
"I guess it was Vinny's way of telling me I could still have something Father couldn't take away," I say.
She reaches over and puts her hand over mine on the rail, and neither of us says anything for a second.
"Did your father ever give you anything like that?" I ask her. "Something just yours?"
Something shifts in her face, something older than pain.
"He died when I was eleven," she says. "So, no.
Not really." She looks down at the club floor below us, unfocused.
"There's a safe in the house in Gravesend.
My mom's house. His old paperwork's in it, work stuff, nothing important probably, but it's the only thing of his that's still...
his. Frank's never been able to open it.
Doesn't have the combination. My mom never gave it to him. "
"What kind of paperwork?"
"Accounting stuff, I think. He kept his own business, did books for people around the neighborhood." She says it like it costs her something, small and worn smooth from handling. "Mitchell."
I don't say anything.
"That was his name," she says, and I understand she's giving me something she doesn't give easily, something she's kept behind glass for longer than I've known her. "Harry Mitchell."
The floor doesn't move. The lights don't flicker. Nothing about the room changes at all, and that's the worst part, because everything in me does.
Harry Mitchell.
I was eleven years old with a knife in my hand that was too big for it, and my father's voice behind me saying finish it, and a man on his knees in front of me whose name I never asked for because I was too afraid to know it.
Not knowing kept it from being real. Knowing would finish what the knife started.
I know it now.
I've never said this name out loud to anyone in thirteen years. I didn't know I would ever hear it from anyone else's mouth, least of all hers.
"Nico?"
I pull her into me before she can see my face, wrap both arms around her, and press my mouth into her hair. She relaxes into me, mistaking my cover for tenderness while I hide my face from her.
"I'm glad you told me," I say, and my voice comes out steady, flat, the way it always does when something underneath it isn't.
"You okay?"
"Yeah." I kiss the top of her head. "Just thinking how much I like having you here. In my place."
She laughs, soft, and lets it go, and we stand there a while, her back against my chest, both of us looking out over the floor of the one thing in my life that's never asked me to be anyone but myself.
She has no idea what she just handed me.
Neither, yet, do I, not the whole size of it. Not yet.
Lydia's asleep beside me, sprawled loose across half the bed, one leg thrown over mine, skin still damp where I had my mouth on her twenty minutes ago. I lie there a while just listening to her breathe, slow and even, sated.
Then I ease out from under her, careful, and pad across the dark bedroom to where my phone sits charging on the dresser.
Four messages. All from men I trust to be quiet.
Done. Clean.
Handled, no noise.
In progress, will confirm by morning.
Confirmed.
Four names off Lydia's list, the ones closest to what they did to Bianca, already moving through the machinery I built for exactly this. I told her that I would find every man who touched her mother and I would make them pay for it.
I meant it as a vow. Now it's just paperwork, coming in one text at a time.
I'm still looking at the screen when it rings.
Unknown number. I already know.
"Yeah."
"You like killing my men for my stepdaughter?" Frank's voice, easy, almost warm, like he's asking about the weather. "That's cute, Don Nico. Real cute."
"You called for a reason. Say it."
"I'm impressed, is what I'm saying. Didn't think you had it in you to move that fast." A pause, and I can hear him smiling through it. "But tell me this, Don Nico. When you're busy spreading her pretty legs at night, do you ever think about her daddy's blood on your hands?"
Something goes very still in me, cold and total.
"You don't know what you're talking about," I say, and it comes out flat, controlled, nothing in it for him to grab onto.
"Don't I?"
"You're already a dead man, Frank." I keep my voice level, quiet enough that it doesn't reach past this room. "The only thing left to decide is how slow."
I expect a flinch. I don't get one.
"Do your worst, Don Nico." He sounds delighted, genuinely, like I've given him a gift. "I'm looking forward to it."
"Then we understand each other."
"Oh, we do." I hear him breathe out, slow, savoring it. "Have fun fucking her for now. After I put you away, I'm going to enjoy making you watch me ruin Harry's little girl."
The line goes dead.
I stand in the dark holding the phone, the confirmations still lit up on the screen, four men down, and Frank's voice still crawling somewhere under my skin.
I look back at the bed. Lydia hasn't moved, one arm curled under the pillow, hair loose across her face, entirely unaware of the three things I'm standing here holding at once.
What I did to her father, thirteen years ago, with a knife too big for my hand.
The fact that Frank has known it, or some shape of it, the whole time, and has been sitting on it like a loaded gun waiting for the one moment it would do the most damage.
And now, a threat, aimed dead center at the only thing left in this world I actually care about protecting.
I don't move. Just watch her breathe, and think about how much I still haven't told her, and how much less she knows than she thinks she does, and how badly I want to keep it that way for one more night.
Cazzo.
I set the phone down on the dresser, screen dark now, and I don't go back to bed right away.
I stand there in the cold, looking at her, at the mole on the back of her neck where her hair's fallen away from it, and thinking that God must have a cruel sense of humor to make her someone I never want to let go.
I get back in bed eventually. She stirs, murmurs something wordless, and pulls herself against my chest without waking. I hold her there and stare at the ceiling until the sky outside starts to go gray, and I don't sleep at all.