31. Nico
NICO
The call comes in at six fourteen in the morning, and I know before I answer it that something is dead.
I'm already pulling on a shirt. "Who."
"OCCB. Full unit. Officers on the door, a van in the alley, they've got the safe cracked open and they're carrying boxes out onto the sidewalk like it's a block sale." A pause. "It's shut down, Nico. Pending investigation. However long that means."
I don't say anything for three full seconds. I make myself count them.
"The books," I say. "The real books, not the ones we show the state."
"Gone. All of it. They knew exactly where to look."
That's the part that sits wrong in my chest. Cops come.
Cops sniff around every club in this city looking for a reason.
What has never once happened in six years of running that place clean on the surface and careful underneath is a raid that walks in and goes straight for the one hiding spot that matters.
Somebody handed them a map.
"I'm coming down there," I say.
"Don't." Anastasio's voice drops. "There's nothing to come down for. It's a crime scene. You show up, you're a guy standing outside his own raided business looking guilty as hell."
I hate that he's right.
I sit on the edge of the bed with the phone against my ear, look at the wall, and clench my jaw. Vinny got that place started for me. I'm the one who's spent every year since actually running it, building it into something clean, legitimate, and mine.
And I took Lydia there and showed her every inch of it.
"Anastasio."
"Yeah."
"How."
He doesn't answer right away, and that's when I know he's already been turning it over, already doesn't like the conclusion.
"I drove her to Gravesend," he says. "Couple days back. She told me it was about Frank. She didn't say what, exactly, and I didn't push, because what am I gonna do, follow my boss's wife around like she's a suspect."
"But."
"But she was gone four hours for a coffee with a friend. And she came back different. Quiet. And now I'm sitting here doing math I don't want to do."
I close my eyes.
I don't need the rest of it. I don't need the name of the friend, or the address in Gravesend, or the specific hour she handed something over to somebody who was never a friend at all. I know the shape of it the second Anastasio stops talking. I don't need to see the proof to know it's true.
It's her.
These last few days, her pulling away from me in bed, in conversation, and in every small room where we used to be easy with each other.
A solo trip with an excuse that stalled halfway out of her mouth.
I told myself it was Frank. I told myself it was her mother in that hospital bed, the weight of all of it pressing her flat.
I let myself believe almost anything except the one thing that was sitting right there the whole time.
"Nico." Anastasio again. "You still there."
"I'm here."
"What do you want me to do."
"Nothing," I say. "Not yet."
I hang up before he can ask me what I mean by that.
I find her in the kitchen an hour later, standing at the counter with a mug of coffee she isn't drinking, her hair still damp from the shower, and something in her face already braced like she's been waiting for this exact moment to walk through the door.
"Terminal 7," I say.
She doesn't ask what about it. That's the first thing that tells me.
A woman caught off guard would ask what happened, would look confused, would reach for her phone.
Lydia sets the mug down on the counter very carefully, like the sound of it against the granite might set something off, and she looks at me.
"I heard," she says.
"You heard." I take a step into the room. "It got raided at five this morning. They went straight for the safe. Straight for the real books. Nobody finds that safe by accident, piccola. Somebody had to show them the door."
The word comes out of me bitter. I don't mean it to. It comes out anyway, the last soft thing I have for her, twisted around into something closer to an accusation than an endearment.
"Say it," I tell her. "Just say it."
For a second I think she's going to lie to me. I watch her face for it, watch for the tell she's never quite been good at hiding. But she doesn't lie. She lifts her chin instead, and something in her shifts from defense into attack, fast, all at once.
"Fine," she says. "It was me."
The kitchen goes very quiet.
"I gave Frank the incorporation papers," she says.
"The real ones, from the safe. I don't know exactly what he did with them, and I don't want to know.
But I gave them to him because he had photographs of what he did to my mother, Nico.
Recent ones, from her hospital bed. He said he'd release them, put them everywhere, her face, everyone we know.
He said he'd send video to your father's whole world of exactly what kind of woman you married.
And then he said if that wasn't enough motivation, he'd make sure my mother's ventilator had a bad night. "
Her voice cracks once, right in the middle of that sentence, and then hardens right back up.
"So yes. I did it. I handed him what he wanted so my mother could keep breathing and so I didn't have to watch myself get destroyed in every group chat your family owns."
I stand there and take it, every word, because there isn't a single piece of it I can call a lie.
"You could have come to me," I say.
"With what? With Frank's photos of my own body? You want me sitting across from you at dinner explaining what your world already thinks I am?" She shakes her head. "You want me telling you that if I don't hand something over, my mother stops breathing?"
"Yes." My voice comes out low. Hard. "That is exactly what I want. Every time. Every single time, Lydia, you come to me first."
"Why," she says, and it isn't a question; it's a blade, "so you can decide what to do about it the way you decide everything. So you can handle it your way."
"Because I would have handled it."
"You mean you would have killed him."
I say nothing.
"That's what I thought," she says.
I feel the old grief rising in my chest before I can stop it, thick and specific, bigger than the money or the club or even Frank right now.
It's the day I brought her through those doors and walked her past the merchandise floor, the liquor license, and the staff schedules.
Then I took her up to the mezzanine and told her about Vinny.
About my brother building something clean with his own hands because he wanted one good thing to leave behind in a family built on dirty money.
I told her that in a voice I saved only for her.
I let her all the way into the one part of my life that stayed clean.
"You know what guts me," I say. "It's not the club. I can rebuild a club."
"Then what."
"That was the one place I ever let you all the way in." My voice doesn't rise. It goes quieter instead, and that's worse. "I told you about my brother in that office. I never told anyone about my brother. And you took that place and you handed it over."
Something crosses her face, grief of her own tangled up with a fury she isn't ready to put down yet.
"You want to talk about what you let me in on," she says. "Let's talk about that."
"Lydia."
"No." She's moving now, off the counter, closer, and her voice has stopped shaking. "You want to stand there and act like I'm the only one in this kitchen who's been keeping something. I know what you did to my father."
The room goes still in a different way.
I don't say anything. I don't move. And I feel it happen inside her, watch it happen across her face in real time, the moment she understands what my silence actually means.
"You're not even surprised," she says slowly. "You already knew I knew."
My jaw tightens. No words come.
"How long." Her voice climbs. "How long have you known that I know?"
"Since you told me his name," I say. "At the club. The second you said Harry Mitchell out loud, I knew you'd figure out the rest."
Something in her face goes very still, more dangerous than the shouting was.
"Were you ever going to tell me?" she says. "Or was I always going to have to find every piece of this myself and hand it to you before you'd admit any of it?"
I don't answer that. Every version of the truth confirms exactly what she's afraid of.
Her breath comes out shaking. "God. You weren't. You were just going to let me live next to it for the rest of my life and never say a word."
"What did you want me to say."
"I wanted you to say something. Anything. Instead you just... let me carry it."
"I killed your father," I say, flat, because there's no version of this where softening it helps either of us.
"Eleven years old. That's what I was, a blade shoved into my hand and my father's voice behind me telling me to finish what I'd started.
You think an eleven-year-old boy says no to Don Leo and walks away from it? "
"I don't care whose fault it was." Her eyes are wet and furious at once.
"My father is dead. My mother spent the next ten years married to a man who beat her because your family's world was the only place left for us to fall into once he was gone.
Your father's people put us on that path, Nico.
Your family ground my father up and handed the pieces to Frank like a gift. "
"That's not fair."
"Fair?" She laughs, and there's no humor in it at all. "You want to talk to me about fair."
"I didn't choose any of it."
"Neither did I." Her voice breaks and she doesn't let it stop her. "Neither did my mother. Neither did the eleven-year-old girl I used to be, waiting for a father who was never coming home because your family decided he was in the way."
I have no answer for that. There isn't one. Nothing I say undoes the years she spent in that house with Frank's hands on her.
"Your mother was right," she says. "You are your father's son."
It hits harder than the raid did. Harder than Anastasio's voice at six in the morning telling me the one clean thing I had left is gone. My chest tightens around the words, a burn that keeps building.
I move before I decide to move.
I close the distance between us in two steps.
She doesn't retreat, not until her back finds the wall and there's nowhere left for her to go.
Then I'm standing over her with both hands braced flat against the wall on either side of her head, close enough to smell the coffee on her breath, close enough that neither of us is breathing right.
"I am nothing like him," I say.
Her eyes don't drop. They hold mine, furious and unafraid, and something in the set of her mouth almost looks like pity.
"Look at what you're doing right now," she says. "You're so deep in him, in what he made you, that you don't even see it anymore."
I don't move back. I can't.
"So go ahead, Don Nico," she says, quiet now, and steady, and that steadiness scares me more than the shouting did. "Do what I know you want to do. Punish me."
Neither of us moves.
The kitchen holds its breath around us. I stand there with my hands on the wall and her face six inches from mine, and every word left in me is dangerous.