Domenico
Everyone believes I’m calm because I don’t feel things. The truth is the opposite. I feel all of it, all the time, every degree of it. A man who feels everything and acts on none of it until the exact right second is the most dangerous animal in any room.
My father taught me that. He taught me a great many things I’ve spent my life since he left us thanking him for.
I fly home from Washington with my hands perfectly still in my lap and a rage in my chest so large and so old it has its own time zone.
They took my niece. A Kovaci, the bloodline that gave the world the monster who put his hands on my wife when she was a child, reached into my family and lifted out the brightest thing in it, and married her at the point of a gun, and texted me a photograph to make sure I knew.
Every instinct I have, every one, is screaming the same word my men are too afraid to say out loud: war. Walk in, level the house, burn it to the ground.
And I’m not going to do any of it. Not yet.
Because I am not my rage. I am the man who holds it, and aims it, and I have learned the hard and bloody way that the cost of moving before you understand the board is measured in coffins.
My father paid that price with my mother and I paid it with him. I will never pay that lump sum again.
I knew where Brooklyn was within the hour.
That’s the part none of them understand, not even Matteo.
That I have known where my niece was every minute since she walked out of that arena.
After my father died, after a man hacked my house blind and it cost me the second thing I’ve ever truly grieved, I rebuilt my eyes from the ground up.
Nobody moves on my blood anymore that I don’t see coming. I let the Kovaci boy take her because by the time he did, stopping it would have cost me more than letting it run. So I let it run. And I watched.
The brownstones are a wake without a body in the middle one.
Sienna is on the stairs when I come in, where she’s been since they got home, and my sister, who has buried a father, survived her own kidnapping with a dead man’s blood under her nails, and never once let any of us see her break, is broken now, quietly, completely, over a single word.
Sienna. Brooklyn called her Sienna, something she stopped doing when she was thirteen, something Si has cherished every day since.
“She didn’t mean it,” I tell her, sitting down on the cold step beside her. “You know she didn’t.”
“I know exactly what she did.” Sienna’s voice is wrecked but her eyes are clear, because she’s mine, because she’s a Caputo to the floor of her soul.
“She looked at me, and she found the one thing that would make me run, and she used it, because she’d rather I hate her than die in that house.
I watched my daughter do the bravest thing I’ve ever seen and I still felt every inch of that knife go in.
And God, Dom, it hurt.” Her jaw trembles, once.
“She called me Sienna so I’d live. So we’d all live.
Don’t you dare tell me she didn’t mean it.
She meant it more than anything she’s ever said. ”
I put my arm around my sister, and she lets me, and across the room Matteo stands at the window with his back to us and his fists at his sides, and I don’t have to see his face to know what’s eating him alive.
Matteo helped me put Admir Kovaci in the ground.
His hands were on it. We all swore it was justice, and it was justice, but justice has a long memory.
Now a dead man’s brother has Matteo’s daughter, and a father is standing at a dark window doing the worst math of his life: I helped earn this.
I helped kill the brother, and the bill came due with my little girl as the price.
I let him have the silence. There’s nothing I can say that he won’t hear as a lie.
Upstairs, my nephew is at the heavy bag again, only this time his cousins are all up there with him probably reinforcing whatever brave, dumb, inexperienced mob kids think they can do.
I’m still reeling that Antonio packed a bag because he wants to rescue his sister and I know my dad is somewhere proud and beaming because of it. And I know someday his namesake is going to be a problem for the whole world, but tonight I love my nephew so much it aches.
With any other problem besides this one, my consigliere would have already counseled me toward the right decision by now and I’d have a plan and action to follow. But that advisor is Sienna and the nearest thing to a conscience a man like me is permitted to keep—and Brooklyn’s mother.
I haven’t made a real decision in fourteen years without running it past her first. And tonight, for the first time since the underboss put on the shoes of the Don, I can’t, because the decision is her daughter, and a consigliere with this much skin in the game is just a heartbroken mother with advice no one can afford to trust. So I’m doing the most dangerous thing I know how to do.
I’m deciding without my conscience in the room.
I find my anchors in the back sitting room, the only two people on earth I don’t have to be the boss in front of, because they’re bosses the same as me.
K is exactly where I knew he’d be. His towering height still and as cold as his eyes with a map of Washington already open on the table in front of him. A man who loves me by solving the problem I’m too angry to see clearly. Krishna Nikolayev, the Russian Pakhan, my husband.
“Three approaches to the estate,” he says, by way of hello. “All of them bad. He built that house to bleed an army. We don’t move on the house. We move on the man.” No heat, all deadly aim, the thing I married him for, on the nights the heat in me runs too loud to think through.
It’s our wife I’m watching, though. Ciera, pregnant with our third set of twins, is folded into the corner of the couch with her knees pulled up, gone somewhere far off, somewhere neither of us can follow.
It’s K who reaches her first, crossing to lower himself beside her, one big hand settling light on her thigh to calm her.
“Kitten.” He says it low, in the voice he uses for exactly one person. “Come back to us.”
She blinks, her pretty green eyes finding me. And I cross the distance to them and take her face in my hands, my thumbs at the hinge of her jaw. “I’m here, pet,” I tell her. “I’ve got you. Tell me where you went.”
“A Kovaci has her,” she says at last, and her voice is very quiet and very steady, which is exactly how I know what it’s costing.
“In a house like the one I grew up in. With that name attached to her.” She looks at me, and there is an old, bottomless thing that slices through my chest. “I know what that family does to a girl behind a locked door, Dom. I lived it.” Her hand finds mine and grips, hard enough to hurt.
“So hear me. I don’t care about a war or debts owed.
I care that if there is the smallest chance that Brooklyn is living one hour of what I lived, you do not let strategy keep you from that door.
” A breath leaves her lips. “And if he has already touched her the way Admir touched me—you bring me the gun.”
“And if he hasn’t?” I ask. “If he’s nothing like his brother?”
Something crosses her face, the thing I’ve been chasing all night, the part of the picture that won’t match the name. “Then he’d be the first Kovaci in a hundred years who wasn’t,” Ciera says slowly. “And I’d want to know how a man comes out of that clean.” Her eyes hold mine. “Wouldn’t you?”
My family is in pieces on three floors, of three different brownstones, all connected, and every one of them is looking to me to fix it, and I am going to. But not tonight, and not with bullets, because of a thing none of them know about.
Because of the video.
It’s in my office, in a drawer I keep locked, on a flash drive my father’s lawyer handed me eleven days after we buried him, with a note in Tony Caputo’s own hand.
Watch when you’re ready to be the man I made you.
I’ve never been ready. I’ve watched the first four minutes exactly once, fourteen years ago, and I have not been able to make myself finish it since.
I take it out now. I turn it over in my fingers in the dim light of my office while my family grieves around me. I do not put it in the machine, because I already know the shape of what’s on it, and the shape of it makes me sick.
My father did not stop running this family when he died.
He couldn’t. It wasn’t in him. He arranged my marriage and called it strategy.
He arranged Lorenzo’s and Si’s. He inherited Ciera when he eliminated the Salvatores.
He set in motion an alliance and never once asked any of his three kids if we wanted it.
Instead, he moved us across a board and won every game, and so help me, I do not hate him for it.
But I also spent my reign swearing on his grave that the next generation would choose.
That I am not him. That I will not orchestrate who my children love.
That we do not need to add any more cultures to our family than what we have now.
And that flash drive, with my father’s voice on it, is the rest of his plan. I know it is. The Russians, then the Irish—and then, to finish it, the last family standing outside the fold. The Albanians.
They had a son the right age in mind for it, didn’t they, Dad? And I have a niece.
And for eighteen months I have watched a masked Albanian krye circle my brightest girl in the dark, and I have not put a bullet in him, and I have told myself it was strategy.
That I was letting the board develop, and tonight, with her married and stolen and three hundred miles away, I have to sit in the dark and ask myself the question I’ve been refusing for more than a year and a half.
Did I let it happen because I’m patient?
Or because some part of me has always known whose name is on this drive, and has been waiting, like the coward son of a brilliant monster, for my dead father to make the choice I swore I’d never make for her?
I put the drive back in the drawer. I lock it. I am not ready. I may never be ready.
But I’m not going to bury that man on instinct, either. That’s the other thing tonight has shown me, the thing snagging at the cold machine of my mind like a thread on a nail.
He isn’t his brother.
I’ve seen Admir Kovaci work. I’ve seen what that family is, what it does to the girls who pass through its houses.
Ciera lives with the proof every day of her life, and there are nights I hold her while she shakes from it.
If Lorik were cut from that cloth, my niece would already be one of the not-seen.
He’d have used her, broken her, traded her up the chain and mailed me the pieces.
My eyes in his city have been bringing me pictures for eighteen months that do not match the name, and I have been too busy hating the name to really look at them.
A krye who launders the sins of senators by day, who has every politician in that swamp by the throat and uses it for—what?
Money he doesn’t need? Power he already has?
There’s a hole in the story of Lorik Kovaci the size of the thing he’s hiding, and tonight, for the first time, I want to know what fills it more than I want to watch him die.
I pour two fingers of my father’s favorite bourbon, and I don’t drink it, and I make the only decision I’m willing to make before dawn.
I grab my phone and press his contact. Giovanni answers on the first ring, the way he has since he took over the capo position in Boston fourteen years ago.
“Pull every eye we have off everything else,” I tell him.
“I want the Kovaci boy’s whole life turned inside out.
Not the lawyer. Not the krye. The man. What he does when no one’s watching.
Where his money really goes. Who he kills, and who he doesn’t, and why.
” I look out at a city I own and a family I’d raze it for.
“Before I bury him for taking her, I want to know exactly what he’s doing in that city.
Because either I’m about to murder the worst kind of man my wife ever survived—”
I think of the foods he special-orders for a woman he shouldn’t know has food allergies, the missing contents of everything in Brooklyn’s bathroom, and a dead father’s drive locked in my desk.
“Or I’m about to murder the only Kovaci who was ever worth a damn. That is not a mistake I’m willing to chance. It is not going to cost us her.”