21. Lorik
LORIK
My mother arrives at my gate the way weather arrives—without invitation, without warning, and with the absolute certainty that the house will simply have to accommodate her.
Besnik’s call reaches me in my office downtown and I’m in the car before he finishes the sentence, because there is exactly one person on this earth I will not allow to breathe the same air as my wife unsupervised, and her name is Klaudia Kovaci.
There are men I’ve killed I felt more warmth toward than I feel for the woman who carried me.
That isn’t bitterness; it’s fact. A mother is meant to be the one person on your side by default.
Mine spent the first seven years of my life proving there’s no such thing as a side that comes free, and then she put me on a plane to another continent to be certain the lesson took.
I make it home in forty minutes that should have taken seventy. She’s already inside. Of course she is. My men know better than to bar the door against the mother of the krye, and she knows it, and she has spent my entire life weaponizing exactly that kind of gap.
I find her in my front room like a stain.
Klaudia at sixty is still beautiful the way a blade is beautiful.
Silver-blonde hair, immaculate, draped in black that costs more than Drini makes in a year.
And flanking her, one at each shoulder, stand the twins, Argon and Genti.
They’re enormous, identical, silent, matched like a pair of dogs, and both of them her lovers.
A fact she has never bothered to hide because hiding things implies she answers to someone.
They watch me come in with four flat eyes and don’t move, and I clock the bulges under their jackets and file the geometry of the room out of pure habit.
“Finally.” My mother does not rise. She has never risen for me in her life. “The great krye. You’ve grown harder to find than your father ever was, Lorik. One would almost think you were avoiding your own mother.”
“One would be right.” I don’t sit. I stay between her and the stairs.
Between her and the second floor, where Brooklyn is, where she is going to stay until this is over and my mother is gone.
“You’re not welcome here, Klaudia. You knew that before you came.
Say what you drove all this way to say, and then get out of my house. ”
She smiles. It’s the smile I have hated longest of any expression on any face.
“Such a greeting. After everything I sacrificed for you.” She lets that sit, the old hook, the one she’s been casting at me since I was seven years old and she put me on a plane to a country I’d never seen because her firstborn was a son and I was only ever a spare.
“I gave you to my parents so you would be made into something useful. So you would learn to kneel to your brother and serve this family the way a second son is born to serve. And instead you came back a lawyer.” She says the word like a slur.
I came back at sixteen. I wasn’t a lawyer yet.
That came later. “And then your brother had the poor manners to get himself killed, and the useless spare became the krye, and I have spent thirteen years watching you squander what should have been Admir’s. ”
“Admir squandered Admir,” I say. “He reached for a bride that wasn’t his and the Italians took his hand off at the shoulder. That isn’t a tragedy, Mother. That’s simple math.”
What she has never understood, what she’s too in love with her own cruelty to see, is that Albania didn’t forge the obedient tool she shipped me off to become.
It forged the one thing she can’t keep a leash on.
I learned in that country that the only person worth trusting is the one who bleeds beside you in an alley, and his name is Casimir, and he is the second-in-command she has spent thirteen years trying to replace with my dead father’s brother.
Because a blood relative is a knife she knows how to grip.
She has never forgiven me for choosing my own right hand. It is the closest thing to respect she has ever paid me.
Her eyes flash, and for a moment the grief is real. She did love him, in the cold transactional way she loves anything that flatters her, and then it’s gone, smoothed back under the marble.
“Yes. Let’s talk about the New York family.
Let’s talk about what you’ve done about them.
” She leans forward. “A son of mine is in the ground because the Caputos and their pets put him there. The Kanun is not complicated, Lorik. It has not changed in five hundred years. A life is owed for a life. Gjakmarrja. I have waited thirteen years for the krye of this family to collect the blood your brother is owed.” Her voice drops, and the venom in it is almost loving.
“And what did you do, when you finally moved? You took their girl. Their precious princess. And instead of opening her throat and mailing it to Domenico Caputo in a box, you—” Her lip curls. “Married her.”
“I did.”
“You married my revenge.” She stands now, finally, and the twins shift with her.
“Blood is owed, and you put a ring on it. You took the one thing I have wanted for thirteen years and you turned it into a wife. Do you have any idea how that looks? To the family? To the men who follow you? The krye of the Kovaci had a Caputo at the point of a gun and he kept her warm instead of cold.”
She isn’t wrong, and that is the danger in her. There are men in this family, my father’s brother first among them, who have wanted my chair since a sixteen-year-old sat down in it, and a krye who goes soft over a hostage is exactly the fault line they’ve been waiting to feel open.
My mother didn’t drive here to mourn Admir. She drove here to learn whether the rumor is true, so she can carry it home to the men who would use it. Which is why I cannot give her the truth. So I give her the version that keeps me in this chair instead.
“It looks,” I say, very calmly, “like strategy. A dead Caputo is a war on three fronts the day after Domenico finds the body. A married one is a leash. While she’s mine, the New York family can’t move on us without moving on their own blood.
I didn’t waste your revenge, Mother. I turned a corpse into a hostage with a marriage license.
That’s the difference between you and me.
You count in bodies. I count in leverage. ”
It’s a good lie. It’s even half true. And she almost buys it.
I watch her weigh it, this woman who taught me to lie before she taught me to read, and then her gaze slides past me, up the stairs, to the closed door at the top, and something in her face sharpens to a point, and I know she’s seen the thing I cannot let her see.
That I went up there twenty minutes ago and my voice changed.
“No,” she says softly, wonderingly, almost delighted. “No, that’s not it at all. Look at you. Standing on your own stairs like a guard dog.” She tilts her head. “You like her.”
“Get out.”
“You do like her.” She laughs, and it is the worst sound in the house.
“My God. The spare fell in love with his hostage. After everything, after Albania, after thirteen years of teaching you that wanting things is how the weak get gutted, you went and lost your spine to an Italian in a wedding dress.”
She steps toward the stairs and I step into her path. The twins go still and ready, and for one heartbeat my own front room is a half-second from a bloodbath.
“She bruises beautifully, I’d wager.” My mother says it to the air, watching my face the way a cat watches a thing it has already decided to break.
“Italian girls always do. So young. So far from home. Alone in a great house, with a husband who can’t seem to stop watching his own stairs.
” She tilts her head. “How careless of you, Lorik.”
“Do not,” I say, and I let her hear, for the first time in her life, exactly what I am underneath the suit, “mistake which of us would walk out of this room.”
She stops. She is many vile things, my mother, but she is not stupid. She looks at me, really looks, and whatever she finds there, she believes it, because she takes one step back.
“You’re banned from this property,” I tell her, and my voice is winter.
“The gate, the grounds, the house. If you come here again, if you so much as send those two trained animals to my fence line, I will forget the single accident of biology that’s kept you breathing this long.
You will not come near my wife. You will not say her name.
You never found one son’s ambition to even bury.
You will not get your hands on the thing that finally made the other one human. We’re done.”
For a long moment Klaudia Kovaci simply studies me, and the hatred between us is the oldest and cleanest thing either of us owns, and then she gathers her coat, and her dogs, and her cruelty, and she walks toward the door.
She stops at the threshold. She doesn’t turn around.
“You misunderstand the Kanun, my son,” she says, almost gently.
“It isn’t a debt you get to renegotiate.
It isn’t a thing you can marry your way out of.
Blood is owed, and blood will be paid, with your permission or without it.
” Now she looks back, over her shoulder, and she smiles at me one last time, and the certainty in it freezes the room.
“You married my revenge instead of finishing it. So I’ll finish it myself.
And you, Lorik, you’ve just told me exactly where to aim. ”
Then she’s gone, the twins folding out the door behind her like shadows, and I stand alone in my front room and understand, with the cold clarity I usually save for courtrooms, that I have made the second great mistake of this marriage.
The first was letting Vance see how much she means to me.
The second was letting my mother see it too.
I take the stairs three at a time. Brooklyn is exactly where I left her, sitting cross-legged on our bed with a book she isn’t reading, and she looks up at me with those ocean eyes, and whatever’s on my face makes her set it down.
“Who was that?” she says.
“No one you’ll ever meet,” I tell her, and I mean it as a vow.