Page 54

“The first snow of the year should be celebrated,” I say as I stand.

Elias kills his cup and stands with me. Outside, the cold is a slap. Snow in the lashes. Snow on Elias’s hair in seconds.

I take him toward the park without offering my arm. He keeps pace. Good. The city is muffled: tires, a distant horn.

The soft violence of weather is all around us. Winter is coming for the Lucci too. Routes clog. Tempers shorten. Men hide in hotels and think snow is cover. It is not… it far, far from cover as far as I am concerned.

We reach the park gates. White paths. Black trees. A bench that’s just right.

I glance at Elias… flushed, alive. He is already calculating something behind the obedience.

The snow thickens as I walk him into it. If he can hold his mind in a storm and still say Master without blinking, he can hold it in a boutique hotel with three senior men coming through a kitchen door. The jealousy sits under my ribs, and I push it down further.

A man who feels nothing for his tools breaks them wrong.

A man who feels too much will die like my father died, with other men’s stories nailed to his name.

I put my hands in my coat. “Keep walking,” I say.

The boy does as I say without pause. The first snow of the year comes down on both of us.

And the winter behind it has teeth…

The snow makes the park honest. Sound dies. Edges soften. The city becomes a rumor beyond the trees. I am still turning over hotels and kitchen doors when something cold and perfect smacks the shoulder of my coat.

“What the⁠—"

Elias.

The little troublemaker.

A perfect fucking snowball too…

And the boy is already packing another. His face is bright in a way the club never gets. I laugh before I can stop it.

“Now,” I say, “you will find out exactly who I am.”

I scoop. I throw. The boy ducks behind a bench like he has done this all his life. The shot explodes on wood.

His catches my chest.

We go back and forth.

No strategy worth the name. Only speed and spite and the stupid joy of a moving target.

I use a bush. He uses a lamppost.

A snowball bursts against my collar and slides down my neck.

I curse in the old language and Elias grins. Then the children arrive. One at first. Then five. Then the whole messy machine of a park in the first storm: childminders, parents, a boy with red mittens, a boy who cannot throw and does it anyway.

An elderly couple join as if they have been waiting decades for an excuse.

Before I know it, the thing has become a war. Sides that make no sense. Laughter fills the air. A snowball hits my thigh from a direction I did not cover. I am full of life in a way I have not been in years.

I catch Elias’s wrist and pull him out of the thick of it, under a tree that still holds a little dark. Snow drops from the branch in slow coins.

“Boy,” I say, cutting myself off.