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I keep the window cracked. Cold air cuts across my face. The engine answers every demand I make of it. The city at this hour does not pretend to be anything else.

“You are going to engineer a meeting with Tito Lucci,” I say. “Tonight. Dino’s Studio. Late bar. Gambling in the back. He often uses it when he does not want the hotel and he does not want his own table. Senior men. Quiet money. The kind of place where a pretty boy who looks a little lost can become interesting if he does not try too hard.”

Elias turns his head. I feel him looking at my profile while I watch the road and the mirrors and the mouths of alleys.

“How do I engineer it?” he asks. “I mean, I’ll figure it out. But any ideas, I’m listening.”

“You walk in like a boy who likes the sound of chips and whiskey that is cheaper than it should be,” I say. “You sit where he can see you. You do not approach him first. You let him notice you. You give him one reason to ask who you are and none to ask what you want.”

He is quiet for a block.

Snow ticks against the windscreen and melts on the warm glass.

“Should I do anything he wants?” Elias asks, a hint of preemptive guilt in his voice.

The question hits my cock first. I harden against the seam of my trousers so fast I almost laugh. The picture is immediate and filthy. Tito’s hands on what I have already marked. His mouth. His voice telling him to kneel, to open, to stay. Elias playing willing so he can walk his halls later and bring me what I need.

The feeling rises with it.

Not only heat. The same stupid, furious spike I felt when I told him in the café that he might have to offer his body.

Elias is mine. Even the thought of lending him for business makes my jaw set until the muscle aches. I keep both hands on the wheel.

“You do whatever it takes,” I say. “No matter what.”

The words come out clean. The rest does not stay clean. I want to pull over in the snow, put the boy on the hood of this car, and remind him who he belongs to before I send him through that door.

I want to hear him say Daddy while the city is still dark and Tito Lucci does not yet know his name.

But I do not.

The mission is the mission.

“The goal is not to kill him,” I continue. “It is not to catch him in a plot against me. Not tonight. All you need to do is establish yourself as a person of interest. A boy he might want to see again. A boy he might ask for by name if he comes back to that room. That is the whole job. Nothing more. Do you understand me?”

Elias nods once. “I can do that. No problem.”

Confidence. I have seen what too much of it does in rooms with men like Tito. I have also seen what the boy did with a coin-sized device under a reception lip and walked out smiling like the hotel had been a chore.

“Do not get clever,” I say. “Do not get greedy. You are not there to steal or listen at doors or plant anything else. You are there to be seen, to lure them into our trap. That is all.”

“I understand,” Elias replies, his eyes focused and my mind spinning with images of him and Tito Lucci or his generals that I can barely bring myself to imagine.

We drive.

The city slides past in sodium and shadow. I think of my father again and push the thought down until it is only rust at the back of my throat.

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

A man who feels too much dies like he died, with other men’s stories nailed to his name and no last words worth remembering.

I will not be that man. Dino’s Studio sits on a quiet stretch that works hard at looking like nothing at all. A nondescript townhouse. Four stories of dirty brick and black iron railings gone dull with weather and neglect.

No sign that matters.

It’s the kind of place you would walk past a hundred times and never look twice unless you already knew what lived behind the heavy curtains. On the left, a laundromat. Fluorescent tubes still burning behind steamy glass even at this hour, as if dirty clothes do not keep ordinary hours. A row of machines that have seen better decades. A handwritten notice taped crooked to the door. Apartments stacked above it, curtains drawn, one window holding a sickly yellow lamp that has been on too long and will still be on at dawn.

On the right, a hipster coffee spot. Closed at night. A chalkboard on the pavement already dusted with snow, the joke of the day half erased by weather. Reclaimed wood visible through dark glass. More apartments above, plants in the windows like the people who live there believe the street is charming and safe and has never swallowed anyone.