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Tell your whore…

At the end, with a gun in his hand and murder in him, the last thing on Luca Santini’s mind was Stevie. Which means the picture in his head of how he hurts me runs straight through her and the boy.

And for the first time, I feel something I haven’t let myself feel in years. Not for me. I’ve never once been afraid for me.

I’m afraid he’ll get to them first.

He thinks I’m vulnerable now. Bleeding, isolated, the elders sitting on their hands, my consigliere shot. He thinks he’s found the weakness, the opening, the vulnerable spot.

He’s wrong. He has never been more wrong about anything. A cornered man with something to protect isn’t weak. He’s the most dangerous thing there is, and Luca has spent his one chance on a message, showing me that the gloves are off. That was the one mistake he can’t take back.

But wrong or not, the fear is real, and it rides with me the whole way.

“Take me to the house,” Carmine says, reading me the way he always does, even now, even gray and bleeding. “Take me nowhere but home. I’ll have Marta wrap it. No hospitals. You know the rules. Hospitals mean questions, cops, a record. I’ve dug worse out myself in the kitchen.”

“You’re going to the ER.”

“Enzo…”

“This isn’t a discussion.” I turn toward the hospital, not the house, and I can feel him glaring. “You’ve been bleeding for ten minutes from your torso, and it hasn’t stopped. This isn’t a kitchen table wound, and you know it. If something happens to you, Marta would never forgive me. And I’d never forgive myself.”

He says nothing. Maybe he still thinks I’m wrong but doesn’t have the strength to argue.

“You took a bullet for me, again, so you don’t get a vote in this. I’m going to keep you alive. Got it?”

He’s quiet a moment. The city slides by, red and gold, the same city that’s about to catch fire.

“The boy’s going to worry,” he says finally, quieter. Not arguing anymore. “Matthew. When he sees me hurt. Tell him… tell him you should see the other fellow.” A rough breath. “He’ll like that.”

“You’ll tell him yourself,” I say, “after they patch you up. That’s an order.”

I drive my oldest friend to the hospital through the first night of the war, one-handed, bleeding, terrified for the two people at home.

It ends now. It ends with Luca. And God help anyone standing between me and my family.

CHAPTER 33

STEVIE

Iget Matthew down at eight, and then I do something I’ve been building up to for days. I ask Lena, one of the maids, to sit outside of Matthew’s door for a bit while he drifts off to sleep.

“Going out?” she asks, pulling up a chair next to his door.

I shake my head. “Nope. Going up.”

I take one breath to steel myself and start climbing the stairs to the fourth floor, to the room where Michael Accardi sits in the dark, pondering everything he’s done.

I knock once and walk in without waiting, because if I wait, I’ll lose my nerve.

The space is enormous and dim, smelling of old paper and the sort of staleness you only get with sealed windows. And it’s hot. So hot. God, why the hell is it so hot up here?

Michael is seated in a wingback chair by a fireplace with no fire, a book opened on his knee. As I approach, he looks up at me with those flat black eyes that are so like Matthew’s and Enzo’s. He doesn’t look surprised to see me.

“The mother,” he says. “Come up all this way. Marta know you’re here?”

“No.”

“Brave, then. Or stupid.” He closes the book. “Which is it?”