Chapter 5

I looked at the men in black, then back at him. "Why didn't you tell me?"

His mouth stayed flat. The rest of his face was enjoying itself.

"You were entertaining," he said.

I wanted to hit him. He turned to the men. "Drive us to her apartment. Then stay out of sight until I call."

We stopped a street over from my building. Knox came up with me. His men waited at the corner.

"Ten minutes," I said at the door. "There isn't much."

Knox stayed in the hall.

My door stood off the latch, a dark seam between the edge and the frame.

I'd closed it this morning. I always pull the handle up on my way out, to make the catch take.

I caught his arm before I thought. "Wait here."

He looked down at where I was holding him. I kept going. "If I tell you to run, you go. You don't stop and you don't ask me why."

Silence. I took it for a yes because I needed one.

I pushed the door open.

The apartment was wrecked, the drawers dumped out, the mattress hauled off the bed. Everything I owned was on the floor, and it didn't cover much of it. Four shirts, two pairs of scrubs, a winter coat I'd worn for six years.

Carlo stood in the middle of my living room with Bruno behind him. My father didn't fit in a room that was mine.

The fear arrived a beat behind, and it was smaller than I expected.

"Serena." He said it like the word was already his.

"We are leaving."

"No."

"You will come with me. You'll give me this man you married, and you'll go to Bellini and ask him to forgive you. You have not seen what a proud man does to the family that shames him."

The paper was folded in my coat pocket, still warm from my body. I dug it out and held it up where he could see it.

"I'm legally married," I said. "To a Valenti. If you take me by force, you're not punishing an insolent daughter. You're declaring war on a family. Even you won't do that in front of a don you've already shamed."

Carlo looked at the paper the way a man looks at a fly that has landed on his hand.

"A Valenti," he said. "You married a Valenti. And you think that protects you."

"It's the rule. You taught it to me at your own table."

"There are more than a thousand Valenti in this city. The man who runs them wouldn't waste a breath on the wife of a soldier. You've married a nobody."

"Bruno."

Bruno reached for the door to the hall. I moved before the fear caught up with me and put myself in front of it, shoulders flat to the wood.

"Run," I shouted. "Knox. Run."

"Out of my way," Carlo said.

"You're not going to touch me."

"Serena."

"You are not taking me to Bellini. Not today, and not out of my own home."

His hand came up. I'd watched that hand come up all my life, and I'd always been on the other side of the room when it landed.

There was nowhere to go now.

The door came in behind me and took me off it. I got a palm on the wall and stayed up.

Knox went past me. I never saw him decide.

He put his foot into my father's chest. My father went off his feet and down, and the sound of him landing came up through the boards under my shoes.

I looked at the space he'd crossed and couldn't work out how a man with one bad shoulder had covered it that fast.

Bruno reached inside his jacket. Knox didn't break stride. He stepped over Carlo and put himself in front of me, back turned, in no hurry at all.

"You were going to hit her," Knox said. "My wife. Your daughter."

Carlo got up. He had blood at his lip.

He was an old man now. He was loading the words. He'd talked his way off worse floors than mine.

"You don't touch her," Carlo said. "You don't know who you're talking to."

Knox said nothing. My father took the quiet for room and used it.

"Men who cross the Bellini don't get buried. They get made an example of. Do you know what you've married into, soldier?"

Nothing came back at him. Not a word, not a shift of weight.

"Bruno."

Bruno went for the gun. I felt the cold in my stomach and the heat in my face at the same time.

There was a gun coming out behind him, and he did not turn around.

I was watching my father when it reached him.

He had been looking at Knox the whole time. Now he was looking at him differently, the eyes going over the face a piece at a time, checking it against something he had been shown a long time ago and told to keep.

I have watched a lot of people take news they could not carry. It arrives in the body first.

The color went out under his jaw. His hand came up, and it was not the hand that had come up at me a minute ago. This one was open.

"Bruno." It came out with nothing behind it. "Bruno, put it away."

Bruno kept drawing. He had stood with this man's gun against his forehead that morning and walked out of my hallway alive.

He had spent the hours since believing that meant something about him.

"Put it away." My father's voice had gone somewhere I had never heard it go. "Now."

Bruno stopped. He looked at Carlo and not at Knox, and that was how I knew he still did not understand.

The gun went back inside the jacket. He stood square, arms out from his sides where they could be seen.

My father had not moved. Then he bent at the waist.

He went lower than he had to, and he stopped there. His eyes were on my floor and they stayed on it. I had watched men hold that position at his own table, waiting to be told they could stand, and he had never once been in a hurry to tell them.

I heard him swallow. His voice came out thin. He used it anyway.

"Don Valenti."

My knees quit under me. I went down, and his arm came under me, quick and sure.

It was the arm I had sewn last night. It held me up like I weighed nothing.

He hadn't taken his eyes off my father.

"He's yours," he said. "Tell me what you want done with him."