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Chapter 88: The Don’s Reckoning
publish date:
2026-09-27 08:07:43
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THE SONGBIRDS CAGE Chapter 88: The Don’s Reckoning
Wren’sWe'd lost the plan, so we needed a new one, and the only place left to find it was the study of the man who killed my father.Nobody liked the idea. Kiryan called it madness. Elena said it was the first smart thing anyone had suggested since Tuesday, which was worse. Dario said nothing for a long time, then, in a voice like a door closing gently, "I'll drive you." I didn't argue.It was a quarter to six on Thursday when we turned onto Via Corvo. The Marchetti townhouse stood at the end of it behind a wall of dark, clipped yew, a lamp already lit in the third-floor window. I'd first seen it from a taxi eight months earlier and thought, quite calmly, so that's where it happens.Dario stopped the car at the gate and left the engine running. His hands sat on the wheel at ten and two. I could see the pulse in his wrist."I can't go in," he said. "I've pictured him in my head for ten hours straight, and I know what I'd do.""I know.""Ask him why." He turned then, his face in the str
THE SONGBIRDS CAGE Chapter 87: Trust, Tested
KiryanWhen a man has been lied to his whole life, one more lie shouldn't weigh anything. That was the theory. I sat at the kitchen table until the lamp burned pale against the coming morning, her eleven years of paper spread out in front of me, and found out the theory was rubbish.She hadn't moved from her chair. She sat with her hands folded, her back straight, watching me read, never once asking what I thought. She was waiting for a verdict, and I wasn't fit to give one yet.The papers were meticulous. Bank records, cross-checked. A hand-drawn map of the coast road with the truck marked in pencil, and beside it, in her small upright writing: He would have seen the headlights at forty metres. Why didn't he swerve? A page of notes on her father's habits. He liked cold coffee. He hummed when he was scared. A life recorded by a daughter who'd learned to love him through evidence.And on the last page, under a heading in block capitals, was my own name.KIRYAN. Bratva. Docks. To be app
THE SONGBIRDS CAGE Chapter 86: What I haven’t told you
DarioMy father's handwriting has followed me my whole life. On birthday cards, on school reports he signed without reading, on the back of a photo of me at nine years old holding a fish nearly as long as my arm. Bravo, figlio. I'd have known that hand in the dark, and I knew it now on a sheet of heavy cream paper, in a boxroom that smelled of my grandmother's liniment."Tell me what that is," I said again, because she hadn't answered.She didn't try to hide it. That's the part I keep coming back to. She didn't fold the paper or say it's nothing. She sat very straight on the edge of the narrow bed with her bad leg out in front of her, a flat, bare calm on her face I'd never seen before like she'd waited eleven years for this door to open and spent all her fear on the waiting."It's the reason I came," she said. "Would you sit down? Please. This will take a while, and I'd rather say it to your face than your back."I didn't sit. I stood on the cold boards in my socks, the blanket falle
THE SONGBIRDS CAGE Chapter 85: Before The Storm
Wren’sWe planned for two days, and by the second night I'd stopped being able to hear the plan.It had turned into a kind of weather. Words drifted past me across the kitchen table sight lines, rotation, fallback, that grim phrase acceptable losses Kiryan used the way other men say lunch. Elena had drawn the whole of Belmare on the back of a wallpaper sample and pinned it over the wood stove with a fork. Dario had marked the boathouse in red. Someone had drawn a small sad face on the stone wall of the terrace, and nobody would admit to it."Again," said Kiryan."From the top?" Dario rubbed his eyes. "We've done it nine times.""We'll do it ten. It's the tenth time a man remembers."So we did it ten. At six, the Don receives. At eight, dinner. At ten-thirty, guests gather for the toast, and a footman in white gloves would lead me to my seat at the Don's right hand, and I'd sit, and smile, and be the woman everyone had been told I was. Elena would be inside in a caterer's black, radio
THE SONGBIRDS CAGE Chapter 84: The Real Target
KiryanI have never been good at sleeping. In my line of work it's a habit that kills men, and I lost the knack of it at nineteen, in a flat in Vyborg, with my brother's blood drying on the floorboards beside me. Since then I rest the way a cat rests in pieces, one ear always turned toward the door.So it was me who heard the stairs.A little after three. The farmhouse creaked in the cold like an old ship, but this was different uneven, a step, a pause, a step. I sat in the armchair by the stove with the lamp off and my pistol on my knee, and didn't move until the shape reached the bottom stair and I saw the cane."It's only me," she whispered."I know. I could hear you thinking on the landing."She let out a small breath through her nose, almost a laugh. She had a blanket around her shoulders and her hair down, and in the red light from the stove she looked younger than she was and more tired than anyone should be. The leg was bad tonight I could tell by the tightness at the corners
THE SONGBIRDS CAGE Chapter 83: The Third Hand
Wren’sThe farmhouse north of the city belonged to nobody. Dario told me that twice on the drive up, like repeating it might make it true. No name on the deed, no phone line, no neighbours nearer than a mile. A kitchen with a wood stove and a long scarred table that had fed shearers a hundred years before we ever sat at it, eating our own bad news.I hadn't slept. Two nights of smoke still in my hair, even after scrubbing my scalp raw. The Palermo Street fire cost eleven men their jobs and one man his life a night watchman named Benedetto, sixty-one, who'd gone back inside for his dog. The dog lived. I couldn't tell you why that was the detail that kept me staring at the ceiling at four in the morning, but it was.Elena arrived at ten with a canvas bag over her shoulder and mud to her knees. She'd walked the last half mile from the road so the taxi wouldn't see the house, and when she stepped through the door she stopped, looking at the two men sitting at either end of my father's kit
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