The Mafia King's Caged Bird

4. The Assassin

Elio

The envelope was thick. Brandon set it on the desk in my private office, said nothing, and left — good boy — and I sat alone with it under the lamp and opened it.

I'd asked for everything. Who had been talking. Who had been listening. In a city that wasn't mine, with my father's long shadow reaching across an ocean, I wanted to know which of my own hands was writing letters home.

It took me less than ten minutes to find it, and longer than I'd like to admit to believe it.

The dates. The movements. My meetings, my routes, the docks, the names of men I'd turned and the prices I'd paid to turn them — all of it, written down in a careful, familiar hand and sent back across the water to Italy. To my father. For three months. Since the first week I arrived. Before I'd unpacked a single box, someone had already started reporting on me.

I knew the handwriting. Of course I knew the handwriting. He'd taught me which knife to use at dinner.

I sat there a long time. I didn't feel rage, exactly. Rage is loud, and I have never been able to afford loud.

Alone, I'd told myself, all this time. I built this alone. And the whole time, the man closest to me had been holding the door open for my father to watch me do it.

I put the files back in the envelope. I straightened my cuffs. Then I went out to host my party.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The club had filled while I was in the office.

The room was warm and loud and gold, full of the kind of people I needed in it: a councilman, two men who move freight, a woman who launders better than anyone on the East Coast and knows it. I moved among them and I was charming, because charm is just another tool and I am good with all my tools. I shook hands. I laughed at the right moments. I let the councilman think he was the most important man in the room.

The whole time, I was looking for Marco.

He wasn't on the floor. I checked the bar, the balcony, the booths. Then I went where the regular guests don't go — through the door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY, into the back hall where the lights run red and low and the doors line up along one side like teeth. Secret VIPS rooms. The rooms we prepared for the things people do in private.

Behind one of them, I heard a noise, and I recognized Marco’s voice.

I opened the door without knocking.

Marco was not alone. He was sitting on the velvet couch with his pants down to his ankles. There was a girl with him, half-dressed, bouncing up and down his c**k as she straddled him.

“Boss—" He scrambled up when he noticed me.

"Outside," I said. Just that. And I turned and walked, and I heard him fumbling after me.

The alley behind the Gilded Cage is a long dark throat between two buildings, lit by one bad bulb. I have chosen worse rooms for worse things. I stood under the light and waited until the door clicked shut behind him.

"Ten years," I said. "I'm going to ask you once. Have you been a rat this whole time?"

"Elio—" He laughed, the way men laugh when they've decided to try lying to me. "What is this? You pull me out of a room over—"

"Once."

His laugh died. He read my face — he'd taught me how to make that face — and he understood that the time for the easy version had already passed. His shoulders came down. When he spoke again it was quiet, almost relieved, the way the truth always comes out once a man finally stops carrying it.

"Your father," he said. "He pays me. He has since you got here. He just — he wanted to know you were safe, Elio, that you were managing, he's an old man and he worries—" The words came faster now, climbing. "It was nothing. Numbers. Schedules. Nothing that ever hurt you, I swear on my life, I would never give them anything that—"

"You gave them everything." My voice didn't rise. It never has to. "You gave them me. Every door I walked through, you held it open for him to watch."

"Elio, please—" He took a step. I watched his hands. "Please. We can fix this. Whatever you need, I'll cut him off tonight, I'll—we're family, I’m your mother’s first cousin, you were a boy when I—"

"Don’t bring my mother into this," I gritted my teeth. "And that’s the part that’s worse, Marco. I'd forgive a stranger. But you? I can't trust you anymore. And I can’t afford a single thing in this city that I can't trust."

I drew the gun.

He begged and begged and begged. I'll spare him the record of it; a man's last words should belong to him. I let him finish, because I am not an animal, and because some part of me wanted to remember the exact sound of the last lie he ever told me.

Then I raised the gun and ended it.

—BANG

The sound filled the alley and emptied it again. Marco dropped. The night went very quiet and I stood there in it and felt the last warm thing in my chest finish going cold.

That was when I heard the gasp.

I turned. The light caught her at the end of the alley — the girl. The singer. The blonde, pale one in the black dress. Her blue eyes blown wide and fixed on the body and then on me and then on the gun, her hand pressed to her mouth like she could put the scream back in before it got out.

She'd seen my face. She'd seen all of it.

And then she ran. Of course she ran — small and quick, already half-turned for the mouth of the alley — but I have done this a long time, and frightened things move the way I expect them to. I was on her before she'd taken her third step. One arm around her, her heart slamming against my forearm like a bird thrown against a window, a sound starting up in her throat that the city absolutely could not be allowed to hear.

"Sorry, little bird." I said, and I almost meant it.

Then I found the place at her neck, and pressed, and held her up as she went soft and silent against me, the girl had gone limp in my arms in the dark.

I looked down at her pale, sleeping face.

I should have left her where Marco was lying. That was the rule. A witness is a witness.

But I carried her to the car instead.

— End of Episode Four: To be continued. —