Blood and Ballots

Luca Castellano had rehearsed the funeral in his head for years, which was the kind of thing you did when your father was Vincent Castellano. He had imagined the church, the flowers, the long line of men in dark suits who would not quite meet his eye. He had imagined his mother, Rosa, dry-eyed at the front, because Rosa Castellano did not cry in public. He had imagined himself standing to speak, and saying something true and something kind, and not saying the rest. What he had not imagined was a wedding. "Luca, smile," Nina said, adjusting his tie with the brisk competence of a sister who had been fixing him since childhood. "It's a wedding. People will talk if the groom's cousin looks like he's at a funeral." "I am at a funeral," Luca said. "It's just a very well-dressed one." The ballroom at the Harrow Grand glittered. A string quartet played something expensive and forgettable. Waiters moved with trays of champagne that no one in his family was really drinking, because his family watched each other drink. At the far table, his cousin Dante was laughing too loudly at something the mayor's aide had said. And Luca felt the familiar, tired pull in his chest: keep Dante happy, keep Dante watched, keep Dante from doing something that would end up in a newspaper. His father was supposed to be at the head table, holding court. Vincent Castellano, sixty-eight, silver-haired, immaculate, a man who could make a room go quiet just by putting down his glass. Vincent was not there. "Where is he?" Luca asked Rosa, quietly, when she came to stand beside him. Rosa did not look at him. She looked at the dance floor, where the bride was spinning in a dress that probably cost more than most people in Harrow City earned in a year. "Your father had business," she said. "Mother." "Business," she repeated, and her voice was the one she used when a subject was closed. "Enjoy the wedding, Luca. For once, try." Luca tried. He danced with Nina. He congratulated the groom, a nervous young lawyer from a good family who had clearly not been told, in so many words, who he was marrying into. He shook hands. He smiled for photographs. He kept his phone in his pocket, face down, because if he looked at it he would see the messages he was already expecting and did not want. At nine forty-three, his phone buzzed anyway. It was Marcus Hale, his best friend since law school, and the only person in Harrow City who called Luca at a wedding without apologising first. "Don't react," Marcus said, when Luca answered in the corridor outside the ballroom, where the music was muffled and the air smelled of lilies. "I'm serious. Don't react, don't leave in a hurry, don't look at the door." "Marcus—" "Your father has been arrested." Luca's hand tightened on the phone. The corridor tilted, just slightly, and then righted itself. "When?" "Twenty minutes ago. At the house. Okafor led it himself. Fraud, conspiracy, a list as long as my arm. It's not a warning, Luca. It's the real thing." Luca closed his eyes. He could hear the quartet starting a new piece. He could hear his cousin laughing. "Is he— is he all right?" "He's Vincent," Marcus said. "He asked for his lawyer, then asked for you, then told the officers they had lovely manners. He's being held overnight." Luca laughed, once, because there was nothing else to do with that information. "Of course he did." "Luca, listen. This is the moment. The family is going to look to you tonight, whether you want them to or not. Dante is already telling people he's in charge until Vincent gets out." "And you think I'm—" "I think you're the only Castellano who ever wanted something else," Marcus said. "And if you don't decide what that something else is, Dante will decide for you." Luca stood in the corridor for a long time after Marcus hung up. He thought about the fortune that had paid for this ballroom, for Nina's architecture degree, for his own education, for the house on the hill with the view of the port. He thought about where that fortune had come from, which was the thought he had spent most of his adult life trying not to finish. He had always known, in the way children know things adults do not say. The construction firms that never lost a bid. The waste trucks that ran at night. The men who came to the house and left envelopes and did not stay for dinner. The money was old, and it was everywhere, and it was, in the plainest word he could find for it, dirty. And now it was his problem, in public. When he went back into the ballroom, Rosa was watching him. She always knew. She crossed the floor to him, took his arm, and said, very low, "Your father is in custody." "I know." "You are the head of this family now, Luca. Until he comes home. Do you understand what I'm asking?" He understood. She was asking him to hold it together. To keep the peace. To be a Castellano. "Yes," he said, because that was what you said to your mother at a wedding. It was then that he saw her. She was standing near the press table — because of course there was a press table, this was a Castellano wedding and half of Harrow City wanted a photograph — with a notebook in her hand and a look on her face that Luca recognised instantly. It was the look of a person who had just found the thread and was about to pull it. She was about thirty, dark hair pulled back, a dress that was clearly not bought for a society wedding but worn as if she did not care. She was not looking at the bride. She was looking at Dante, and then at Rosa, and then at Luca, and she was writing. Luca walked over before he could talk himself out of it. "You're press," he said. "Observant," she said, without looking up. "Sofia Bennett. Harrow City Herald. I'm covering the wedding. And, if I'm honest, I'm covering the family." "Most people just say congratulations and move on." "Most people aren't me." She looked up then, and Luca felt something shift, inconveniently and completely. Her eyes were dark, direct, and unimpressed, which was not an expression he was used to. People were usually impressed, or afraid, or both. "You're Luca Castellano." "I am." "The lawyer son. The one who left." "I didn't leave," Luca said. "I went to school. There's a difference." "Is there?" She smiled, and it was not a kind smile, but it was an honest one. "Your father was arrested twenty minutes ago. Are you going to comment?" Luca stared at her. "How did you—" "I have sources," she said. "Do you have a comment, Mr Castellano?" He should have walked away. He should have said no comment, found Dante, found his mother, done the family thing. Instead he heard himself say, "My comment is that my father is innocent until proven otherwise, and that this is a wedding, and the bride deserves one happy night." "That's a good line," Sofia said, writing it down. "Is it true?" "I don't know," Luca said, and the honesty surprised them both. "That's the problem, isn't it?" For a second, neither of them said anything. The music swelled. Someone laughed. Dante looked over and frowned. Sofia closed her notebook. "Thank you, Mr Castellano. I'll be in touch." "I'm sure you will," Luca said. She walked away, and Luca watched her go, and thought, with a clarity that frightened him: this woman is going to ruin us, or save us. And I am not going to be able to tell which until it's too late. Later, much later, when the wedding was over and the ballroom was empty and Rosa had gone home to a house without Vincent in it, Luca stood alone on the terrace overlooking Harrow City. The port lights blinked across the water. Cranes stood like patient giants. Trucks moved along the waterfront road, small and purposeful. Somewhere down there was everything his family owned, and everything his family had taken, and everything he would have to decide what to do with. He took out his phone and typed a message to Marcus, then deleted it, then typed it again. *We can't keep doing this. There has to be another way.* Marcus replied in under a minute: *Then find it. Before Dante does.* Luca put the phone away, looked out at the city that had made his family rich. And that his family had, in its own way, been quietly robbing for years, and made a decision he did not yet know how to keep. He would clean it. All of it. The money, the companies, the name. He would take the Castellanos out of the shadows and into the light — even if the light was politics, even if politics was just another kind of fight, even if it cost him everything his father had built. And he would do it, he realised, with a reporter watching his every move, a cousin waiting for him to fail, and a city that had every reason not to believe him. It was, he thought, a terrible plan. It was also the only one he had.