The Don's Sin

Ammonia and old blood. The fish-packing warehouse has been scrubbed a hundred times and the concrete still breathes its history. Luca checks the Beretta for the third time and counts the gaps between the buzzes of a dying fluorescent tube. His men drag in a Ferrara soldier, young, cuffed, his white shirt blooming crimson from a stomach wound. His own underboss wants the kill done as a message. Luca's father used this warehouse for negotiations before Luca was born, and the same steel table is still here. The soldier talks. He was called to a pickup by a man wearing a pinky ring with a big red stone. Luca has been looking for that ring since he was twelve years old, since the night his mother locked him in a closet and he watched through the crack in the door as a man wiped a revolver clean and curled his dead father's fingers around the grip. He holsters the Beretta and cuts the soldier loose with a message for the Ferrara Don: *Tell him I've buried enough men from both sides.* When he reaches the parking lot there is a single red rose on his windshield, thorns intact, held in place by the wiper blade. Someone was watching. Someone saw him let the man go. Dante Ferrara walks into the DeMarco social club proposing a ceasefire, damp curls, a limp, eyes that laugh too easily for a man who lost a brother in this war. He is supposed to be the enemy. Luca is supposed to have killed his brother. Neither of those things is quite the truth, and both of them know somebody inside their own houses is arranging the bodies. *"And because," I said, "when you kissed me, I kissed you back. And I've been trying to figure out what that means ever since."* What Luca actually wants is a yard, a school without metal detectors, and a niece who grows up without learning what a piece is. What…