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“Say my sister’s name again,” I tell him, very softly. “Go on. I’d like to hear how it sounds.”

He doesn’t say it.

I let him go and sit back, and wipe my palm on his napkin.

I let the silence sit. It’s a good silence; I’ve spent my life learning to build them. Ketch holds it longer than most men could, which tells me he’s good at his job, and then his eyes flick, just once, to his own glass. It’s the first tell that this conversation isn’t going quite the way he’d hoped.

I lean forward and press my palms together. “Here’s my reply. I want you to deliver it to Luca just as I say it.” I pause to be sure he understands. “Luca will not touch one square foot of Accardi ground, not the waterfront, not Sutphin, he won’t so much as sit on a single barstool in any of my clubs. And if a single one of his people comes into my territory with anything but deference, I’m not going to send a lawyer. I’ll come myself.”

Ketch keeps his eyes on mine, trying not to flinch.

“And when I come,” I continue, “I won’t send a warning to Luca. I’ll send his man back to him in a body bag. Did you get all of that?”

Ketch swallows. Hard. Then he forces an easy smile onto his face. “I got it, Enzo.”

“Mr. Accardi.”

“I got it, Mr. Accardi.”

I rise. “Good. Was there anything else?”

“Not a thing. Have a good night.”

I reply with a quick nod before leaving.

On the elevator ride down, Carmine at my side, I begin to turn the conversation over in my mind. Ketch should be worried. Even with his cheek on the lacquer, he wasn’t. He should’ve paled, should’ve balked, should’ve done something. He didn’t. He was cool and calm, mostly. A man carrying a threat like that back to Luca should have shown more fear than he did.

Ketch not being worried could very well mean my rejection of Luca’s offer was expected. Hoped for, even.

Did this meeting go exactly how Luca hoped it would?

The thought lodges in my mind, and it won’t move. Plus, my mind has not been right since this morning, when Matthew climbed into my arms and looked at me with eyes so similar to mine that it was like looking in a mirror.

He is four, or close to it. Marta told me before I asked. I do the arithmetic I’ve refused to let myself do for eight months. The masquerade. The ring on the pillow. The woman who walked out a delivery door before dawn and vanished so completely that it took me more than four years, and Luca Santini’s spite, to find her again.

Nearly five years gone. A child of four. Her son, with my hair, my eyes, my stillness, my way of looking at people as if able to see right through them.

Her son.

Maybe mine.

The elevator doors open and the casino floor blurs. I don’t hear a single chime. Luca is unafraid. Perhaps ready for war. Perhaps wanting it. And somewhere in my house, asleep down the hall from his mother, is a boy who might be the one thing in this city I can’t afford to have.

I turn to Carmine.

“The car.”

Moments later, I’m in the backseat, the Gilded Crown melting into the distance behind us. I could have the truth by morning. I want to hear it from her.

CHAPTER 11

STEVIE

“Where’s the boss?”

“He’s out. After-hours business.”

I don’t want to know what that means.