Chapter 5

An old woman and a young girl, propping up a fading bloodline in a circle of jackals that smelled weakness the way wolves smell blood. That was the whole of the Genovese Family now. So I had bent my head and worked, hungry to shoulder the weight of the name before the old blood ran out entirely, before there was nothing left of us but a crest on a chain and whispers on the street.

Livia had come from nothing too, an outsider no one at the sit-downs would look twice at, tolerated and never welcomed. When I learned she was an orphan with no Family to shield her, something soft in me answered it. I took her in under our protection, a stray given the Genovese roof, and I paid her way and told her we would claw our way out of the dark together. I called it mercy. I thought that was what it was.

I never imagined she would taste my kindness and call it charity, and hate me for the giving. She envied every last thing I carried, the name, the blood, the two young capos who had grown up at my side. She used everything she had to turn their heads, and with them at her back, she set fire to the life I had been trying to rebuild.

I was still turning it over, that slow bitter ache of it, when the car rolled to a stop at the destination and the ache had nowhere left to go.

Whatever had passed between us at the garage had left the two of them uneasy, off their rhythm. They came around at once, both of them, Lorenzo reaching for my door, Dominic already lifting my bag from the seat as if the small courtesies could cover the larger thing they'd done.

Lorenzo's voice climbed, bright with something that wanted to be hope. "Francesca, look. This is the park we used to slip away to when we were kids. Dominic and I bought the whole parcel, put it under a clean front. This is ours now. Our own ground. Nobody comes here without our say."

Dominic nodded, quick and eager, cracking the first knuckle of his right hand without seeming to notice he did it. "I had my men plant your tulips. All of them, everywhere. This time next year the whole field will be nothing but flowers. A sea of them."

"And the four of us come out here," Lorenzo went on, "we ride, we breathe the air, we forget the rest of it for a while." He was turning the Valente heirloom on his little finger in slow, easy circles as he spoke, the way he always did when he was building a picture he wanted you inside of.

Their faces were full of the future, both of them, so certain of the shape it would take.

I stood and looked at the land a long time and said nothing. It was true, all of it. This was where the three of us had hidden as children, the ground that held our best years, back before the funerals and the debts and the jackals. But I had never loved tulips. I had never even been able to stand near them. The pollen closed my throat. They had spent a fortune to plant a field that could not hold me for an hour, and neither of them had ever known me well enough to know it.

While that thought was still settling cold in my chest, the sky above me tore open in color. Fireworks bloomed in great gaudy sheets, and in the burning light the sparks spelled out my name across the dark, letter by letter, dreamlike and impossible.

And there, inside that manufactured beautiful moment, Lorenzo drew out a ring and held it toward me. The circling on his finger had stopped. "Francesca. This is the Valente heirloom. My blood has passed it down for the woman who will one day sit at the head of the Family. My people meant it for the future mistress of the Valente name." His voice dropped, gentler, sure of its landing. "I've wanted to put it in your hand for a long time. I just had to wait until tonight for the chance."