Chapter 17: Giacomo's POV

Giacomo's POV

The Don sent for me at five in the morning.

He sat in his kitchen in Bay Ridge in the dark, with one cup of coffee he had not touched.

I had stood in that kitchen at fifteen, with a dead woman's blood drying stiff on my jacket.

I had never once been invited to sit in it.

"Sit," he said.

I sat.

"My daughter walks into that ballroom tonight on my arm. She stands on his stage. She plays his voice."

"Yes, Don."

"And he will try to kill her again. We both know it."

"We have the roof. We have the waiters. We have a plate under her dress."

"A plate stops one bullet from the front." He looked at me. "Vincent will not shoot from the front."

I said nothing.

He slid a folded paper across the table.

It was the Hargrove roof plan, the one Brooke had sent.

Across the bottom he had written in his own square hand:

*Take her out. Alive.*

"I won't ask what she wants," the Don said. "She'll want to stay. She'll want to finish."

"If the shot is coming and she will not leave, you pick her up and you carry her off that stage."

"She'll never forgive me."

"Then she'll be alive to refuse."

I looked at the paper for a long time.

"Nina told me to find the roof," I said. "I gave her my word I would."

"You'll find the roof. And then you'll do what I say."

I folded the paper and put it inside my jacket, against my ribs.

He had spent twenty-two years asking me for things I could not refuse.

This was the first one I had already promised myself.

"One more thing," said the Don.

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