Chapter 7: The Road Home

Raf's POV

I knew Sandro Pagano would not wait until Monday.

A man like that does not take a public loss and go home to sleep.

He takes it as a debt.

We left Newark in two cars.

Dario drove the first with Elena and me in the back.

Two of my men followed in the second.

The parkway was empty under a low gray sky.

Elena sat with her father's coat pulled around her and her hand resting low on her stomach.

She had not noticed she was doing it.

I had noticed for the last hour.

"You were very good in there," I said.

"I was terrified."

"I know. Nobody else did."

She turned her head and looked at me.

Her eyes were wet, but she was not crying.

"He looked at Dario," she said. "At the end. Did you see?"

"I saw."

Dario's hands tightened on the wheel.

He said nothing.

I watched his eyes in the mirror.

He was a patient man.

He had spent three years inside Sandro's house, driving Sandro's car, sitting at his door, and passing me one small truth at a time.

Pietro Rinaldi had asked him to.

I had never asked Dario why.

I looked at Elena again.

The first time I saw her, she was twenty-four, at the back of her own father's funeral.

I stood by the last pew with my hat in my hands and every man in the church watching me for a reason to shoot.

She stood by the casket and did not cry.

Eleven days later, my brother Paolo was shot dead on the pavement outside her wedding hall.

I never saw her face again until the platform in Chicago.

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