Chapter 22: The Last Shot

The gun in her clutch was small and silver, and her hand around it was perfectly steady.

"Nobody move," Bianca said.

The room had turned its back on her, and now every chair scraped around again.

Three hundred people stared at the barrel.

Her driver stepped through the double doors at the far end with his scarred eyebrow and two men behind him.

All three had pistols out.

"Dario," Bianca said, almost kindly. "Come here, sweetheart."

Dario was ten feet from her at the end of the head table.

He didn't move.

She crossed the floor in four quick steps and caught him by the collar of his blazer.

She pulled him back against her with the muzzle under his jaw.

"Mom," he said.

His voice was very small.

I was already walking.

"Stop there," Bianca said.

"I'm stopping."

"Give me the crown."

I looked down at the flat box in my hands.

"Let him go," I said, "and it's yours."

"Give it to me first."

"No."

I still held the microphone, and the whole hall heard it.

"I am not going to beg you for my son," I said. "I'm telling you what happens."

I took one step closer.

"You let him go, and you walk out of this room with the crown on your head."

I let her see the hundred jackets around us.

"You don't, and you're dead before you reach the door."

"Is that a threat?"

"It's the arithmetic."

Around the edges of the floor, the Lombardi capos were standing.

So were the Montalto capos, a hundred men with their jackets open.

The driver and his two men saw it.

One of them looked at the driver and lowered his gun.

Bianca saw it too.

Her face did something small and ugly.

"You took them all," she said. "Twelve years I kept this house, and you walk in and..."

"Bianca."

It was Ruggero.

He had come across the floor without my noticing, to my left shoulder, his bare hand open at his side.

"Let the boy go," he said. "You've lost. Do the last decent thing."

"You," she said. "You and your hand."