Luca isn’t surprised to see me. He welcomes me in with a fatherly pat on the back, wearing a fucking sweater like he’s waltzed straight out of the nineteen fifties. Somehow, he still makes it look good. “Come in, come in. I was working on something for a client.” He has his phone in his hand and presses absently at the screen, then sets it on a side table in the entryway.

“You’re always working on something for a client.”

“That’s how you get rich.” Luca grins like he’s joking, but I know he has more money than he lets on. Moretto men don’t talk about finances openly, the same way they don’t talk about the women they fuck, except in oblique terms, so it’s no surprise when he steers the conversation away from his work. “But that’s not what you’re here to talk to me about.”

“No.” I have a dull sensation that this was a bad idea, a still small voice kind of moment, but this is my brother. He wouldn’t rat me out or go to my father or any of that shit. I’m here alone. That’s enough for him to know that whatever I say is between brothers. If I can’t trust him...

“Did you enjoy your birthday?” His eyes twinkle. Maybe he’s remembering the birthday dinner, which got particularly raucous for a family dinner, with twice the usual amount of wine passed around the table. My aunt Elena took it upon herself to make a raunchy joke about my manhood, as if I’d waited in celibacy for the age of twenty-one. I laughed until I cried.

“It was a good dinner.”

“Fantastic, I’d say.” He beckons me into the living room, pin-neat with modern furniture. I keep meaning to ask him if he had a designer do the house. Luca takes a seat on the loveseat and I sit across from him, on the sofa. “But none of that is possibly bothering you.”

Luca’s sweater is heather gray and his jeans are tight without being fucking ridiculous, and despite the nineteen fifties vibe of the sweater kind of outfit that would have women swooning over him the moment he steps outside, and he leans forward, elbows on his knees, to wait for my reply. “All of that was fine.” My answer treads familiar ground and he waits, with the infinite patience that I’ve only ever seen from Luca. I clear my throat. “We can skip all the bullshit, can’t we?”

He laughs, leaning back, arms crossed. “Of course. We all went through this, you know.”

I perk up. “You did?”

He shakes his head. “Every one of us. Even Vince.”

“Vince?” This is shocking on a level I never expected. Vince is the loudest, most bloodthirsty one of us all. The one whose brawn took him right into high-stakes security jobs. “I can’t believe that.”

“It should make you feel better, Gio. The guilt comes to all of us. It’s not like it was in the old days, but I don’t think our dear father knows that.”

“No, it’s not the same, but—” I wrestle with the awful vortex of shame and pride and, yes, guilt. “How did you...decide?”

“To get over it?” He looks to the side, brow wrinkling. “It weighed on me, for sure. But one day I woke up and I knew the truth.”

I swallow hard and wait. It’s not what I was asking, but obviously Luca assumes that I’ve carried out what I was sent to do. The fingers of my right hand buzz, and it’s as much of a warning as an airborne. I’m not going to admit anything. I was, but plans have changed.

“Family first,” Luca says simply. “Our father hasn’t asked much of me, but he asked for proof of my fidelity.” He holds his hands up. “How could I deny him that? I spend the rest of my life following the law, then we’re even.”

It was a low-level thug that Luca tracked and had killed by a slightly higher-level thug. My father celebrated his absence at the next week’s dinner. He’d been terrorizing several of the laundromats, targeting the women, and at the time it seemed like a great victory. But what if there was more to the man’s story? What if it was this kind of situation?

Something cold twists at the pit of my gut—a warning. I drop my head into my hands and take a steadying breath. When I straighten up, Luca is looking out the front window. “Thanks, Luca.” I sigh like my heart has been heavy with the truth of killing Alessia Ricci. “I’ll be able to sleep tonight.” I stand up as if to go and Luca stands with me.

“Have a beer before you rush away,” he says, putting a brotherly hand on my shoulder. “Now that you’re finally old enough.”

“All right,” I say, even though my skin itches to be out of here, itches to be back on the road. Something isn’t right.

Luca goes to the kitchen via the front hallway, and as he does I hear his phone buzz against the tabletop. I force myself not to look toward the car, not to give anything away. There’s the slide of a drawer opening in the kitchen, and soft, measured footsteps.

I turn toward the sound, ready to take the beer from his hand. “Luca, I—”

There’s no beer in his hand.

Luca holds a handgun, leveled at me, a vague disappointment on his face, as if he’s been told that it’s raining when there was supposed to be sun. “That’s her, out in the car.”

It’s not a question.

There is ice in my blood, ice freezing all of my veins. “Don’t do this.”

He gives a little sigh and turns the gun in his hand, testing its weight. There’s a click as he releases the safety. “I don’t want to, Gio, but it’s been asked of me.” He looks into my eyes. “Still, you’re my little brother. So I’ll count to ten.”