I wish he’d let me kill someone.

I let the wish float aimlessly in the air in front of me, as insignificant as a speck of dust drifting in the sunlight streaming through the window of my childhood bedroom. Why did I even come up here? The fading color of the paint on the walls makes me feel expectant, impatient. I don’t know what it is that I’m most impatient to have happen. The meeting itself? The assignment? Moving on with my life?

Below me, the front door of the house opens and closes, a heavy, measured click.

My father is home.

In a matter of hours, this house will be filled to the rafters with his brothers and sisters for the weekly family dinner. Too many people will crowd around the sturdy oak table in the dining room, shouting over each other to be heard, filling their plates over again and again with the platters of family favorites my aunts will prepare. Real Italian food. They’ll have my uncles in on it, too. It’s a special day, they’ll say, a special day because little Gio has turned twenty-one.

Twenty-one. The age when a Moretto man becomes a full-fledged adult in the family. The age when he takes his place in the humming structure that’s kept all of us afloat for four generations. That’s how the legend goes, anyway. Most of it is bullshit, but some things are true: my father, Marco Moretto, is the man at the root of most of the crime that happens on this side of Chicago.

The door to his office, across the hall from the dining room, shuts with a heavier thud.

It’s time.

I stand up from the desk—the same desk I sat at for hours, doing bullshit homework—and straighten my tie. I’ve been working as a teller at one of the banks downtown for the past month. It’ll look good, the frontline experience, if I want to go to grad school. I know it already—the double major in political science and finance won’t be enough. I need more money than that. More power. More than my father, with his legitimate empire of laundromats planted all across the city, could have ever dreamed of having.

But first—this.

I wish he’d let me kill someone, because negotiating with the gang leaders can be tedious as fuck. I’m strong enough for it. I’ve put in my time at the gym. I run every day. If he’d let my brother Vince go with me, it’d be a fucking cakewalk, but I can’t count on that. No, the assignment will probably be something dry, like negotiations over territory, providing an explanation about the way Morettos run things to one of the new gangs in the city. The Hundred, maybe. The kind of shit where you sit in a public place and pretend that your heart isn’t pumping the blood of a criminal.

I’m not a criminal. Not yet.

It would be faster, at any rate, to shoot someone than to play the negotiation game. There’s less risk in talking, though, which is why I’m certain that’s what I’ll be sent to do. It’s a symbolic exercise, anyway. The days of Moretto family men shooting guns out car windows are mostly over.

I march down the stairs and square my shoulders in front of my father’s doorway. My blood thrums in my veins. The anticipation settles deliciously in my gut. On the other side of this door is the rest of my life.

I raise my hand and knock, three times.

“Come in,” my father calls.

I know something’s off the moment I open the door.

He’s not seated behind his desk, like he always is for these meetings, the ones when his sons turn twenty-one, when they are no longer boys, but men. My brothers all told me the same thing. Walk in. Shake his hand. Regard each other as men. Get assignment, complete assignment, welcome to the family, big boy, you made it.

My father stands in the center of his office, hands in his pocket, eyes on the floor. This is not the stance of a man who plays two roles at all times, the lines blurring with every step he takes. Head of the city’s most powerful crime family. Upstanding citizen with a chain of profitable businesses in every neighborhood. Which one is he playing now? What's happened?

Sweat beads under my collar as he shifts his weight from one foot to the other. Is he...sad? What the hell is going on?

I’m about to fucking lose it when he raises his head, and I notice his eyes, dark and shining.

It’s not sadness in those eyes. It’s revenge.

“Gio,” he says, as if he didn’t invite me in here a minute ago, as if he’s only now realizing my presence. “Happy birthday.”

“Thank you, Dad.” I eye him warily. His mouth stretches into a strange grin.

“Get the door.”

I close it behind me and extend my hand for him to shake.

“Twenty-one,” he says wonderingly. “Twenty-one years old today. Your mother would be proud.”

“I hope so.” I wouldn’t know. I have to take his word for it. That’s what happens when your mother gets murdered before you’ve had a chance to graduate from preschool.

He looks at me like he’s seeing a ghost, but then he smiles even wider. “Your twenty-first birthday,” he says again, his expression hardening into steely seriousness. “You know by now what we’re here to discuss.”

“Of course.” I straighten my back, lift my chin, the family pride flowing in my veins. “I have been considering the possibilities. A meeting with the Hundred, maybe. They’re new enough in town to—”

“Naturally. Naturally,” he says, cutting me off. “A reasonable assumption.” His eyes flick to the wall behind me. “Those young men aren’t doing my laundromats any favors, that’s true.” My father rubs his palms together. “If your birthday had been yesterday, that’s where I would have sent you.”

Wait—would have?

“You have no idea how long I’ve waited for this,” my father says, but he speaks so quietly I wonder if he meant to say it out loud. “Gio, some new information has come to my attention.”

“What kind of information?” There’s no fucking way I’d let him down, but I have more on my plate than this assignment. My extra class. My shifts at the bank. But the look on his face.…

I hear the front door swing open and the voices of my aunts fill the hallway on the other side of the office door. My father makes no move to greet them. Instead, he takes his seat at his desk, the expression on his face deadly serious. “Sit down, Gio. There are things you need to know.”