I should have been ready. I should have known better. I should have acted sooner. I shouldn’t have ignored my instincts.

I will not make such mistakes again.

The SUV races down the highway as fast as I can make the beat-up hunk of metal move. We have no time to waste, and there are few enough police out in the area that I’m not going to worry about going 40-50 miles over the speed limit. A trail of dust runs behind us like a cloud in our wake. I grip the steering wheel so tight that even I notice it.

Serena is in the seat next to me, watching out the window as we barrel down the road.

“Are you sure your friend will have everything ready for us when we get to the air strip?” she asks for the third time, looking over to me with worried eyes.

“If he doesn’t, I’ll kill him,” I say matter-of-factly. Her eyes go wide, but I crack a smile at her to let her know I’m joking. If I don’t ease the tension at least a little, we’ll both get too strung out to focus, and focus is the one thing we need right now.

“I hope your parents aren’t upset we had to leave so fast,” Serena says, running her hands through her hair. “I’m so sorry, Bruno, we-”

“Don’t be sorry,” I say, shaking my head, “this is an emergency. We’ll be back to see them, and they know my life is...the kind of life that involves sudden changes in plans. It isn’t as unusual as you’d think.”

She nods, swallowing.

“The plane I have ready for us will get us back to the States faster than any airliner could,” I say, watching the strong wind whip sand across the road ahead of us as we make our way toward the air strip. “Once we’re onboard, it will be about seven hours straight to New York. I’ve already reached out to my contacts to have a company car ready for us when we get back.”

“The Costas are still looking out for you?”

“I have friends,” I say simply. “Friends look out for each other. Besides, I’m a walking symbol by now. It looks good for the Costas for me to stay in good shape, especially when I show up in New York again alive, back from the dead.”

I see goosebumps on Serena’s arm, and I take my hand off the stick shift a moment to lay it on hers, giving it a light squeeze.

“Is the family going to be okay here, though?” she asks, her eyes going wide yet again. “If anything were to happen to them because of us…”

“Not gonna happen,” I say with a shake of my head. “Now that they have our scent, the only thing these dogs will be interested in is us. Besides, I’ve warned the village about these outsiders, and the local crime rings are on high alert. The Cleaners have connections in the region, but that’s a different matter than a bunch of Americans rolling around causing trouble. And I’ve had some of my cousins come in to stay with my parents for a week or so, until things cool down. We don’t have anything to worry about here.”

She nods, looking thoughtful for a few moments. “I want to come back,” she says with a determination that I can’t help but admire in her. “One day, I mean, when we’ve gotten through all this. I want to come back and make sure the women’s shelter is okay, that they’re taken care of. Those women gave me a safe place for as long as they could—I don’t know how, but I want to return that kindness.”

“I’ll make it so,” I say with finality, and we exchange a short smile before we turn the corner to the last road we’ll take in Italy.

A few minutes later, we pull up the long, open road to where a small private jet is sitting. The tarmac is a small one, really too small for anything to take off from, but it’ll have to do for now. I can just barely make out the pilot sitting in the cockpit looking at us approaching through a set of binoculars, and he hails us as we approach.

“Another friend of yours?” Serena asks.

“You don’t have anything to do but make friends in this part of the country,” I say with a grin. “Well, that and ride cars wildly around the wilderness.”

“Right.”

The wind is picking up, but the direction it’s blowing will only help the plane take off. I drive us not far from the boarding ramp, but my eyes are scanning the area around us.

Something feels wrong.

“I’ll get out first,” I say calmly, but Serena can pick up on my bad feelings more easily than anyone else. Still, she doesn’t question it—she just nods and picks up her bag over her shoulder. “Get out after me. As soon as you’re out, stay low and hurry into that plane, understand?”

“Got it,” she says. Her eyes look into mine, strong and resolute. I take her hand in mine, bring it to my lips, and kiss it.

I pull the car to a stop, and immediately, I get out of the car, my bag over my shoulder.

I take off my aviators to scan the horizon, eyes moving quickly. There are a lot of cliffs and vantage points from here. No signs of cars rolling our way full of Cleaners, though.

A moment later, I hear Serena’s door open, and within a matter of seconds, I see her little form dart from the car up the stairs of the ramp, keeping low, just like I instructed her. My muscles relax a moment later once she’s inside the plane.

Then I see it.

Out of the corner of my eye, for barely a fraction of a second, I see the sun glint off something in the cliffs to the south. I’d know a glint like that anywhere.

There’s a gunman up there, watching us.

My jaw sets. I should duck and run, make a beeline for the plane, but instead, I step around to the front of the car.

My eyes are set dead-on where I saw the glint. And even from nearly a mile away, I know that I’m staring right back at the barrel of a sniper rifle.

There’s no way the Cleaners had enough notice to set up a proper sniper nest this quickly. And I doubt they have many trained sharpshooters in their pocket. That leaves two options in my mind: either someone got lucky and is using that scope to watch us and let his bosses know we’re leaving the country, or some young buck is going to try to take the shot.

So I step forward into the open, glaring right back at him.

If you want it so bad, go ahead, try and make the shot.

The wind is bad right now. It doesn’t take a marksman to know that a shot at that range with this wind would be a tough one, to say the least. If the man behind that scope has enough skill, though, we’re already dead, regardless of whether I run or stand still.

I stand there for a solid ten seconds, my face still as stone, daring him to make the shot. The sun catches the scope again. A quick glint.

Nothing.

My face twists into a frown, and I put my aviators back on. “Coward,” I mutter, and I turn my back on the sniper, strutting to the plane and boarding without worry.

“Everything okay?” says my friend in Italian from the cockpit as I enter the plane. Serena is already sitting in one of the comfy seats, looking relieved to see me again.

“All good,” I reply, smiling to him warmly. “Hope you can fly in this wind.”

“Told you, I was air force,” he says with a cocky grin. “And you won’t be the first Mafioso I’ve smuggled out of the country on short notice. Just make sure the cash is in my account, or I’ll kick you out over the Atlantic.”

We laugh, and I take my seat across from Serena. “Get comfortable,” I say, casting one more glance out the window to my homeland. “Before you know it, we’ll be back in the Bronx. And we just lost the element of surprise.”

* * *

It turns out that getting comfortable is easier said than done on this flight. Seven hours feels like seven days, and passing the time has proven hard. We don’t have much to talk about that doesn’t go back to the danger Serena’s mother is in, and because of that, it feels a little irreverent to try to focus on the brief good times we’ve had with my family.

So, three-quarters of the way into the flight, I’m doing push-ups on one hand on the floor of the cabin. Serena watches me, if only to distract herself from the stress.

It isn’t working so well.

As for me, I have to stay in peak physical condition, no matter what. This isn’t a serious workout for me, just something to keep me warmed up, because for all I know, we could be landing in the middle of a firefight.

Until this is finished, I need to be beyond my A-game, and lying on my ass in a hospital bed didn’t help my strength.

“But what if it’s too late?” Serena says anxiously, and it’s not the first time she’s expressed that fear. I can’t blame her. The situation isn’t good. “What if something’s happened to her already? Oh my god, I’ve just been goofing off like I’m on some vacation all this time and I’m the worst daughter ever. Or what if nothing bad has happened to her and someone stole her phone and is luring us into a trap and-”

“Then I will kill them,” I say simply, lowering myself to the ground before putting both hands down to push myself up. I stride over to her, crouching beside her seat and taking her hand reassuringly. I’m bare-chested, having taken my shirt off to exercise more easily.

“Serena,” I say in a low tone, looking into those anxious eyes, on the verge of tears for hours now. “You can’t be everywhere at once. You had to run for your life. You ran for the child’s life. You did the right thing—you kept yourself alive. If your mother isn’t the kind of person who can recognize how important that is, then she’s no mother at all.”

Her face just watches me, trembling, and I know the great beast of fear within her is trying to push out any hope of comfort. I rise up and sit in the seat next to her, raising the armrest to pull her close to my chest, letting her head rest there.

“I don’t know if I could forgive myself if something happened, though,” she whispers.

“I know, passerotta,” I say, stroking her hair gently with my thick fingers. “But we’ve gone through a trial of fire, both of us—and you’re not used to this. What you’ve accomplished, what you’ve survived in Italy is a greater feat of strength than I could ever come close to.”

“I don’t know about that,” she says with a soft smile.

“We’re coming back from the dead, you and me,” I say, looking down to that face I love so strongly. “You’re doing all this for your family, nothing else. It would be enough for your mother for you to keep yourself and your future child safe, but going back to look after family? If that doesn’t make you a good daughter, I don’t know what does.”

After a moment, she looks up at me with a struggling smile on her face, and she gets closer to me. My arms, warm from exercise, wrap around her comfortingly, and we hug with nothing but the droning of the plane all around us for a few moments.

“You are my strength, Serena,” I say, squeezing her gently. “I mean that. We have each other, and that makes us strong enough to move mountains for what we love.”

Just then, I hear the pilot’s voice over the speaker.

“Bruno, just to let you know, we just crossed into radius of American phone signals. If you have any calls to make, now’s the time.”

“Thanks,” I call to the cockpit, and I nod to Serena, standing up and getting a phone from my bag.

A few moments later, the phone is ringing, and I’m pacing the cabin with a hand on my hip.

“...hello?” an uncertain voice answers from the other end.

“Hello, Giovanni,” I say with a grin. “Nice to hear you again.”

“Holy shit, Bruno,” Giovanni gushes, laughing at the other end of the line. “Don’t give me a heart attack like that! Fuck, it’s good to hear from you. You really didn’t waste any time stirring up the goddamn wasp’s nest coming back to life, huh? Rising on the third day too good for you?”

“It’s a bad habit,” I say, winking at Serena.

“Where are you?” he asks. “Can you even answer that? What’s going on?”

“We’re heading back to America,” I say. “We’ll be in the Bronx before the end of the day. I need you to make sure pickup arrangements are settled at the air strip. You know the one. I’ve already got some guys on it, but I want someone I trust there with them. Talk to Nico.”

“You got it,” Giovanni says, and I can still hear the disbelief through the phone. “I gotta say, Bruno, it’s fuckin’ weird hearing your voice again. I mean, I’d heard rumors, but…”

“This is on a need-to-know basis,” I say. “Trust me, if I’d wanted to go public with this, you’d be one of the first men I contacted. But what’s this about rumors? What’s the situation in the Bronx?”

“Shit, you don’t know anything, do you?” Giovanni says in wonder.

“I’ve had a bad case of the ‘dead,’ Giovanni.”

“Right, right. Well, things are uh, not good. We’re in an all-out mob war, Bruno.”

I clench my jaw. “The Cleaners don’t know when to die, do they?”

“They were backed into a corner for a while there, but anything backed into a corner fights hard. When everyone thought you’d been killed, they fought twice as hard to get back lost territory. Lot of good men are dead. It’s been a bloody winter and a bloodier spring. Nobody even knows what the turf borders are anymore, it feels like every week some block is ours, then it’s the Cleaners, you get the idea. Don Abruzzi dug his heels in hard, and he’s holding the vendetta for his son’s death against the whole Costa family. He circulated a bunch of news about your death, too, saying he had your body, photos, all kinds of shit.”

I listen to all this with a still expression, taking it all in. When he’s finished, I take a breath.

“Alright. Giovanni, I want you to get the boys back together. Only the men I’ve been on jobs with, you know the ones. Men we can trust. I’ll explain more when we land, but the Cleaners probably know by now that I’m going to be back in town soon. I’m going to lead us on a job.”

“A job? Shouldn’t we touch base with Don Costa?”

“Fuck the Don,” I grunt. “Has he given a shit when I’ve been busting my ass across the world on their account? No. You know who has stuck up for us? Us, Giovanni. If we want something done right, we do it ourselves. This is our neighborhood. Not the Cleaners’, and not the Don’s. I’ll deal with the blowback later, if anyone wants to cross that bridge. You with me or not?”

There’s a long sigh from the other end of the line before Giovanni says, “Shit, yeah, you know I’m with you, Bruno. Alright, let’s do this. I’ll see you in a few.”

I end the call, and I look down to Serena, who looks shocked at me.

“Did I just hear all that right?”

“I didn’t survive a car bomb to go back to following orders like a grunt,” I say.

“Well, yeah,” she says with a smile, but it fades as she goes on, “I mean, what did you mean, ‘job’? What are you planning?”

A cocky smile crosses my face. “We’re going to find your mother by drawing the bastards out of hiding first. And we’re going to do that by finishing this where it started.”