Chapter Six

Campbell

SOFIA LIVES ON the other side of Queens, where Astoria starts to dip into Long Island. It would be a quick trip if not for the perpetual snarl of Grand Central feeding car after car into its narrow gullet, keeping traffic just shy of a dead stop. I keep the music off for her sake, but there isn’t much to do but watch through the windshield and wait for a gap in the next lane to wedge myself into.

“This is why I never leave home,” Sofia says, clicking my charger into the bottom of her phone. “Traffic is a form of torture, after a point.”

I shrug. “There are far worse ways to be in a car for hours than this.”

Her mouth tightens into a curious line. “Like what?”

“The trunk.”

A diabolical glint enters her eyes. “Well, trust you to bring up the mood. Although I won’t blame you for being dour. Justine looked like she was in rough shape.”

“Justine thinks she betrayed people that she loves very much.” A taxi lunges in front of me at the last second, and I hit my horn out of sheer principle. “And if she didn’t already break their trust, she will soon enough. I’m not giving her a choice.”

“It’s not betrayal when they’re better off not knowing.” Sofia frowns. “This is protection. The same way I don’t walk up to strangers on the street and tell them I’m a Cattaneo, yes that kind of Cattaneo, and they shouldn’t cross me. Everyone loves the Mafia when no one knows we’re there.”

In a way, they manage to pull off what I do at scale: a charming but constrained distance, camouflaging brutality in plain sight. I’ve met plenty of people who think the Five Families are an artifact of the past, which is entertaining but not half as dangerous as the people who buy into their popular image. Made men aren’t honorable vigilantes; they back the heroin and trafficking rackets with their boots on countless throats.

Sofia’s business is old school, casting a protective net over neighborhoods that prefer tithing the devil they know over the risk of being gentrified, while washing cash clean of its blood-soaked origins. Her father refused to invest in drugs, and Sofia wouldn’t deal in flesh if there was a gun to her head. As a result, most people who move into the Cattaneos’ domain are oblivious to where their money goes, which suits her just fine.

“How’s politics?” I ask.

“Hell,” she answers flatly. “Every Galici with a gun is waving it around, insisting their property’s being infringed upon. Someone screwed with one of their shipments a month ago, and the rest of us haven’t heard the end of it. The downside of being a satellite family is all their trouble trickles down on us.”

No one’s voted in a new don since Alessandro passed, which leaves her in the unenviable position of being in control without a drop of official authority. Sofia has a half a dozen uncles who could take up the mantle, but the second someone is back in charge, he’s bound to become a target. The aging elite would rather retire on the stacks of cash filling up their mattresses than go back to the blood sport of their youth.

“I’m half tempted to sell everything off and go legitimate,” she adds. “Well, except for your contracts, of course.”

“What’s stopping you?”

“Pride. My dad’s spirit rising up to haunt me for the rest of my days.” Sofia shrugs. “Everyone would fight it, too, which is the last thing I need. My uncles are comfortable as a horse put out to pasture, and they want to die happy. Why bother being ambitious when it’s easier to coast on your name for another generation?”

One day the shine will wear off, but that’ll be a problem for whoever comes after her. “You could always back some young mobster who wants to make his mark. Run things from behind the scenes.”

She scoffs. “That shadow throne shit never works in practice. The second I piss off Scarface Jr., he’d turn the whole family on me. Fact is, this is comfortable on my end too. I just don’t like the ripples I’m seeing in the water.”

“Anything I can do?”

“Oh, fuck you!” Sofia snaps at a sedan with Massachusetts plates that rushes to cut me off, leaving us locked behind the red light. “Piece of shit tourists. And no, I don’t want you getting involved again. Mickey’s death was timed to keep the heat off me. If I start dropping bodies now, every fire is going to come my way.”

“It’s not like they would know it was you,” I note. “I’m a lot better than that.”

“When a boss at the top of the chain needs a scapegoat, they won’t care if there’s proof a Cattaneo was responsible. It would be a convenient excuse to get me and mine out of the way, and slice up what we have left for everyone else.” Sofia rifles around in her bag and pulls out a pack of cigarettes along with a lighter. “Do you care if I smoke?”

“Yes,” I say, “but go ahead.”

She rolls her eyes and does the same to the window, lighting up into open air. After a few contemplative drags, Sofia taps away her ash and gives me a leveling look. “I really hope things work out for you and Justine. She’s good for you.”

Better than I deserve, certainly. “I’m glad you’ve come around on her.”

“Jealousy is goddamn stupid, and you know that.” Smoke drifts from between Sofia’s lips, casting a haze over her eyes. “But I’m over it. So when I say I’m worried about the two of you, it’s not projecting. I promise.”

I frown. “Worried about what, exactly?”

“This half-in, half-out mess you’re trying to pull. What happens after you meet her family, Campbell? Are you going to get a house together? Ask her to marry you? Sneak off to kill someone during the honeymoon so you don’t strangle the first person who looks at Justine the wrong way?”

The accusation is like a hook wrenched up through my spine, hanging me out to dry. Thankfully, I’ve never been susceptible to road rage. “I’m not asking Justine to marry me. The rest is up to her.”

“Because of Richard?” Sofia asks.

“Because I’m hers whether or not there’s a ring on my finger,” I insist. “If that’s something she ever wants, then I’m happy to do it, but otherwise, I couldn’t care less. And in case you missed it, Justine already has a house.”

“You know what I mean.” She turns her head and blows another silver coil of smoke out the window. “If you stay in one place, it’s easy to trace your movements. The FBI doesn’t have two brain cells to rub together, but even they can figure it out if people start dying every time you leave Chicago.”

“People have accidents everywhere. How are they going to connect that to me?”

“No one’s perfect.”

“We made it perfect.” Now anger has a grip on me, its jagged nails biting into the back of my neck. “No arrests. No red flags. The TSA just escorted half a dozen murder weapons in the back of a plane for me without so much as a pat down. I’m better than I’ve ever been, so why the hell are you losing faith in me now?”

Sofia goes quiet. I want to push for an answer, but the expressway has finally opened up, so I drag my focus back to the road. It’s another ten minutes to her part of town, but she keeps her silence, finishing her cigarette at the last stubborn speck of ash.

By the time I pull into Sofia’s driveway, suspicion is coiled in my stomach like a serpent, fangs sunk deep. I’m not sure whether to kick her out or lock the doors, but she finally relents as the hum of the engine dies out.

“I’m not losing faith, Campbell,” she says softly—the closest Sofia has ever been to gentle. “It’s because of Paris.”

My hands are around the steering wheel, but they might as well be around Victor Marchand’s throat, crushing his life into the smallest survivable piece. Watching him gag on his own blood, kneeling at my mercy. I wanted to punish him for kidnapping and beating Justine, but death was a shallow consequence. It would have been so much better to cut out Victor’s flesh a pound at a time, to break him down to every individual joint, then hollow out the marrow.

And I would have done it if Justine hadn’t stopped me. She reminded me of the contract, that his murder was part of a promise I swore never to break. Leaving any trace would have implicated the woman who hired me, and she’d already spent months stalked by Victor, sadistic and relentless. Except in that moment, I didn’t care. Justine holding the beast at bay was the only reason he died painlessly, unconscious and strapped to his own bomb.

“How is Paris relevant?” I ask, looking Sofia in the eye. “That was an accident too.”

“An accident that spent two weeks on international news because you blew up an entire warehouse just to kill one man.” She holds my gaze, unblinking. “You never use explosives, not after what they did to your unit. What were you covering up?”

Sofia could have found out the answer a dozen other ways. She’s clever enough to pry clues out of Justine by proxy, and her cousin Enrico can hack into anything if he has a mobile phone and a couple cans of Red Bull. The truth itself isn’t what matters, but whether I’ll give it to her or hold my tongue, corrupting the implicit trust between us.

“I almost lost control.” No, that’s not true. Even if it’s splitting hairs, correcting myself is the right thing to do. “I did lose control. With Marchand, in front of Justine. He kidnapped her because I pushed her away, then he hurt her where I couldn’t do a damn thing about it. I was going to butcher him.”

“Past tense,” Sofia says. “So what happened?”

“She stopped me at the last second.” The urge didn’t fade, but routine took over, a few minutes of cold clarity providing room for a coverup. “Except Justine stabbed him when he came for her. I choked him out. There were too many signs of a struggle to just snap his neck and dump him in the river. But he’d been planning to bomb the embassy where his ex worked, and the rest of the warehouse was empty.”

She sighs, putting the pieces together. “You obliterated the evidence.”

“And no one came for me, Sofia. Not the French, not Interpol. If there’d been so much as a hint that some terrorist was fleeing the country, they would have shuttered the airport and screened everyone inside and out.”

The frame I fit around Marchand’s life was a custom job; the police saw his blighted military record and wrote off the bomb as a desperate, misguided attempt at vengeance. Justine and I spent several weeks in recovery, and Ulysse’s web of local intel never caught any rumors that everything was a setup. If anything, more people were glad Marchand was dead than I expected; he was buried like trash, without ceremony.

“You got lucky,” Sofia says. “You’re good, Campbell, but that was luck. If the timing had been off in any way—”

“If Justine was dead, I would be too,” I interrupt. “So it’s not like you’d be at risk.”

“This isn’t about me!” Anger infuses her eyes, vivid and acidic. “I’m not trying to save my own skin. I’m worried what you’ll do the next time someone hurts her. I’m worried someone close to Justine will realize what you are, and what then? Will you poison her mother at the breakfast table and look the other way? You’re lethal, Campbell. To everyone.”

The searing spark of anger in my chest cools, quenched to a black and brittle sliver. “Yeah. You’re right. So, if this your way of saying we’re done, tell me right now. If not, get out of my car and go write your will. I know how many you’ve filed in court.”

“Fuck off,” she snaps. “Do you remember what I said to you after you killed Mickey?”

“You said a lot of things.”

Sofia’s eyes narrow. “Well, you had a knife to my throat at the time. Does that jog your memory?”

It does. I take a breath, pushing against the leaden feeling in my ribs. “When a Cattaneo backs a horse, you’re with it until the bloody, bitter end. And if you don’t trust me, there’s no way we can do business.”

“Exactly. I do trust you,” Sofia hisses. “I care about you. Don’t you write me off as some goddamn opportunist. She makes you so fucking vulnerable, Campbell. It scares the hell out of me.”

“I need her.” The truth ruptures from inside me, an artery under the scalpel. “I need to be vulnerable. I have to feel something, Sofia, or one morning, I’m finally going to lose the war that started years ago and shoot myself in the head. Justine already saved me from it once. Every minute you have with me now is because she was there.”

Sofia turns away from me, putting her face in shadow. “Jesus Christ. I…”

“You’re my friend, not my therapist,” I say. “I don’t expect you to fix the havoc in my brain. I just need you to believe I can handle this like I’ve handled everything else.”

She swallows hard, throat tight. “I want to believe it. Does that count for anything?”

“I’ll give you partial credit.”

The joke is a tourniquet; laughter comes from low in her throat, sorrow arrested before it can come out into the open. “Thanks.”

I watch as Sofia throws her phone back into her purse, then slings it over her shoulder. She gets out of the car and comes around the other side, giving me an expectant look until I roll my window down halfway.

“If anything comes up with you and her, call me,” she says. “Don’t wait. No matter what you need to wipe off the record, let me help you. Okay?”

That I can promise. “Okay.”

“I mean it.” Sofia steps back from the window, standing up straight. “Now I’m going to drink an entire bottle of Averna and blame you for the hangover. Good night.”

She walks away before I can answer, but there’s nothing left to say anyway. I stay in her driveway until Sofia closes and locks her door, then start the engine up again. Justine hasn’t texted me yet, but I can find somewhere in Flushing to stay idle until she does.

Headlights flash in the corner of my eye—too bright, too close—and the last thing I hear is the deafening crush of steel.