Chapter 3 - The Safehouse on Mott Street
The town car smelled of leather and ozone from the rain that had just begun to spit against the windshield, turning the neon lights of the Queens Midtown Tunnel into long, bleeding streaks of red and yellow.
In the back seat, silence was a physical weight.
Sophie had fallen asleep again against her mother's side, her small breathing shallow and rhythmic, exhausted by the six-hour time change and the strange, electric gravity of the adults around her. Camille sat pressed against the far door, her shoulder wedged into the leather paneling as if she could push her way right through the steel skin of the car and into the dark water of the river outside.
Alessandro sat opposite them, his knees nearly touching hers in the enclosed space. He had not removed his overcoat. His dark eyes remained fixed on her hands—hands that were laced tightly together in her lap, the knuckles white, the skin translucent.
"You should have told me," he said.
The words weren't loud. They didn't need to be. The driver, a scarred Sicilian named Luca who had driven for Alessandro's father before him, kept his eyes locked firmly on the rearview mirror, his face as expressionless as a tombstone.
"I didn't think you'd let me leave," Camille whispered, her voice cracking, dry from fear. She didn't look at him; she kept her gaze fixed on the crown of her daughter's head. "If you had known I was carrying a child... Alessandro, you know what your life is. You know what your name is. A child in our world is just a target with legs."
"Our world?" He let out a short, cold sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "You left my world six years ago, Camille. You walked out of the apartment on Fifth Avenue while I was settling the dock dispute in Newark. You left a note on the kitchen counter saying you were going back to Paris to paint. You didn't mention a child."
"I found out two weeks later. In a clinic in the 6th arrondissement." She finally lifted her head, her gray eyes—the same gray-blue as Sophie's—flashing with a sudden, desperate defiance. "And the men who tried to kill you in the garage? They were looking for leverage against you, Alessandro. They were cleaning house. If they had known about the baby—if anyone had known—she wouldn't have lived to see her first breath. I ran so she could breathe."
"You ran to a city where my uncle's old associates still control the port of Le Havre," Alessandro said smoothly, leaning forward slightly into the dim amber light of the dash. "Do you have any idea how easy it was for me to find you once I started looking? The only reason I didn't find you sooner is because I believed you when you said you never wanted to see my face again."
"I didn't want you to find us," she choked out, a single tear finally breaking free and tracking down her pale cheek, though she didn't wipe it away. "I wanted her to have a normal life. A life where people don't get shot in restaurants or find packages left on their doorstep with severed fingers inside. Look at me, Alessandro! Look at what you are!"
He didn't flinch. He had been told what he was by priests, by enemies, by dying men, and by women who had loved him and feared him in equal measure. None of it had ever shaken him the way the sight of that small red sketchbook had shaken him three hours ago over the Atlantic.
"She has my hands," he said softly.
Camille flinched as if he had struck her across the face. She pulled Sophie slightly closer, tucking the child's head beneath her chin.
"She is my daughter," Camille hissed, the maternal instinct overriding the terror for a fraction of a second. "You don't get to claim her now just because you happened to sit in seat 14A by some sick twist of fate. You don't get to draft her into the ledger."
"She is a Vitali," Alessandro replied, his tone chillingly absolute. "That is not a matter of paperwork or permission, Camille. That is blood. And blood does not leave the family just because the mother buys a ticket to Paris."
The car swung off the FDR Drive and rattled over the cobblestones of a quiet side street in Chinatown—a street that looked like any other nondescript block of dry cleaners and import shops, but which hid behind its brick facades one of the most heavily fortified private sanctuaries in Manhattan.
The car descended down a ramp into a sub-level garage lined with concrete pillars three feet thick.
Luca cut the engine. The silence that followed was absolute, broken only by the ticking of the cooling metal under the hood.
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"Where are we?" Camille asked, her voice dropping into a register of pure panic as she looked out the tinted window at the sterile, gray-walled bunker.
"Not a cell, Camille," Alessandro said, opening his door and stepping out into the cold damp air of the garage. He turned back, his face unreadable in the overhead sodium lights. "A safehouse. Until I know who else knows she exists."
