"You would have been a Moretti."
"I would not. I am Frank Donovan's son, the way you are Vittorio Moretti's son. Frank raised me. Frank loved me. Frank died trying to give me back. Same as you are your father's, even though you spent fifteen years proving you were not."
He looks at me for a long second.
"Go on."
Frank finished the letter in my head an hour ago. This is the rest of it.
"I am going to stay with the NYPD."
Matteo's head turns. Marco's hand goes to his hip. Alessandro does not move — because Alessandro is the only person in the room who has already understood what I am about to say.
"I keep the badge. I keep the caseload. I keep the partner. And I start looking the other way on the right things."
I hold his eyes.
"Moretti Global. MGS. MGRE. Anything inside the family ledger. A closed file. If somebody in OCB starts looking, Ifind out before they do and I tell you. Everything that touches the family from the outside — Stavros, federal interest, foreign syndicates — I see it before they get to the door. You decide. And I make sure the decision is the decision NYPD does not see being made."
"You are offering me your position."
"The career was to put me in the position. The position is what I am giving you."
"For what?"
"For her."
The room does not move.
Alessandro is looking at me the way he has been looking at me since I walked in — taking the measure of something he has not yet decided whether to trust.
"Take it or leave it."
"Take it."
He holds my eyes for one more second. The second of a man making a decision he is going to live with for the rest of his life.
"Then leave. But your woman is on a freighter at dawn."
I do not move.
"Are you walking out that door, Detective Donovan?"
"No."
"Good."
He nods once. "That is the part I was waiting for."
The elevator opens behind me.
Luca walks in.
The file on Luca Moretti does not account for what happens when he walks into a room.
What happens is the room gets smaller.
Dark clothes. The kind a man wears when he has been doing work he would not write down, and the work has been the only work he has ever wanted to do.
