He is quiet for a moment.
"I am sorry, I was the second kind. I thought if I took the second of his, the second of mine would come back. I have known that is not how it works since the morning of February 13, 1988, when I sent the baby away, and my Demetrios was still gone."
I look at Sean.
His face is doing the thing I have only seen it do once. In the cabin. The morning after the warehouse. When he drank my coffee and pretended he did not know what was happening to him.
He is deciding not to be.
Luca's weapon comes up.
He steps off the threshold. The muzzle at the base of Kostas's skull. He has heard everything about Frank. He has heard everything about Maria.
"Sean."
"No."
"Why?"
I watch Sean take a breath. The breath of a man about to say something out loud for the first time.
"He dies in a federal cell. We get the client list. The operating ledger. The names of all Stavros’ assets across the three governments. The receipts on Frank. The receipts from the Bronx warehouse. The receipts on the woman in the chair behind me. He dies on the floor of a federal infirmary in three months, and his death is the death of his entire architectureinstead of the death of one old man in a wheelchair. That is not mercy. That is strategy. This is what I do."
Luca does not lower the weapon.
"He lit the match on our mother."
"He did."
"And you want him alive."
"I want his architecture dead. He goes with it. Twelve weeks. Maybe sixteen. I am asking for sixteen weeks of his life so I can take forty years of his work."
Luca breathes once. He lowers the weapon. He does not look at Sean when he says it.
"You really are one of us."
"I am something new."
I look at Sean.
He is something new. A man who can do what the badge will not allow and use the badge to make the doing clean.
Luca goes back to the threshold.
Now.
The federal agents are nine minutes out. I have been holding three names in my mouth since a container in Red Hook. I have been holding them since before that. Since the morning at the cabin, when I read the file and understood whose architecture I was actually inside.
I stand.
The zip ties are cut. The legs have been in the chair too long. I do not let them show it.
I walk to the wheelchair.
I stand in front of Kostas Stavros.
He looks up at me.
