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He nods and goes.

“Take me home,” she says again, the way she said it before the world fell apart, but quieter now, wrecked. “Please. I need to see Matthew.”

“Carmine’s got the car.” I lift her hand, the one I never let go of, and hold it against my chest. “We’re going home. He’s safe, Stevie. I swear on everything I have, he’s safe, and I’ll keep him that way.”

It’s a promise I have no right to make. The night just proved I can’t keep anyone safe, not even in my own house.

I make it anyway.

Because I’d promise her the moon right now, and mean it, and I will find a way to deliver it or die trying.

And that scares me more than any of the blood on this floor, because it tells me exactly how far past saving I am already as far as this woman is concerned.

The next night, Anthony calls me down to the basement.

The kid on the bicycle who brought the rabbit mask to my gate was nineteen and had been paid sixty dollars by a man in a Mets cap. The man in the Mets cap went into the Harlem River with the rabbit mask still on. This one won’t get off that easy.

The man in the chair is younger than I expected. Twenty-three, maybe twenty-four. Good teeth, cheap boots, a rosary tattoo climbing out of his collar like he thought God might be watching. He isn’t praying now. Now he’s bleeding from the nose and staring at the drain in the middle of the concrete floor as if it’s the most interesting thing he’s ever seen.

Everyone stares at the drain. That’s why it’s there.

“Dario Ferrante,” Anthony says from the doorway. “We picked him up at a cousin’s place in Howard Beach this afternoon. He still had powder burns on his hands.”

Carmine would call him stupid, if Carmine were here and not upstairs with two stitches in his hand and Marta guarding him like a dragon.

“Scared,” I say instead. “From the outside, scared and stupid look the same.”

I take off my jacket and hand it to Anthony. Then I unbutton my cuffs and roll my sleeves to the elbow, one and then the other, slowly, because the boy is watching me do it and I want him to have time to think about why.

Two floors above us, Stevie’s light is off. Matthew is asleep on the other side of the bathroom wall from her, the gray rabbit tucked under his chin. I checked on them both before I came down. I stood in the hall outside her door longer than a man should, listening to her breathe.

Then I came down here.

There are two houses under this roof. She has only ever seen one of them. I intend to keep it that way.

I pull a stool across the floor and sit facing Dario, close enough that our knees nearly touch.

“Do you know who I am?”

He nods. His lip is split, and the nod makes it bleed again.

“Say it.”

“Enzo Accardi.”

“Good. Then you understand that I already know most of what you’re going to tell me. Who paid you. How much. Where the money was left. So this isn’t really an interrogation, Dario.” I lean in. “It’s a test. I want to see if you’ll lie to me.”

“Mr. Accardi, I swear, I don’t know who paid…”

I don’t let him finish. I take his left hand by the wrist, flatten it on the arm of the chair, and bring the heel of my palm down on his first two fingers, once, hard, in a direction they were never built to go.

The sound he makes isn’t a word. It bounces off the cinder block and comes back smaller.

I wait for it to stop. It takes a while.

“That,” I say, when he can hear me again, “was the lie. We’ll count it as the only one you get. Who paid you?”

“Nicky.” It comes out wet and fast. “Nicky Bianchi. He drinks at a place on Rockaway, by the casino. He gave us the envelopes, he gave us the guns, he told us which door.”