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O’Reilly was visibly putting the pieces together. “Didn’t realize her Joey was your Joey. He was in the war?”
“Mm. Marine, in the Fifth Regiment attached to the Second Division. Died in the Battle of the Somme.”
The agent sat forward, his face relaxing into an expression of interest. “No kidding. I was in the Second, Army side, but my regiment left that part of France before Somme. Worked with the Fifth for a while in ’17, though. Say, did your brother ever mention a Sergeant Brentwood?”
Lorenzo shook his head, almost wishing he could nod instead. That they could find some common ground other than Sabina, something to make this man see that Lorenzo wasn’t his enemy—ultimately, the two of them were on the same side. “Sorry. Plenty of sergeants made their way into his stories, but none of them were Brentwood.”
Roman’s gaze went distant and his posture relaxed a few degrees, like even thinking about Brentwood—whoever he was— made him look at the world a little differently. “He was a good man. When I first met you, at that birthday party for your cousin Max—you reminded me of him. I thought…I thought maybe there was one good egg in the bunch.”
Lorenzo didn’t even remember Max’s birthday. He certainly didn’t remember meeting O’Reilly there. Still, the information settled on him like a coarse blanket—warming, perhaps, but uncomfortable nonetheless. “Your opinion of me seems to have changed. Because of Sabina?”
Roman’s eyes flashed flinty again. He tapped a finger onto the table. “Because of this. Because you’re helping him wiggle out of charges for crimes we all know he committed. That you know he committed. It’s men like you that help keep power in the hands of men like him. And it’s men like him that make the streets unsafe for everyone.”
It was on the tip of his tongue to say he’d never wanted to, that he never would again. With this case, these particular charges officially dropped, his duty to Manny was finished. His career as a Mafia lawyer was over. But what did it really matter what Roman O’Reilly thought of him? His greater point still stood. The Mafia was a monster with many heads, many hands, many feet. Try as he might to separate himself from it, he’d never fully succeed—not as long as he ate at Manny’s table and called his family famigghia.
He heard Helen Gregory’s voice down the hall, reminding him again of his own weaknesses. Mafia blood didn’t just stain his streets and his family’s hands; it flowed in his veins.
He could claim all he wanted that he wasn’t one of them. But the hard glint in Roman O’Reilly’s eyes said he still had a long way to go to prove it, and the memory of Helen Gregory’s kiss agreed.
