Chapter 6 - The Glass Fortress
The next morning, the Hudson Street estate did not wake to the smell of coffee.
It woke to the sound of diesel engines.
Four black Suburbans were parked bumper-to-bumper along the curb. Eight men in dark topcoats—not the usual neighborhood muscle, but the heavy hitters from the North Side crew who answered only to Vincent—stood at thirty-yard intervals along the iron fence.
In the second-floor conservatory, where the morning sun cut through high panes of frosted glass, Emma was painting.
Vincent sat in a wicker chair across from her, a legal pad on his lap. He had not looked at the contracts on the pad in twenty minutes. He was watching the way she mixed red and yellow to make the color of a peach.
"Your father won't come back," Vincent said.
Emma didn't stop her brush. "I know."
"Are you sad?"
She dipped the brush in the cloudy water glass, watching the water swirl into a murky sunset.
"He was always leaving anyway," she said. "Now he just did it with you watching."
She looked up at him, her dark eyes entirely too old for her small, round face.
"Are you going to shoot your nephew?" she asked.
Vincent’s pen stopped against the yellow paper.
"Who told you about Marco?"
"Gianni," she said, painting a green leaf on her paper. "He was yelling at the butcher. He said Marco is a dog who doesn't know who owns the yard. Dogs get put down when they bite."
Vincent sighed. The sound was long, dry, and came from the bottom of his lungs.
"Gianni talks too much," the Don murmured.
"My mama says killing people is a sin," Emma said. "She says God has a big book, and every time you do something bad, an angel writes it down in red ink. If you have too much red ink, you can't go to the garden."
Vincent looked out through the glass of the conservatory.
Down below, the city was waking up. Steam rose from manhole covers; yellow cabs darted through the slush like bright beetles; regular people—clerks, bakers, teachers—were walking to the subway with their paper cups and their umbrellas, entirely oblivious to the fact that forty feet above them, an old man was calculating the tonnage of his own damnation.
"My book is almost entirely red ink, Emma," Vincent said.
He hadn't intended to say it. The words slipped out, greased by the strange, clean light of the greenhouse and the rhythm of her small, wet brush.
Emma stopped.
She laid the brush down on the porcelain tray.
She walked across the tiled floor, her pink socks silent, and stopped between his knees. She reached out and took his left hand—the one that had held Julian against the wall twelve hours earlier—and turned it over.
She traced the deep, jagged scar that ran from the base of his thumb to the center of his palm—a souvenir from a Sicilian knife fight in 1968.
"My teacher says you can use an eraser," she whispered.
Vincent smiled, a small, genuine smile that reached all the way to the corners of his eyes, crinkling the dry skin.
"Some ink doesn't erase, little bird."
"Then you just write something nice over it," she said, leaning her forehead against his wool-clad shoulder. "Until the red gets covered up."
Vincent sat very still.
He did not breathe. He was afraid that if he moved, the warmth of her small head against his collarbone would evaporate, leaving him once more in the cold, cavernous stone of the house he had built as a monument to his own grief.
Slowly, his broad, scarred arm came up.
He did not hug her—he didn't know how to do that anymore without feeling like he was going to break something—but he rested his heavy palm against her back, his fingers curling gently around her small shoulder.
In the doorway of the conservatory, Rachel Dawson stood with a basket of folded linen.
She watched the most terrifying man in the city resting his cheek against her daughter’s dark braids.
She did not make a sound.
May you like
She turned, walked back down the hall, and for the first time in five years, she didn't look over her shoulder.
***
