Chapter 13 - MARCO’S SON
Marco had no son.
That was what I thought.
That was what everyone thought.
His wife, Teresa, had miscarried twice. After that, Marco never spoke of children. If someone mentioned fatherhood around him, he left the room.
But Elena’s whisper changed the shape of the betrayal.
He has my son.
I went to Teresa Ricci myself.
Tony wanted to come.
I told him no.
Some doors a man must knock on without soldiers behind him.
Teresa opened the door of their modest house in Whitestone with swollen eyes and a kitchen knife in her hand.
When she saw me, she did not lower it.
“Is he dead?” she asked.
“No.”
She almost collapsed from relief, then caught herself and remembered she hated me.
“Where is your son, Teresa?”
Her face crumpled.
So there was a son.
“A boy,” she whispered. “Matteo. Five years old. Not mine by blood. Marco found him during a collection two years ago. His mother overdosed. No family. Marco brought him home and said just for one night.”
“But he stayed.”
She nodded. “Marco loved him. More than anything.”
“Why hide him?”
“Because men like you use what men love.”
I accepted that.
“Where is he?”
Tears spilled down her face. “Gone. Three weeks ago. Harlan’s people took him from the playground. Marco came home with blood on his shirt and said he had to do what they wanted or Matteo would disappear forever.”
The room seemed to tilt.
Marco had betrayed me.
But Harlan had built the cage.
“Why didn’t he come to me?”
Teresa laughed bitterly. “Because you’re Dante Romano. Everyone knows your rules. Everyone also knows your punishments.”
That was the cruelest truth of all.
My rules were meant to protect children.
My reputation had made a desperate father too afraid to ask for help.
Teresa lowered the knife.
“There’s a place,” she said. “Marco kept saying it in his sleep.”
“What place?”
“Saint Agnes.”
The name pulled something from memory.
An abandoned Catholic school near the border of Queens and Brooklyn.
Closed ten years ago.
Bought last year by a shell company.
Harlan had not moved everyone through Red Hook.
May you like
He had kept insurance.
And that insurance was a five-year-old boy named Matteo.
