Jino hands me fins and an oxygen tank, then demands I use them properly so I can survive the underwater trip we'll take together.
Lorcan leads me aboard a party boat, turns up the music, hands me drugs and a drink, and makes me float on the current with him.
All three of these acts are dominance. All three are control. All three involve me submitting to someone else's authority.
But only one of them makes me feel like I'm drowning on purpose.
Only Giovanni.
I stare at my reflection in the window.
Giovanni's collar gleams back at me.
What is happening here?
19
Little Italy looks like a historical reenactment designed to launder money.
I crawl the Aventador down Mulberry at ten miles per hour—any faster would be disrespectful, any slower would be weakness—and catalog the storefronts like I'm reading a ledger.
Pork store on the left, display case full of soppressata and capicola.
Bakery on the right, sfogliatelle in the window arranged like soldiers.
Social club with blacked-out windows, the kind of place where men go in at noon and don't leave until the espresso runs cold and the blood runs hot.
Every business on this block pays tribute to Luca LaRiccia.
Every old man sipping espresso at those sidewalk cafes reports to him.
The tenements crowd both sides of the street, fire escapes creating permanent lattices of shadow. Pre-war construction, built when Little Italy actually meant something instead of being three blocks of tourist traps surrounded by Chinatown.
The LaRiccias held onto this territory through sheer ruthlessness—three generations of making examples out of anyone who thought relocation meant negotiation.
The Aventador's engine purrs like expensive violence.
Heads turn. Conversations pause. An old woman carrying groceries actually crosses herself.
I'm not supposed to be here.
The pedestrian entrance passes on my right—those fifteen-foot wrought iron gates depicting grapevines and wolves, the courtyard beyond, the bronze doors that require an intercom announcement and permission to enter.
I pull around the corner to Hester Street where the garage entrance waits. Steel gates, security cameras in all four corners, the kind of setup that processes fifty vehicles a day and remembers every single one.
Two guards materialize before I even stop moving.
Impeccable black suits. Earpieces. One flanks the driver's side, one the passenger, synchronized like they've done this ten thousand times.
The LaRiccia building looms above me—five stories of 1920s Art Deco limestone, BANCO NAPOLITANO still carved above the entrance.
Luca's up there somewhere.
He's been watching me since I turned onto the block.
The guard on my left taps the window with two knuckles.
I slide the window down.
