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“Okay,” I say.

He nods once and picks the box up off the dresser.

“What are you going to do with that?”

“Find the kid on the bicycle,” he says. “Then find who paid him. Then find who paid that man.” He looks at me over the open lid. “And then I’m going to have a conversation with each of them, and you’re going to sleep through all of it.”

“And Luca?”

His smile turns lethal. “This time, I won’t ask which part to remove first.”

He means it to comfort me. It doesn’t. And it doesn’t make me want to run, either, which scares me more than anything else that has happened tonight.

It makes me want to reach for him.

So I do. I grab a fistful of his open collar and feel the heat of his skin against my knuckles, and I pull him down and kiss him.

The office was a wound breaking open. This is slower and darker, a choice made in a quiet room with a threat to my son sitting on the dresser, and both of us knowing exactly what he is.

His hand comes up to my jaw. The other slides to my waist and hauls me into him. A sound I didn’t plan on comes loose in my throat, and he swallows it and kisses me like he intends to take his time with every inch of me, and I let him, right up until he lifts his head.

“Wear green tomorrow,” he says against my mouth. “Let them all wonder.”

Then he takes the box and goes. I listen to his footsteps on the stairs, all the way down, past the ground floor, to wherever it is in this house that men like him go at night.

I sit on the edge of the bed in the dark for a long time, lips still warm, body still humming, and I don’t let myself wonder where that is.

Not yet.

Enzo

The kid on the bicycle took forty minutes to find. He was nineteen and looked fourteen, and he cried, and I gave him two hundred dollars and sent him home to his mother. Boys like him are not part of this.

The man in the Mets cap who paid him took three hours.

He’s in the chair under the single bulb now, the one my father had wired into the basement ceiling thirty years ago. Carmine has already done the part with the hands. I didn’t ask him to. Carmine has watched Matthew eat cereal at my kitchen table.

I open the box from the dresser and take out the rabbit mask.

“You bought this,” I say. “Two dollars. Party store on Fordham Road. You picked the one with glitter.”

He tries to talk around the blood. I don’t need him to. Luca’s name is already on the paper in Carmine’s pocket.

I stretch the elastic and fit the mask over his face. The tall ears tip forward. Glitter in his eyelashes.

“You sent this to my son.”

It’s the first time I’ve said it to anyone but her. My son. I say it to a man who won’t live to repeat it.

“River,” I tell Carmine. “Leave the mask on. When they pull him out, I want Luca to see it on the news.”

In the kitchen, I wash my hands until the water runs clear. Then I climb the stairs, past his mother’s door, and open Matthew’s a crack. He’s asleep sideways, one foot off the mattress, a stuffed rabbit crushed under his arm.

I fix his blanket. I tuck the foot back in.

Then I stand in his doorway until the sun comes up.

CHAPTER 20