Chapter 4 - Ghosts of the Harbor
The rain had stopped by midnight, leaving the D’Angelo estate shrouded in a thick, sulfurous mist rolling in off the East River.
In the master suite upstairs—a room Roman hadn't slept in since the night Nora vanished—a small nightlight shaped like a yellow duck cast a warm, flickering glow across the king-sized bed. Sophie was fast asleep, her breathing deep and even for the first time in three years, her small hand still clutching the plastic doll with the missing arm.
Nora sat in a velvet chair by the window, staring out at the dark silhouette of the security gates where the red tail lights of Helena's black sedan had disappeared twenty minutes ago. A cup of cold tea sat untouched on the side table.
The door opened silently, and Roman walked in. He had removed his jacket and tie, his white shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbows, revealing the intricate web of scars along his forearms from old turf wars in the docks. He didn't make a sound as he crossed the heavy Persian rug, stopping a few feet behind Nora’s chair.
"She's sleeping," Nora said without turning around. Her voice was barely audible over the hum of the radiator. "She hasn't slept through the night since the landlord turned off the heat in January. Every time a car backfired on the street, she’d crawl under the sink."
Roman pulled a straight-backed chair over and sat down beside her, his large knees nearly touching hers. He looked at the side of her face—at the pale skin beneath her eyes, the tired set of her jaw, the way her shoulders seemed permanently curved under the weight of an invisible burden.
"I didn't know, Nora," Roman said, his voice stripped of all the authority, the coldness, and the menace that defined his public life. For the first time in three years, he sounded like the twenty-four-year-old boy who used to sit with her on the fire escape of their tenement, sharing a single paper cup of coffee and dreaming of a life away from the blood and the grease. "When you left... I thought you chose to go. My mother showed me a letter—supposedly written in your handwriting—saying you were taking the child to California to start over with someone else. A college professor. Someone clean."
Nora turned her head slowly, her slate-grey eyes locking onto his. "You believed she would let me go to California? Roman, nobody leaves the D’Angelos. You know that better than anyone. If I had tried to run on my own, I would have been at the bottom of the bay before I reached the New Jersey turnpike. The only reason we survived in Queens for three years is because your mother thought we were too pathetic to matter—until the money ran out and she needed to cover another hole in her ledgers."
"She's gone now," Roman said. "The freighter left the pier at eleven. She won't reach the Italian coast for ten days, and when she gets there, she'll find out that the monastery doesn't take visitors who haven't signed over every asset they own to the diocese."
Nora let out a dry, humorless sound that might have been a laugh if there was any joy left in it. "And what about us, Roman? What happens tomorrow when the capos wake up and realize the old woman is gone, the accounts are frozen, and the new boss is sitting in the library holding a three-year-old child's doll?"
"They'll do what they've always done," Roman said, his jaw tightening as he reached out and gently laid his rough, scarred hand over hers on the armrest. She didn't pull away, though her fingers remained stiff and cold beneath his palm. "They'll fall in line. Or they'll find out why my father called me the Butcher of Red Hook before I was old enough to legally buy a drink."
He paused, his thumb brushing against her wedding ring—a plain band of white gold that she had never taken off, even when she pawned her mother's earrings to buy groceries.
"I’m not letting you go this time, Nora," Roman whispered, his voice dropping an octave, heavy with a finality that brooked no argument. "You and Sophie stay here. The estate is sealed. Savage has sixty men on the perimeter. Nobody gets in, and nobody gets out without my thumbprint."
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"This isn't a home, Roman," Nora said, looking around the cavernous, silent room with its dark oil paintings of ancestors who had traded in blood and extortion. "It's a mausoleum."
"Then we'll burn it down and build something else," Roman said. "Starting tomorrow."
