“She got out at a red light. Said without Nico, there’s no point.”

“Will she be okay?”

“Yes.” He shrugs, running the sponge over my belly and breasts. “She took your ring. She says thank you for it.”

“You should have let Palmeri kill me.”

“I take care of what’s mine.”

“And you use it like the devil.”

He’s not amused, concentrating too hard on the way his fingers run over my belly. “You don’t know what you mean to me.”

“But what about those women? Rosemarie and Wanda and… all of them. What do they mean to you?”

My stomach grumbles under his hand. He gets up.

“You need to eat.”

Chapter 30

CHAPTER 30

DARIO

The fresh stuff is mostly bad, but I find a box of pasta and a can of tomato sauce. I boil the water while she’s upstairs drying her hair.

Joanne. Wanda.

I name them all.

I have Sarah, which is all I want, but we’re alone.

Rosemarie. Nella.

With Nico gone, I have no eyes inside the Colonia. All I have is the sense that Massimo won’t wait to go down to St. Eustatius. He’ll have to be back for the boat into Red Hook though. And the Agostis won’t sit in Queens and shrug off Sergio’s murder. They’ll come for the Colonia and war until they’re wiped out before coming for the hands that actually did it.

Giselle. And Mary.

It’s just me, Sarah, and everything I promised her.

She knows how my life has been, fighting the Colonia. She knows what she’s in for with me. Why would she want to go through it? Who’d want to start it all from the beginning, with nothing but a fire in the gut?

Oria gone. Dafne gone.

How many more will be lost now? I gave them hope, then took it away when they didn’t need it anymore. I can’t betray them and leave them to fend for themselves against an enemy they couldn’t defeat by themselves. I have to give them back what I took.

I can’t force Sarah into the violence and hardship to come. I can’t even manipulate her into sticking around to love me. She has to come to it without any help from me, and even then, I can’t continue to live with her if she doesn’t have a way out.

The pasta’s almost done when she comes downstairs wearing a green dress that stops right below the knee. Finally out of the grotesquely modest Colonia costume, she’s more beautiful than any woman I’ve ever seen.

I have a path of roundabout excuses and setups to explain the situation. I’ve engineered a soft landing, but now, with her right in front of me, I launch into the bad news before she even asks.