“Aiden, you need to calm yourself.”

“Let her take whatever she needs. This is not a negotiation, sir. We firm on that?”

His father stared back into his eyes for a long time and then eventually gave him a flick of his eyelids that Danny took for assent.

He placed his father back on the ground. Nora appeared in the doorway, her temple scraped from Quentin Finn’s nails. She met his eyes and he turned away.

He let out a laugh that surprised even him and took off running up K Street. Quentin had a two-block head start, but Danny cut off through the backyards of K Street and then I Street and then J, vaulting fences like he was still altar-boy age, knowing that Quentin’s only possible destination was the streetcar stop. He came barreling out of an alley between J and H and hit Quentin Finn up at the shoulders and brought him sliding down into the snow in the middle of East Fifth Street.

Christmas lights had been strung up in garlands above the street, and candles lit the windows of half the homes along the block as Quentin tried to box with Danny before Danny ended a series of light jabs to both sides of his face with a torrent of body blows that finished with the one-two snap of a right and left rib. Quentin tried to run again, but Danny caught him by his coat and swung him around in the snow a few times before releasing him into a streetlamp pole. Then he climbed on top of him and broke bones in his face and broke his nose and snapped a few more ribs.

Quentin wept. Quentin begged. Quentin said, “No more, no more.” With each syllable he spat another fine spray of blood up into the air and back down onto his face.

When Danny felt the ache bite into his hands, he stopped. He sat back on Quentin’s midsection and then wiped his knuckles off on the man’s coat. He rubbed snow into the man’s face until his eyes snapped open.

Danny took a few gulps of air. “I haven’t lost my temper since I was eighteen years old. You believe that? True. Eight years. Almost nine…” He sighed and looked out at the street, the snow, the lights.

“I won’t…be a…bother to ya,” Quentin said.

Danny laughed. “You don’t say?”

“I…just want…me…w-wife.”

Danny took Quentin’s ears in his hands and softly banged his head off the cobblestone for a bit.

“As soon as you’re released from the charity ward, you get on a boat and leave my country,” Danny said. “Or you stay and I call this assault on a police officer. See all these windows? Half of them belong to cops. You want to pick a fight with the Boston Police Department, Quentin? Spend ten years in an American prison?”

Quentin’s eyes rolled to the left.

“Look at me.”

Quentin’s eyes fixed in place and then he vomited on the collar of his coat.