Page 24 of Night of Shadows
I stand in the kitchen of the brownstone I have prepared for her, in which my daughter is asleep upstairs. The woman whom I have not stopped thinking about since our night together has just cried in front of me without permission and asked me, in the only way she knew how, to be the kind of man who could see it without making it about him.
I am going to be that kind of man.
Chapter 10
Maeve
The Family Arrives
They come on the fourth day at 10:00 in the morning, three separate vehicles, each one parked at a calculated distance from the brownstone.
I watch them arrive from the upstairs window.
Nora is at my hip. She’s holding Brontos with one hand and pulling on my earring with the other, the small absent-minded tug of a girl who has not yet been told she’s being introduced this morning to the most dangerous men in Boston.
Lex is downstairs. I don’t need to see him to know where he is. I know where he is in this house at any given minute, the way a person knows the weather without looking at the sky.
Cormac comes first. The black SUV pulls up at 9:58. He gets out with two soldiers I do not recognize and one I do, a man named Tomas, who used to drink with my Uncle Brendan at the Black Rose in the years before my Uncle Brendan died. Cormac is bigger than I remembered. He’s six-six and broad and gray at the temples, and he walks the way men who run South Boston Walk. With the deliberate ease of a man who has not had to hurry for anything in twenty years.
Declan is already inside. Has been since dawn. I have not seen him properly yet, but I have heard his voice in the kitchenat six and the small, low laugh he produced when Lex told him about the dinosaur plate.
Dimitri arrives last, at 10:04, on foot from the corner.
He’s walking. The other men drove. The other men parked at calculated distances. Dimitri has been dropped off at the corner and has walked the half-block in the rain that has begun in the last fifteen minutes, the kind of November rain that is not quite cold enough to be sleet but is doing the work of cold. His hair is wet. He’s not wearing a coat. He is, even at this distance through the upstairs window, the most contained man I have ever seen.
I have read about him. He’s the third Konstantinos brother. He’s a year younger than Lex. He’s the one Boston papers describe as the strategist in the family, which is how they describe a man whose role in an organization the papers do not understand. He runs a fund. He’s on three boards. He’s been to Davos. He’s also, by every operational signal I have learned to read, being protected by a Konstantinos, the most dangerous person in this morning's lineup, and he’s the one who has come on foot.
"Bug," I say. "We are going downstairs."
"Okay."
She holds Brontos. I carry her on my hip. I go down the stairs of a man's brownstone to meet the Konstantinos family in his living room.
? ? ?
Lex meets us in the foyer.
He’s put on a jacket. I don’t recall seeing him wear a jacket in the house before. He’s worn shirts and rolled sleeves, and atone point, on a Sunday morning, that soft gray sweater that I can’t think about right now. But the jacket is for his brothers. The jacket is the version of Lex who is performing for the family, which is the version I have not yet seen.
His hand finds the small of my back.
It is brief. Two seconds, maybe less. The hand is warm through my cardigan. The hand is the first place he’s touched me on purpose, and it is doing it now in a foyer with his three brothers and an Irish crime boss waiting in the next room, and it is doing it because he’s decided I need a small physical anchor before I walk into that room.
He removes the hand. He says, very low, "Cormac knows you. Declan is fine. Stavros keeps to himself. Dimitri?—"
He stops.
"Dimitri what?"
"Dimitri sees everything."
"Got it."
We walk into the living room.
Five men stand up at once. The two I do not know turn out to be Stavros, the youngest brother, who has been keeping back at his own request, and a Konstantinos cousin named Andreas, who is here as a logistics person and is at this moment standing in the corner so as not to crowd Maeve Callahan, which is a thing he’s been told to do.
Cormac speaks first. "Maeve."
