Page 22 of Tender Entrapment

The words came out of him by rote, the way a man crosses himself at a funeral. In the mafia, forgiveness was a sin. Those who hurt the family had to be made an example of. He had said it himself a hundred times, to a hundred men.

He reached the door. His hand closed on the handle.

Camille didn’t beg. She didn’t run to him or grab his arm or perform any of the theater a guilty woman might. She only sat there with her tears falling silently, her chin high, waiting to hear what the Tiger of New York decided her life was worth.

It was the chin that stopped him. Mary used to lift her chin like that.

“Show me,” he said, turning around. “The message. Show me you told Weinberg you were out.”

Her hands shook so badly she could barely work the phone he handed back to her. But there it was, sent two days before the engagement party. “I’m done. Find another way. I won’t do this anymore.” And beneath it, Weinberg’s reply. “You’re done when I say you’re done. Think of Joe.”

Luigi read it twice. Something old and cold shifted inside his chest.

She had tried to get out, and the cop had put his boot on her neck. In Luigi’s own house, Weinberg had reached in and used this woman like a lockpick, and the law would call it good police work.

“You understand what my men expect of me,” he said quietly. “The family was betrayed. Somebody pays. That is the arithmetic I have lived by for thirty years.”

“I know,” she whispered.

“Then know this also.” He sat on the edge of the bed and took her face in both hands, the same hands his enemies feared. “Somebody will pay. But it will not be you.”

Downstairs, his caporegimes were waiting, summoned in the dead of night, hungry for a name. Luigi gave them one.

Weinberg.

He told them the truth, the parts of it they needed. The rat had been an outsider, a civilian with no record, coerced by a detective so desperate to build his career on the Frazetta name that he had blackmailed a young woman with her kid brother’s sentence. And the family’s answer would not be a body in the river. Bodies made martyrs and task forces. No. From tonight, the leak belonged to Luigi. Every word that traveled to Weinberg would be written in this study. They would feed him phantom shipments and empty warehouses until his own department wondered if he had invented his source. And when the moment was right, the recording of a certain detective threatening acertain young woman, which now sat in Donald Silva’s safe, would find its way to Internal Affairs.

“The example,” Luigi told them, “is not what we do to the girl. It is what happens to any cop who thinks he can reach inside this family and use one of ours as a weapon.”

One of ours. He watched the words land, watched his capos understand that the matter of Camille Williams was closed.

It was almost dawn when he came back to his bedroom. She was still awake, sitting exactly where he had left her, as if a wrong movement might break the spell that kept her alive.

“Joe’s lawyer will have a visitor tomorrow,” Luigi said. “A very good lawyer, and he works for me. Your brother will be home by Christmas. Weinberg’s leverage is finished. Soon, so is Weinberg.”

Camille’s composure, which had survived interrogation and confession and a death sentence, broke over a kindness. She wept into his chest, and he held her, this small traitor, this brave and reckless woman who had walked into the tiger’s cage to save her brother and stayed because she loved the tiger.

“Why?” she asked at last. The same question he had asked her.

“Because in forty-six years I have loved two women,” Luigi said. “I buried one. I don’t intend to bury the other.”

He tipped her chin up.

“But understand me, Camille. There is no getting out for you now. No ‘I’m done, find another way.’ You will wear my ring. You will sit at my table. Your family is my family, and God help the next man, cop or crook, who thinks he can touch what belongs to Luigi Frazetta.”

“Is that a proposal?” she asked, laughing through the tears.

“It’s the only kind I know how to make.”

She kissed him, and the last of the night’s arithmetic dissolved. Somewhere below, his men were already working.Somewhere across the city, Weinberg was drafting reports about a shipment that would never come.

Six weeks later, the Frazetta estate hosted its second engagement party of the season. Paulo and Brooke. Luigi and Camille. Joe Williams, home early with his record sealed, drank too much of the good prosecco and toasted his sisters until Lucia cut him off. And if the Don of New York’s most feared family spent the whole evening with his hand at the small of one blonde woman’s back, his capos knew better than to smile about it where the Tiger could see.

He had hunted a traitor and found a wife.

Forgiveness, his father had always taught him, was a sin. Luigi smiled at his bride-to-be across the terrace and decided that, just this once, he could live with sinning.

THE END