HIS MAFIA HEIR SHE HID FOR SEVEN YEARS

now, somewhere public and neutral, where they could talk without an

Elena almost asked what it meant. Something in Frank's face told her not to-a tightness around his eyes, the particular stillness of a man choosing, very deliberately, not to react to something.Dante didn't look back once he'd passed through the door. Elena watched the space where he'd been for a moment longer than she meant to, aware of Frank beside her, aware that whatever composure he'd been holding together for the last thirty seconds was costing him something visible.It wasn't until Dante's car had pulled out of the alley and disappeared around the corner, taillights swallowed by the dark, that Frank turned to Elena, and whatever professional calm he'd managed to hold together in front of Dante fell away entirely, all at once, like a held breath finally let go."Ms. Cross." His voice had dropped low, almost a whisper, though there was no one left in the alley to overhear them. "Do you know who that is?"• • •"I know him," Elena said carefully, wrapping her arms around herself against a cold that had nothing to do with the night air.Frank studied her for a moment, like he was deciding how much a person deserved to know before it became too late to warn them at all. "I worked a security contract at a restaurant downtown, years back. Before this job." He glanced toward the empty street where the car had disappeared, like saying it out loud might somehow summon it back. "There was a night a man got out of line with one of the Marchetti associates. Nothing dramatic-a shove, some words, the kind of thing that happens in any restaurant on any given Friday. Wasn't even Dante himself in the room. Just someone connected to the family, sitting three tables over.""What happened?""That man didn't come back to work the next week," Frank said. "Or the week after. His manager told us he'd quit, moved out of state for a family thing. Nobody in that restaurant ever said otherwise, not out loud, not once, in six years of me working there. Nobody ever said what actually happened. Nobody had to. You could feel it in the way people stopped saying his name, the way conversations just steered around the empty space where he used to stand."Ele