Once the newcomers were only a few feet away, the man released the boy’s hand. He bent down and muttered a few low words—Russian words—to the boy. His hand skimmed the dark, short hair of the boy, and then he patted him on the side.
With a nod and nothing more, the boy walked a few steps off the stone pathway, his hands held out, as he couldn’t see with those sunglasses of his, and came to a stop at a cracked, weather-beaten, marble bench. The boy sat down, and stared off to the side, silent.
“How’s his eyesight?” Alberto asked.
The Russian man’s gaze cut to Alberto with a flash of pain. “Better, but it’s difficult when he’s outside. The brightness of the day makes his eyes hurt. Frankly, the brightness of any light hurts his eyes.”
Alberto cleared his throat. “Your other boy, why not bring him?”
“He’s too old. He understands much more. He favors his uncle.”
Alberto nodded. “Your girl, then? I heard you had a daughter, Vasily.”
The Russian’s stare dropped to the blonde, green-eyed girl at Alberto’s side.
“She was occupied,” Vasily murmured.
Alberto chose not to push, but he believed Vasily’s reasons for not bringing another one of his children to the meeting were different from the ones he had given. Perhaps because the sight of a ten-year-old boy wearing sunglasses to protect his damaged eyes caused by a bomb that Alberto had ordered to be set was enough to cut at even the hardest and coldest of men.
Children should not be brought into the affairs of the mafia, if it could be helped.
After half a decade of fighting between the Markovic Bratva and the Gallucci Cosa Nostra, a street war that killed nearly thirty men between their respective organizations, a single bomb had quieted the streets.
But not in the way Alberto wanted it to.
He’d intended to stop the fighting, to reclaim part of the Brooklyn streets leading into Little Odessa that had always been the Gallucci grounds. A great portion of his family’s business was tied into the warehouses and connections they had made. When the Russians started to push back against the Gallucci’s demands, it had all snowballed from there.
A shouting match led to a sit-down.
The sit-down led to name-calling.
Italians and Russians simply didn’t work well together. They were two entirely different criminal organizations, following codes that might have seemed similar on the surface, but were actually quite different in some ways—from family dynamics both in and out of their respective organizations, and even from the way the two conducted business. Cosa Nostra was steeped in tradition and smothered by rules. Working with other organizations outside of their systems and beliefs was practically impossible.
Alberto brushed off his inner thoughts, knowing they weren’t important now. “Violet, what’s that game I asked about?”
His green-eyed daughter was staring at the quiet boy twenty feet away on the marble bench.
“Counting clouds,” Violet said in her childish, sweet voice. “We count clouds to be quiet.”
“Why don’t you go do that for a bit, huh?” Alberto was going to tell his daughter to leave the boy alone and find her own spot to play—Violet had a knack for annoying others at times—but she was already making a beeline for the bench. “Well, at least they will be entertained.”
Vasily’s lips curled up at the corner in what seemed to be disgust, but he quickly tampered back the reaction when his son patted the bench as Violet approached with her quiet hello.
“Kazimir is a guarded boy … even for his age.” Vasily glanced to the side and took in his son, who was openly chatting away with Alberto’s daughter. “Or he usually is, anyway.”
“Violet doesn’t let people have walls,” Alberto replied, chuckling. “She barrels right through them with a smile.”
For a moment, one second of suspended time, they were just two fathers taking in the sight of their children enjoying the company of each other. It was simple. It was innocent. It was peaceful, something both had longed to provide them with.
But in the end, the pair had come to this place with a purpose. One that Alberto could no longer put off.
“Why were you the one to finally accept my offer of a meeting?” Alberto asked. “I expected your brother. He is the boss, isn’t he?”
Vasily bared his teeth when he flashed a smile. A cold smile. “Gavrill has no intention of backing down against your family.”
That was not what Alberto expected to hear. It set him on edge instantly, and he once again found himself sweeping the graveyard with his gaze, looking for something he might have missed. Had he made the wrong choice in doing this with the Russian?
“Worry not, comrade,” Vasily said like he could read Alberto’s mind. “The graveyard was a good choice to meet up. No one would ever desecrate the final resting place of so many souls, no? And our children, of course. I wouldn’t have brought my boy along, had I thought for a second that you might hurt him.”
Again, Alberto added silently.