But that day, he had snuck out of work early to watch. Toward the middle of the game, a scrawny boy with tanned skin took a nasty spill, and someone’s cleat gashed his cheek. It was a superficial wound, so Vincent grabbed a first-aid kit from the car, sparing the boy a trip to the emergency room. “Thanks, Doc,” he’d said. “Oh, what did the doctor say when the invisible man asked for an appointment?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Sorry, but I can’t see you today.” He laughed hysterically at his joke. “Get it? Can’t see you? You know, because he’s invisible!”
Vincent smiled. “I get it.”
Halftime began as he finished fixing the boy’s wound, and Carmine ran over. “Dad! You came!”
Intense guilt hit him. “I did.”
Carmine threw his arm around the boy’s shoulder. “This is my best friend, Nicholas.”
Those words caught Vincent off guard. Carmine’s teachers all reported the same thing—he was closed off and shut down, so much so that it was as if he weren’t there.
Vincent’s pager went off as he stood there, the moment lost in that split second as the beeps rang out. The sparkle in Carmine’s eye dissipated, the child Vincent had grown accustomed to returning without a single word spoken.
But all hope was not lost, Vincent realized, because Carmine had someone. Someone he could be Carmine around—the young, innocent boy, haunted by demons others couldn’t see.
After their fallout, he watched his son spiral out of control. He was walking down the one path Vincent wanted him to stay far away from—the path leading straight to Chicago. But then she happened. The girl who had never been able to call her life her own taught a boy who had the world at his fingertips exactly what it meant to live. He wasn’t alone anymore.
Nicholas, however, was.
Vincent never forgot the joke he had told him that first day, because Nicholas was a lot like the invisible man. Drifting his way through life, unnoticed by most. Vincent saw him, though, even if he couldn’t fix him. And as he stood on that pier under the cloak of darkness, he wished he would have done something more to help.
He gazed down at the water, fixated on the spot where Nicholas’s body had disappeared moments before, and felt nothing but disgust. He had watched the boy grow up and had now sent him to a watery tomb like many of his adversaries.
“Oggi uccidiamo, domani moriremo,” he said, his gloved hand making the sign of the cross. Today we kill, tomorrow we die.
Vincent headed to his car hidden in the trees, and he drove away from Aurora Lake without looking back. He had already cleaned up the house, having hosed down the driveway and redistributed the gravel to hide all signs of the incident, but he had bigger issues he needed to deal with.
* * *
As soon as Vincent made it home, he slipped inside the room under the stairs and headed down into the basement. The place was cleaned out, the crates relocated elsewhere, so he had no problem navigating the room. He reached the large bookcase along the back and opened a metal electrical box on the wall beside it. He slid a section of panel down, revealing a small keypad, and punched in the numbers 62373.
There was a loud click. He slid the panel up, closing the electrical box as the bookshelf shifted a few inches. The door led into a safe room, or what his youngest referred to as the dungeon. The room, not much larger than a prison cell, had steel reinforced walls layered with bulletproof Kevlar.
It was the kind of room few men went into and even fewer came back out of alive.
He flicked a switch along the side, and fluorescent lights lit up the small space. He squinted and blocked out the blinding glare with his hand. Groans rang out from the corner where Johnny lay shackled to a table on the concrete floor.
“Vincent.” The voice was barely audible. “Help me.”
“I will,” Vincent said, “but first you’re going to help me.”
“I can’t move. I can’t feel my legs.”
“I know. The bullet hit your spinal cord.”
“A bullet? I’m paralyzed! Oh God, my legs!”
Vincent sighed with annoyance. “Toughen up.”
“What happened?” Johnny struggled to move. “My f**king legs!”
“What happened is I got a call that someone was at my house, so I came home to investigate and found my son unconscious, his girlfriend missing, an innocent kid dead in my front yard, and you injured. You, at the scene of an attack on my family. So how about you tell me what happened.”
“I, uh, I don’t know . . . I got shot, and I don’t know how or who . . .”
Vincent said, leaning against the table and crossing his arms over his chest. “I understand how this life is. We get drawn into things that get out of control, but it’s not too late to fix it. I need you to tell me what Nunzio wants with the girl.”
“I can’t!”
Vincent could sense his panic and fought to keep his expression calm so as not to alarm him further. “You have to be in pain, and you need your wound cleaned before infection takes hold. It’s your only option.”
“I can’t tell you anything,” he said. “I don’t know anything.”
“You’re lying,” Vincent said. “You wouldn’t go along with something unless you knew why. Where did he take her?”
“You have to believe me, Vincent. I can’t tell you!”
“You can tell me, you just won’t! There’s a difference, and that difference is as vast as life and death.”
“Please!”
He shook his head. “Don’t beg! It’s unbecoming of you.”
“You have to understand—”
“No, you have to understand. They’ve taken something important from me, and I’m not going to stop until I find her. If you want even the slightest chance of making it out of this room alive, you’ll tell me what I need to know.”
“If I tell you anything, they’ll kill me.”
“If you don’t tell me, I’ll kill you,” he said. “And I won’t take mercy on you. Every minute she’s out there, you’re going to be right here, and I’m not going to end your suffering until she’s back where she belongs.”
* * *
The tension was so thick you could cut it with a knife. Carmine had heard the phrase so many times, but it wasn’t until that moment, sitting in that immaculately clean car and fighting back nausea at the stench of fresh leather, that he finally understood what it meant. It was stifling, the hostility rolling from the man beside him too much to take.
Carmine had a fractured rib, a broken nose, and a mildly sprained wrist on top of the concussion. Vincent had called in a favor, and one of his colleagues agreed to see him off the record. Despite Carmine’s insistence he didn’t need any doctors, Vincent demanded he go, and when Vincent DeMarco demanded something, even Carmine couldn’t say no. So when Corrado arrived in town, the two of them had set out for a clinic while his father stayed back to deal with the devastation.
“You’re not gonna kill that doctor I saw, are you?” Carmine asked, the heavy dose of morph**e in his system clouding his thoughts.
Corrado said nothing, and Carmine wasn’t sure whether that was good or bad.
“I don’t think you should,” he said. “He’s just a doctor.”
“Carmine?”
“Yeah?”
“Shut up.”
Carmine decided then he should probably shut up.
Disoriented, he glanced at the clock on the dashboard and saw it was midnight. Haven had been gone for twelve hours, and the clock kept ticking as if the seconds didn’t matter.
He sighed, the strain in the car growing.
Carmine felt like he could breathe again when they reached the house and put some space between them. He headed inside and paused in the foyer as his father stepped out of the room under the stairs. Corrado shuffled in and closed the front door. “Has he talked?”
“No,” Vincent said. “He’s given me nothing.”
Corrado brushed past Carmine, giving Vincent a peculiar look before disappearing into the room. Vincent muttered something under his breath, refusing to look at Carmine as he strode away. Carmine sat down on the steps, putting his head down and rocking back and forth for a while, before pacing the hallway. As the morph**e faded from his system, so did his patience.
Eventually, he heard footsteps on the stairs as Vincent approached at the same time Corrado stepped out, both men stopping in the foyer. Carmine looked between them, his last bit of control slipping. “Why are you just standing there? Can’t you do something? Anything? Christ!”
Before the last word was verbalized, Carmine was jerked by the back of his collar and slammed into the wall. He lost his breath as Corrado shoved a gun to his fractured rib. “Have you still not learned your lesson? Is one of us going to have to die before you realize this isn’t a game? These are our lives you’re messing with, and I, for one, will not tolerate you endangering me more than you already have! I don’t care whose child you are.”
Carmine’s heart pounded rapidly. He didn’t doubt for a second that his uncle would shoot him.
“Corrado,” Vincent said. “Let him go.”
Corrado released Carmine and swung around, turning the weapon on Vincent. Carmine inhaled sharply as he watched it play out. Vincent stood as still as a statue, not blinking as he stared down the barrel of Corrado’s gun.
“You keep pulling me in deeper and deeper, Vincent,” Corrado said, lowering his pistol.
“I know,” Vincent said.
Corrado turned to Carmine. “That mouth of yours is going to get every single one of us killed. If you can’t close it yourself, I’ll close it for you.”
* * *
The next day dawned when Carmine made his way up to the third floor, his chest constricting as he pushed open his bedroom door. He sat on the edge of the bed and grabbed a pillow, clutching it to his chest as tears formed in his eyes.
Every bit of composure he had was ripped away as he inhaled Haven’s scent, which lingered there. The grief swallowed him, refusing to let go until his father interrupted in the middle of the afternoon. “We’re leaving for Chicago soon,” Vincent said.
Carmine set the pillow down and wiped his tears, cringing at his torn, blood-splattered clothes. “I should change.”
“I prefer you stay here in case she shows back up.”
Carmine laughed bitterly as he stood. “She’s not a lost dog. She didn’t wander out of the backyard and get lost in the woods somewhere.”
“I understand, but you should reconsider. It’s dangerous and—”
“I’m going,” Carmine said, cutting him off. “If you don’t want me to go with you, I won’t, but I’ll be on the next goddamn plane whether you like it or not.”
“Fine, but you need to watch yourself, son. You can’t run off on a vigilante mission. I can’t focus on getting her back if you’re out there wreaking havoc and counteracting everything I’m doing.”