The Biker's Captive

His father's ring sits heavy on Dante's pinky, the onyx scarred by the bullet that went through the old man's hand before it killed him. Marco Vitale was shot in the back of the head and left in the Gowanus Canal, and the debt he was owed is six months overdue. Domenico Lombardi will not pay it. He slides fifty thousand across a bar table and calls it a gift for Dante's trouble, and then he makes the mistake of mentioning his daughter's inheritance. The agreement was signed by both fathers: pay in full, or surrender the collateral. So Dante sends a car to Brooklyn Heights for a twenty-year-old who works at a bakery on Montague Street. He had seen Chiara Lombardi exactly once, three years earlier at her mother's funeral, seventeen and standing beside her father's pew wearing a face he recognised from his own mirror. When they take the bag off her head he is expecting tears. What he gets is a girl with eyes like river stones who does not blink, and who throws a cup of coffee in his face, and who later sings a Sicilian lullaby through the basement door until he has to tell her to stop, because it is the one his mother used to sing. Chiara is not passive. She gets to a phone and asks dispatch to pass a message to Agent Reeves. At the same time, Dante's uncle Enzo has been taking calls from Lombardi without him, and proposing terms about a captive who is not his to trade: forty Czech rifles and a hundred thousand in cash for a handover at a bakery on Mulberry, done by midnight. Enzo calls Chiara a rat. Enzo's father tried the same thing on Marco Vitale twenty years ago. At home there is Rosa, who is six, has a missing front tooth and a stuffed rabbit she will not let him throw away, and who studies a burnt pancake the way her father studies a man across a negotiating table. This is a dark mafia romance about a man collecting a debt he never expected to collect, a woman who refuses to be anyone's bargaining chip, a family meeting where the chair at the head of the table has been set deliberately too low, and a traitor whose name arrives late. The romance is closed-door, and it ends in a dark kitchen before dawn with a lease crinkled in her hand and a terrible menu written out in his.