men on our block talking about the Italians. Not just the gangsters. All of them. How much they hate them. But I’m working for Italian gangsters.”
“Maybe it’s the men on our block that are wrong, hmm?” James paused. “Perhaps we’re all wrong, and we’re all just people trying to survive.”
“Maybe. And I… I mean, the man I work for, even his own countrymen don’t accept him as one of their own.”
James paused briefly at the slight change of direction. “Don’t they?”
“No. I knew before that they called him the Venetian. Never quite knew why.”
“Why do they?”
“To remind him he’s a half-blood. That even though he was made, which they’ve never forgiven their boss for, he’ll never be as Sicilian as them.”
James laughed humorlessly. “Ah, more than half a decade since the Great War, and yet here men are, squabbling over blood and purity the way they squabbled over land and borders. It never ends.”
“No, I suppose it doesn’t.” Danny rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand. “But now I’m working for him, and I don’t… I can’t decide if…” His thoughts had seemed so clear, but words failed him now. “I don’t even know. Just, nothing seems right. Up is down, black is white, and I’ve sold my bloody soul to the men who killed my brothers.”
“You’ve gone to work for a man who can pay you like no one else,” James corrected. “He’s not the man who killed your brothers. Is he?”
“He’s not. But then why does this all feel so wrong?”
James didn’t answer right away. When he did, he sked, “Do you want to stop working for the Pulvirentis? Or do you just want to do the work without feeling guilty?”
Danny thought about that, the silence in the confessional heavy on his shoulders. “I’m not sure. Don’t know that I could stop working for them if I tried, though.”
James made a quiet sound of acknowledgment, but he didn’t argue. Danny shivered. What did it mean when even a man of God accepted that working for gangsters wasn’t something people did temporarily?
“It’s… It’s more than that, though.” Danny’s heart sped up and his stomach fluttered. “The money and the gangs.”
“How so?”
Danny closed his eyes and rubbed them. “I don’t know what it means, but I want to keep working for them. Working for him.”
“For Battaglia?”
Just the name made the hair on Danny’s neck stand on end. “Aye. I can’t say why. I just… I don’t want to walk away from…him.”
“Do you feel you owe him? After he’s paid you and the lads what he has?”
Danny shook his head even though James couldn’t see him. “No. I mean, I do, but… But that’s not…” He blew out a breath. “I can’t even explain it. It’s not the job or anything else. It’s just… him.”
James was quiet for a while. “Do you think it’s something like Seamus?”
Danny’s throat constricted. He hadn’t heard that name spoken aloud in years, not in reference to that particular lad, and even here in the privacy of the confessional, he was sure everyone in Manhattan had heard it and would know what it meant. That they would all instantly know that Seamus was the only one in the world who’d ever fanned these glowing embers of need that Carmine did now.
Hadn’t Danny himself thought the same thing? How those moments alone with Carmine vibrated with feelings Danny hadn’t known since Seamus had left New York four years ago? This wasn’t the same thing that had been there during those scorching nights with that office clerk last year. That had been fun, and it still made Danny shiver to remember it, but it was nothing like this. He’d never craved that man the way he craved air and water.
“I don’t know,” he whispered. “Maybe. Kind of… Kind of feels that way.”
James laughed softly. “If it is, then it’s no mystery to me why you don’t want to be away from him.”
With some effort, Danny swallowed. “But it ain’t as if I can have him. Or I should even want to. He’s…” He squeezed his eyes shut in the darkness of the confessional.
“He’s one of them?” James offered. “One of the men who’s the reason your brothers are dead now?”
Danny’s throat was suddenly tight again, and he nodded, then remembered James couldn’t see him. “I suppose, yeah.”
Silence hung between them again. Danny thought for a moment that James was letting him compose himself, and maybe he was. Then the priest spoke: “You know, when I went