Chapter 4 - The Ghost of Don Carmine
The weight of the object was heavy, dense, and instantly familiar.
Damian did not look at the watch right away. For three full seconds, he simply felt the contours of the metal against the calluses of his palm, his nervous system sending an electric jolt straight to the base of his skull. The diameter was sixty millimeters. The silver was worn smooth along the bevels, oxidized into a deep charcoal-gray in the crevices of an ornate, hand-engraved relief.
Slowly, Damian opened his fingers.
The breath left his lungs in a sharp, soundless gasp.
Engraved on the front cover of the hunter-case watch was the ancient crest of the Romano family: an open hand grasping a broken wheel, flanked by two rampant wolves. Above the wheel, carved with a jeweler's chisel fifty years ago, was a jagged, diagonal scratch—a flaw created the night a stray bullet had ricocheted off a concrete pillar in a warehouse in Brooklyn, grazing the man who carried it before burying itself in the river.
"Dad's watch..." Damian whispered.
The syllables were choked, dry as ash, tearing their way out of a throat that hadn't spoken his father's name aloud in four years.
Carmine Romano had carried this watch every day of his life. He had wound it every morning at six o'clock, listening to the rhythmic, mechanical pulse of the Swiss escapement while he drank his espresso and planned the expansion of an empire. When Carmine’s motorcade had been ambushed on the Pulaski Skyway four years ago—the night the family shattered, the night Damian had inherited the throne in a baptism of fire and vengeance—the car had burned down to the steel frame.
They had recovered Carmine's body. They had recovered his signet ring, fused to the bone of his finger.
They had never found the watch.
The investigators had assumed it was stolen by the first corrupt officer on the scene, or melted down in the heat of the gasoline blaze. For forty-eight months, Damian had hunted the men who orchestrated that strike, executing four captains and a rival underboss, searching every pawnshop, every underground fence, every private safe from Boston to Miami for the single piece of his father that was missing.
And now, it was resting in his palm. Dropped from the torn belly of a child's toy.
Damian’s fingers began to tremble. It was an almost imperceptible tremor, but to a man who had never allowed his hands to shake on a trigger, it felt like an earthquake.
He brought his left hand up, his thumb catching the release button on the winding stem.
Click.
The front cover sprang open.
Inside, beneath the scratched sapphire crystal, the hands of the watch were moving.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
It was running. The spring was wound. Someone had turned the crown within the last twelve hours.
Beneath the crystal, taped against the inner enamel of the lid, was a tiny, faded black-and-white photograph no larger than a postage stamp. It showed a young Carmine Romano, laughing in a sun-drenched vineyard, holding an infant Damian high above his shoulders.
Damian’s eyes ripped away from the photograph and locked onto the face of the little girl sleeping on his chest.
Her small nose. The delicate curve of her upper lip. The subtle, aristocratic arch of her browline that had seemed so familiar when she first waddled through the hedges.
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She did not belong to a rival. She was not a stray.
She was Romano blood.
