Fifteen years of teaching wrestling to teenage boys taught me how bodies move, but it took a Chicago mob boss to show me how they hide agony.

Gia turned her head, looking past Roman’s broad, hunched shoulder toward the bleachers forty yards away.

Noah was sitting on the lowest wooden bench, holding a plastic bottle of water between his hands, his head down, watching his sneakers. Beside him, Victor Lane stood like an obsidian statue, his arms folded across his chest, his eyes scanning the empty upper mezzanine.

Gia looked at the curve of Noah’s adolescent spine, at the slight slump in his shoulders that came from carrying a last name that doubled as a target.

"That's why you brought him to me," Gia said softly, turning back to Roman. "Not to make him a varsity state champion. You aren't interested in Illinois High School Association medals."

"Noah’s father—my younger brother, Anthony—was killed three years ago in an alley behind a casino in Cicero," Roman said, his voice flat, devoid of self-pity, stating the cold geometry of their existence. "Anthony was soft. He liked the money, he liked the Italian suits, he liked the respect, but he never understood the physics of violence. He thought words could negotiate away a blood debt. They found him with two bullets behind his ear."

Roman took a slow, painful breath, his fingers digging deeper into his lower lumbar.

"I took the boy in. But I can't be everywhere. If I go down—if this back gives out on a wet sidewalk or during a meeting in the West Loop—Noah is alone. I need him to know how to break a wrist, how to slip a collar tie, how to drop his center of gravity when someone bigger tries to drag him into a trunk."

"He doesn't need to break wrists yet, Roman," Gia said, using his first name without hesitation. "He needs to learn how to move. Right now, he’s terrified. He watches you walk into a room like an emperor, but he can see that you're dying on your feet. When a kid sees the giant in his life cracking at the seams, it doesn't make him tough. It makes him fragile."

Roman’s jaw tightened, the stubborn pride flaring once more in his dark eyes. "He has to survive."

"Then let me show him how leverage works," Gia said.

Without waiting for his permission, Gia turned toward the bleachers and raised her hand, giving two sharp claps that echoed crisply through the cavernous rafters.

"Noah! On the line!" she called out, her voice shifting back into the resonant, authoritative command of the coaching pit.

The boy responded on instinct. He dropped his water bottle, sprang up from the wooden bench, and jogged across the blue mat, his sneakers squeaking with youthful energy. He stopped three feet from Gia, snapping his hands to his sides, his chest heaving, his eyes darting cautiously toward his uncle.

Roman stood where he was, his charcoal suit holding him together like an iron corset, his face masked in renewed stillness.

"Noah," Gia said, pointing toward Roman. "Underhook drill. Right arm inside, cup the deltoid, drop your level three inches, head in the center of the chest. Show your uncle how we move a heavier opponent without using muscle."

The boy froze, looking at the towering, terrifying Don of Chicago as though he had been ordered to tackle an oncoming freight locomotive.