love exists & you're included

This, at least, draws Connor’s eyes away from the window. He looks at Ciro in the way he has of looking at people that Dad calls x-ray eyes, a sort of intent, plain, open searching which takes absolutely everything that the recipient is willing to give, consicously or not. Ciro lifts his chin a little, self-conscious, and squares his shoulders. Braced for insult.

Connor thinks for a moment how to encapsulate his critique. He settles on: “You aren’t Don Volpe’s son.”

For a moment Ciro is so floored by the audacity of this that his brain flatly refuses to process it. He sits in his own chair in his skinnyjeans and hoodie, wishing the coffee machine worked so he could at least get a hit of caffeine or SOMEthing to take the edge off of not knowing where his family is, and he thinks the word and says it at the same time: “What?” because Connor knows the full extent of it, and he has never been an asshole about it before. (Ciro does not know this to throw at him, but Connor, too, was an adopted child.)

“What calls have you ever made, Ciro?” Connor asks.

Ciro remains silent, unsure what the question is.

“I’m aware your father decides on the regular who he’d like to live, or die, or answer a question. He organises people, and pieces. Alexei organises, too. And Gion, for his daughter.” (It’s news to Ciro, that Connor knows about Bethanne.) “What have you ever done for your family?”

It is an audacious question. Connor’s not sure he would have asked it with Harry in the same room (he doesn’t think he’d be killed; but he does think it’s needless drama), but Harry is not in the same room, and Ciro has asked directly for feedback. Ciro does not waste much time in coming back with: “I love my family.”

“And that’s enough, in the mafia?” It isn’t, he means.

“Yes!” It is.

“And if someone had a gun to your father’s head, and you had the opportunity, would you be able to pull the trigger? To decide to?” Would he even know how to be that sort of person? Connor sips his cup of tea. This is pleasant conversation, for him. For a moment, a hot flash of it, Ciro is filled with a hatred of this man who sits and makes assessments and sips his stupid cup of tea while he tears into Ciro’s flesh and insults his loyalty to his family.

“Don’t disrespect me,” Ciro says. He has learnt this from is Dad.

“Or what?” Connor asks, lightly. He peers over at Ciro Volpe, mouse of a man. “You’ll tell Daddy?” Let Harry take care of Connor for him, too? This is exactly Connor’s point: Ciro doesn’t have anything dangerous in him, no vindictiveness. He’s, what, petty? That would work for someone who was not the son of a mafioso. Ciro is the wrong man for the role, raised by the wrong people for too long. This boy in a life of crime is going to get someone killed. Connor, or Alexei, or Stefano, or Gion. Someone close to him, and he Is either too reckless or too stupid to see it.

Ciro stands. “I’m serious, man. I mean it. Lay off.”

Connor looks him over, very aware that he could press another button and see exactly what Ciro is like when he’s posturing, when he’s decided that someone’s crossed a line. It’s intriguing. Connor would like to know what is on the other side of all this bluster. But he isn’t here to provoke a teenager, so he looks away again, eyes back on the window, watching the snow whirl outside. “People typically think it’s a compliment, when I tell them they’re not capable of murder.”

“I’ve killed someone.”

“That’s not something to tell a homicide Detective,” Connor tells him, flatly, unamused, “and I’m aware.” He has read up on Ciro Volpe, and the death of a Mr Raphael Calombaris. If he’d had the case himself he might have pursued it; as it is, the case is considered closed and was considered that way when he first picked up the file, an accidental death, and Connor suspects it was self-defense, anyway.

The room is getting colder by the second, the residual warmth of the day leeching out into the snow pressed flat up against the glass. They have dressed the windows with furniture (a sofa from one corner of the cafe; blankets from the reading nook), at least as much as is reasonable, but there’s still gaps. Ciro can see his own breath spiral in the air as he thinks, numbly, for something else to say. The problem this homicide detective has is that he doesn’t kill people? That he doesn’t want to? He throws himself back down into his chair, glum. “You don’t gotta be such an asshole,” he says.

“Mr Volpe,” Connor says, and he picks up his weapon to holster it again as he turns to face Ciro, “I don’t like you, because just by existing where you are, you are a danger to yourself and your family. The work people look to you to be doing has to be offloaded to your father, or to Lorenzo, or Gion. You don’t make the decisions because your family doesn’t make you. So when you have to, and they can’t, someone is going to die.”

“Nobody’s going to die.” He won’t let that happen.

“You’re a mafioso’s son.” Connor thinks yes: he will.

“Yeah, OK, well — if that was going to happen, why has nobody talked to me about this?” Ciro demands. “They’re my family. Weird it’s just coming through you.”

“Your family have lost enough children. They’d die for you.” Connor tells him, like it is obvious. (It is). “Personally, I’d rather not.”

“Yeah, well. They love me. And I love them.”

Connor has no comment on this. It is true. He sees it even in the way Alexei speaks of Ciro sometimes as he’s making dinner Connor isn’t going to eat, talking - albeit carefully - about his day, and Ciro’s latest hockey game, and the lizard Alexei “had” to help Ciro smuggle into the Volpes’ mansion. This boy is loved dearly by the people around him: it is going to get everyone killed.

The phone sitting on the table in front of Connor vibrates. It’s a personal phone; he has texted Alexei to tell him that Ciro is with him, sheltering in this storm. Alexei is grateful to know. Connor blacks the screen out and takes another sip of his tea, waiting for the morning to come and the plows to move in and the snow to give way to the sky.

Ciro doesn’t speak again, either, slumped in his seat and feeling maybe-sort-of-kind-of small because of all of this. He is loved. What is wrong with that? What is wrong with any of it? What, ethically, does he have to do about it? He is loved. He loves his family. What does some asshole working as a dirty cop have to say about him and his family and how he works in it all?

“If it’s worth anything,” Connor adds: “I do hope I’m wrong.”