Long, drawn out, bloody, and merciless... it's the kind of battle we find ourselves in the middle of now. The city is burning and people are falling as the devastation spreads through the boroughs, touching places it hadn't infected before.

The new king decided it was time to claim more than just the pride lands. He wants those shadowy bits that don't belong to him. He wants the entire kingdom.

The problem, you see, is that most people don't seem to notice. They go about their days like nothing has changed. The casualties barely make a blip in the newspaper, treated as isolated incidents, like they're not even connected.

But they are.

They all add up to a fucked up situation.

One I'm caught smack dab in the middle of.

"He's got to go."

Genova sits across from me in the den of his brick house, frantically puffing away at one of his cigars. Smoke permeates the room. It's locked up tight and has no place to go. My eyes sting from the haze, my chest tightening with every breath. I can feel it scorching my lungs and I'm not even the one smoking.

"Who?" I ask, not entirely sure why I'm here. He asked me to meet him on short notice, saying he had something important to discuss with me.

"The guy," he says. "Scar."

Ah.

Scar.

"He hit one of my safe houses this week," he continues. "Robbed me of a whole gun supply. Took out three of my guys!"

Pity, I think, but I don't say that.

Don't want to piss off a boss any more than I already have.

"He's certainly persistent," I say.

I wish I could say that I was surprised.

I'm not.

"He's a pain in my ass," Genova counters. "He's a fuckin' cockroach I wanna squash! He's got to go, there's no away around it. So I need you to take care of that for me, like you said you were gonna."

I just stare at the man after he says that.

"I never said—"

"You said you were gonna handle the problem."

"I handled it."

"Yeah? So why the fuck is he still breathing?"

Good question.

"He's a boss now," I point out. If what Lorenzo said is true, that he'd been called in to meet with the families, like it or not, he's now one of them. He's off limits. "I can't kill a boss without permission from the others."

I did it once and got away with it.

I won't be so lucky if I do it again.

There are three other families out there who would need to give permission before I could ever touch a man in his position. They're unwritten rules, ones they've admonished me on before.

I can't risk it.

I would.

But I can't.

Not while staying out of it all.

"He's nothing," Genova spats, flicking the ashes from his cigar right onto the floor. "He's nobody! Nobody! He'll never be a boss!"

I don't know if he means what he's saying or if it's the anger talking, so I nod noncommittally and just hope that's enough to get him off my case about this.

"So?" he asks. "You going to take care of this for me or not?"

Or not.

"I'm out," I say. "I've told you that."

He scoffs. "The only out in this life is in a fuckin' wooden box. You've been in for as long as I've known you. Just because you belonged to Angelo—"

"I didn't belong to anybody," I say, cutting him off. "I'm not a made man, Genova. I never took an oath. Never said those vows. Never swore myself to anybody."

"Except your wife, right?" He laughs bitterly. "Or wives, I guess it is. Took oaths for them, didn't you? Swore yourself to them. They're good enough for your loyalty, but what, none of us are?"

He's twisting shit, trying to manipulate me. "It's different."

"As far as I'm concerned, Vitale, it's all the same. It's all love, and respect, and family. You make a vow to a piece of pussy to worship it forever, but you never were man enough to take a vow to commit yourself to the brotherhood with us. After all Angelo did for you, after all he lost… gotta say, that always rubbed me the wrong way."

I can hear the anger in his words, the deep-seeded resentment I always suspected he felt. I declined their sacred invitation, probably the only one who ever did it.

The only one who lived to tell about it.

I got a pass for the rejection because of who I am.

Or rather, who I was.

But I'm not that person anymore.

I'm no longer Angelo's golden boy, the bloodthirsty son-in-law eager to take on the entire world for the cause. I've said it before… there are no friends in this business. There are just people who need you until they don't need you anymore. Either you're on their side or you're standing in their way, and the last place you want to be is in the way of a war.

And I'm standing in the middle of the battleground with nowhere to go.

Pick a side, they're all screaming.

It's a tug-of-war I can't win.

"What would you do now?" he asks. "If I invited you to join us, to be one of us, to vow your loyalty to us after all these years, would you deny the family again?"

"I'm not your enemy," I tell him, evading that question, because he wouldn't like my answer to it. I'm not joining.

"You're not my friend either," he says, "not if you turn your back on us."

Silence permeates the room then. Guards stand in the corners of the space, falling into the darkened shadows, watching, waiting, protecting the man they swore themselves to, a man I'm very clearly pissing off by refusing to join them. But that just wasn't me, despite what they all might've thought. I wasn't made to be a street soldier. I wasn't built to follow orders. I'm not afraid of a man with a gun. Giuseppe Vitale's blood pumps through my veins. As much as the man might hate it, that's an undeniable fact. There's nothing coded in my DNA that makes me a passive pushover… nothing that makes me one of his brainwashed monkeys.

"I knew him," I say.

Genova stares at me. "Who?"

"Scar." I stare back at the man, waiting for a reaction, to see if he knew that. His expression remains blank. I'm not sure if he's just that damn good at wearing a mask to hide his surprise or if he did his homework, too, if he made the connection. It couldn't have been that hard. You see, while Lorenzo's blood came straight from the Gambini family, an Accardi raised him, and the Accardis were always loyal to Genova. That's got to burn. This is personal. "I knew him, long ago. I knew him, and I saw something in him, something that reminded me of myself."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because it won't be easy to squash him, Genova," I say, "not when I helped make him the monster he is."

Genova nods.

No, he's not surprised at all.

"That's why I'm asking for your help, Vitale." He leans toward me, flicking even more ashes onto the floor. "Join us. Help us. Let's put all of this animosity behind us, and let's finally embrace each other as friends."

I stare at him for a moment, considering how to answer, before I just say the words. "I have no friends."