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THE FAMILIARITY OF THE SETTING she found herself in burned like heavy incense in Caterina's nose. Above the flimsy wooden table in the centre of the room still hung a muted light, casting long shadows to the right. Less people had gathered to witness her humiliating defeat, she noted grimly, though she knew it had more to do with fear rather than curiosity.
"And so we meet again, Caterina Cardinale."
Life had the most cruel sense of irony. Less than a decade ago she sat around the dinner table with the man before her, breaking bread and drinking wine as if they shared more blood than the string of familiarity that attached them to one island far away in the South.
"Vincente," the brunette greeted curtly while he took his hat off, deliberately setting it on the table, next to her hand. "Let's get this over with."
"Where is your gypsy boy, ragazza? Throwing around horse shit, or robbing widows of their last pence?"
She ignored the jab, not wanting Tommy's name involved in this matter. Instead, she straightened her back, and looked the man in front of her dead in the eye. "I will be back, Vincente. I will take back what is rightfully mine."
"You don't scare me, little girl," Vincente bristled, greying moustache moving with his lips. He would be a fool to fear a twenty-something girl with little to her name.
"I would watch your tongue, my friend," she retorted, not sparing a moment, "You should remember that loyalty of our people doesn't lie in pubs and empty promises, but honour and a justice served."
His sour, patronising smile revealed more than any words he could have said, "But it certainly helps," he paused, singling for one of the men to come forward, "Bring the papers in."
With one stroke of the pen handed to her she signed a death sentence of her dignity. It was a deliberate move, a check mate that brutally cornered her in her own home - that took her home away. With one pained stroke of her pen she hands over all the neighbourhoods that made Little Italy, all the pubs in her hold save two, St. Michael's and the White Horse, in order to pay off the debt she did not create, and solve the conflicts she didn't start.
Her father must be having a field day down in Hell, she reckoned. Today was just another proof that they both failed the family when it needed them the most.
When the curvy tint remained on the paper, she leaned back. A thin, silver case was procured from the inside of her coat, filled with neatly rolled cigarettes, imported. She placed one between her lips, striking a light with a matching silver lighter. A weighty pause enveloped them, the two chess players at the end of a match.
She broke it deliberately, with a question that had been racking her brain for a while,
