Franco

The humid night air clung to Franco like a second skin as the black Cadillac rolled through the familiar streets of New Orleans, the French Quarter lights blurring past the tinted windows. Home. The word tasted like blood and milk in his mouth—sweet and metallic, making his stomach twist. He’d been gone for years, bouncing between Miami’s sweaty backrooms and Cuba’s sticky heat, collecting debts with his Lupara and sucking on its barrel like a goddamn pacifier when the shakes got bad. But the old man’s summons had cut through all that noise like a straight razor. “Come home, figlio. We got business.” No explanations. Just a plane ticket and a driver waiting at the airport.

Franco shifted in the leather seat, his malformed head—always swollen, bumpy from old beatings, eyes a little too wide and wild—tilting as he chewed on the knuckle of his thumb. Part of him wanted to laugh. Part of him wanted to blow the driver’s brains out and disappear again. Salvatore Barbi didn’t do second chances. Not after what happened with Angelina. The memory hit him like a gut punch: her soft hands, the way she’d called him her dirty little baby while grinding down on him, the sound of his father’s fists cracking his ribs afterward. Blood’s blood, the old bastard had snarled before banishing him. But you’re no son of mine anymore.

Yet here he was. Twenty-seven years old, still feeling like that scared twelve-year-old who’d earned his father’s love by putting a bullet in a debtor’s skull.

The Cadillac pulled up outside Il Martino, the family’s favorite Italian joint on the edge of the Quarter—a place that smelled of garlic, red sauce, and old money. Red leather booths, dim chandeliers, and waiters who knew better than to look too close. Franco stepped out, adjusting the collar of his rumpled silk shirt, his sawed-off Lupara tucked discreetly in a custom shoulder holster under his jacket. Pacifier’s right where she belongs. His heart hammered with a mix of rage, hope, and that sick, crawling need for approval he hated himself for.

Inside, the maitre d’ nodded without a word and led him to the private back room. Salvatore Barbi sat at the head of a long table like a king on his throne—older now, hair more silver than black, but those eyes still sharp as switchblades. A half-empty bottle of Chianti and plates of veal parmigiana waited. No one else. Just father and son.

“Franco.” Salvatore’s voice was gravelly, laced with that thick Sicilian accent he never shook. He gestured to the chair opposite him with a meaty hand. “Sit. Eat. You look like shit, kid. Miami and them Cuban whores treat you that bad?”

Franco dropped into the seat, his lips twitching into a crooked grin that didn’t reach his eyes. Inside, his mind raced. Look at him, actin’ like nothin’ happened. Like he didn’t beat me bloody and throw me to the wolves. But underneath the anger was that pathetic little-boy ache. Maybe he missed me. Maybe I can be useful again.

“Yeah, Pop,” Franco said, voice a mix of street-tough mobster and whiny kid. He reached for the wine, pouring himself a generous glass. “Cuba’s got good blow and better pussy, but it ain’t home. You called me back for a reason, eh? Or you just wanna stare at your prodigal fuck-up over some pasta?”

Salvatore chuckled low, cutting into his veal with deliberate strokes. The sound of the knife scraping the plate set Franco’s teeth on edge. “Always with the mouth on you. Some things don’t change. But yeah, I got reasons. The family’s got opportunities. Rackets expandin’. And you… you’re still blood, Franco. Even after all that ugliness with Angelina.” His father’s eyes hardened for a split second at the name, but he waved it off like cigar smoke. “I beat the shit outta you, sent you packin’. Spared your life ’cause you’re my son. But time passes. A man needs heirs. Stability.”

Franco’s hand tightened around the wine glass until he thought it might shatter. Angelina. The name alone made heat pool low in his gut—shame, lust, grief all twisted together. He took a long swig, then another, imagining the barrel of his Lupara instead. Don’t think about her soft belly, the way she’d laugh when I cried like a baby. He forced his attention back to Salvatore.

“So what, you want me runnin’ collections again? Shakin’ down the deadbeats on the docks?” Franco leaned forward, his expression eager but edged with suspicion. “I got good at it down south, Pop. Real good. Ain’t no one slips away from Il Bambino.”

Salvatore leaned back, studying him like a prized but unpredictable dog. “We’ll talk business soon enough. You’ll stay at the house. Your old room’s waitin’. But there’s more.” A pause, deliberate, as he took a sip of wine. “I found you a wife, Franco. A good match. Someone who’ll settle you down, give the family legitimacy. She’s agreed. The weddin’s set for next month if you don’t fuck it up.”

Franco blinked, his reddish thoughts scattering. A wife? His chest tightened with a weird rush—excitement, terror, that greedy hunger for something soft and warm to claim as his. A real one? Not some whore I gotta pay to call me baby? But suspicion crept in fast. Who the hell would agree to marry him? The deformed gun-toting freak with the “reputation”?

“Who?” he demanded, voice dropping into a growl. “You gonna tell me, or keep playin’ games like I’m still that snot-nosed kid? C’mon, Pop. Don’t leave me hangin’ here with my dick in my hand.”

Salvatore smirked, forking another bite of veal and chewing slowly before answering. “Eat first. We’ll talk details after you remember how to act like a man instead of a goddamn bambino. But trust me—she’s a looker. Local. Knows the life. You’ll meet her soon enough if you play nice.”

Franco’s mind spun, a chaotic mix of filthy fantasies and old wounds. Part of him wanted to flip the table, demand answers, maybe even cry like he did when things got too big. But another part—the part that still craved his father’s nod—forced a shaky laugh. “Alright, old man. You win this round. But if she’s a dog, I’m blamin’ you.”

New Orleans had not gotten prettier while he was gone. Same wet heat, same river stink, same old men pretending the city still belonged to them. Franco Barbi came back because Salvatore said to come back, and that was the whole prayer. Miami had been exile with better shirts. Cuba had been work. Home was the only place that could still make him feel twelve years old and waiting to see if he was allowed to sit down.

He had been back long enough to put blood on his father’s ledger again. Collections. Introductions. A couple of problems that needed to disappear loud instead of quiet. He laughed when he was supposed to laugh. He called Salvatore ‘dad’ in rooms that mattered. He did not talk about Angelina. Nobody else did either, not where he could hear it. The nickname still followed him around the Quarter like a stray— Il Bambino— and he smiled with his teeth when the older guys used it, because smiling was cheaper than making a scene in front of the don.

The suit was white enough to look expensive under restaurant lamps. The body inside it was the same joke it had always been. Franco knew what he looked like. He had known since he was a kid. People stared because the face was wrong, because the head was swollen and disfigured, because something in him read as baby and monster at the same time. Stares were not interest. Stares were inventory. He had learned to treat them like an insult on sight.

So he did not notice the pale woman who had started turning up at the edge of his days. Not really. A light-haired shape across a street. A quiet figure in a modest dress outside a church the family used for show. Someone in the back of a place on Magazine who looked too long and then looked at her menu. New Orleans was full of leftover people. Franco was busy becoming a son again.

Tonight was supposed to be simple. A sit-down in a dining room that still put out white tablecloths and pretended it was not a courtroom. Salvatore wanted him seen. Franco wanted the old man to keep using his name like it belonged on the books.

He was on his way in, Lupara a heavy private thought under the suit jacket even if it stayed out of sight, when some fool’s gaze hooked on him in the doorway and stayed there.

Franco’s head turned sharp.

She was pale as milk under the foyer light. Very pale. Hair so light it looked almost white, curls caught back like she’d been somebody’s wife all afternoon. Soft body in a plain dress that did not know what to do with her chest and hips. Reddish eyes. Makeup on lashes and brows like she was still trying to draw a face people would accept. For a second she was only another stare.

His mouth went ugly first.

“The fuck you lookin’ at?” The words came out low, mean, New Orleans still stuck in them after Miami.

New Orleans, Louisiana — 1957.

The French Quarter was alive after dark.

Jazz spilled out of open doorways, cigarette smoke hung in the warm night air, and the city’s more respectable inhabitants rubbed shoulders with its less respectable ones beneath the amber glow of nightclub chandeliers. It was a good place to spend money, get drunk, and forget about the things waiting for you at home.

Franco Barbi was doing all three.

He occupied a leather booth near the bar, one short leg crossed over the other, a half-empty glass of Wolf’s Milk resting in his gloved hand. His white pinstripe suit was immaculate, his purple satin shirt practically glowing beneath the nightclub’s dim lighting. A brown leather ammunition bandolier crossed his chest, its buckshot shells polished, a ridiculous little purple pacifier dangling from a blue ribbon. His lupara rested within easy reach.

He looked expensive. He looked important. He looked like somebody who could have a man shot for looking at him incorrectly.

Unfortunately, he also looked like Franco Barbi.

His enormous, grotesquely misshapen skull, patchy blond hair, sunken midface, crooked nose, and bulging, bloodshot eyes were difficult to overlook. The left side of his head bore the unmistakable marks of old surgical procedures and considerably less delicate trauma. He was short, stocky, and prematurely weathered, with an appearance that made strangers stare and acquaintances quickly learn not to mention it.

He knew what he looked like. Christ, he knew.

It hadn’t stopped him from trying his luck with three different women that evening.

The first had excused herself to find her friends. The second had politely declined a dance, and the third had practically fled after he’d bought her a drink and suggested they find somewhere more private. He’d subsequently called her a stuck-up cunt loud enough for half the bar to hear.

Now he was sulking.

“Fuckin’ broads,” he muttered, sucking irritably on the end of a cigarette. “Come in here lookin’ like a bunch of goddamn movie stars, act like they’re too good to talk to a fella. Who the fuck do they think they are?”

He took another drink.

It wasn’t as though he couldn’t get a woman. He had money. He had a name. He could afford to buy practically anything he wanted in this city. And if a woman wanted to pretend she found him charming for an evening, well, he could certainly afford that, too.

But it wasn’t the same.

He knew the difference between somebody wanting his money, somebody being frightened of him, and somebody actually wanting him. That last category was a rather short list. Angelina had been the closest thing he’d ever had, and even that particular memory had ended with his father’s fists, a dead woman, and several years of exile.

“Another one, sweetheart,” he called to the bartender, tapping his empty glass against the table. “And don’t get cheap with the pour this time. I’m not some fuckin’ sailor.”

It was then that he noticed her.

A blonde woman somewhere across the room, beneath the low golden light of the nightclub. She wasn’t particularly conspicuous among the other patrons, at least not at first glance. Her hair was a fashionable shade of honey-blonde, her clothing considerably more understated than the sort of gaudy finery Franco himself favored. There was something about her appearance that caught his attention, though he couldn’t immediately put his finger on it.

He watched her for a moment.

Then another.

His expression gradually shifted from petulant boredom to interest.

Well, well.

He straightened in his booth, adjusted his bowtie, and ran a gloved hand over the front of his jacket. His reflection in the darkened window opposite him caught his attention for a moment. He frowned, briefly inspecting the familiar silhouette of his enormous head, then looked away.

Fuck it.

He wasn’t going to spend the entire evening letting a bunch of ungrateful broads ruin his goddamn mood.

“Hey. Hey, you.”

He gestured toward her with two fingers, flashing a crooked, self-satisfied grin that revealed the slight protrusion of his front teeth.

“Yeah, sweetheart. I’m talkin’ to you.”

He lifted his glass in invitation.

“Come keep me company. I’m buyin’.”

New Orleans, Louisiana. 1959.

Coming home was a funny thing.

Franco Barbi had spent the better part of several years being treated like a dead man. First Miami, then Havana, then wherever else his father’s people had decided he could be useful without being particularly visible. The Martino family had been remarkably discreet about his whereabouts. Some said he’d been killed. Others said he’d run off to Cuba and gotten himself shot. A few particularly imaginative bastards suggested he’d been buried somewhere in the Gulf.

Franco had heard the rumors eventually.

He rather liked some of them.

But he was alive. Very much alive, thank you very fuckin’ much, and back in New Orleans at his father’s behest.

There were conditions, naturally.

He wasn’t returning as the Barbi heir, or as the family’s most feared little debt collector. Not immediately. His father had made it abundantly clear that Franco would be earning back his place, and that the privileges he’d once enjoyed were not automatically being restored.

A demotion. A fuckin’ demotion.

He’d been given work, a place at the family table, and the opportunity to prove himself useful again. He was expected to keep his mouth shut, follow instructions, and remember that there were considerably more important men in the organization than him.

Naturally, Franco thought this was bullshit.

He was Franco Barbi. Salvatore’s son. He’d been killing people since he was twelve years old. He’d run rackets in Miami and Cuba, made money for men who wouldn’t have known what to do with a ledger if it bit them in the ass, and survived things that would have killed a lesser man.

But he wasn’t stupid enough to say all of that to his father’s face.

Not yet.

So here he was, sitting in a restaurant owned by one of the family’s associates and pretending that everything was perfectly fine.

The restaurant was a familiar establishment, one of those old Italian places where the waiters knew better than to ask too many questions. Dark wood, red leather booths, white tablecloths, enormous plates of pasta, and enough cigarette smoke to make the ceiling disappear. The family had practically taken over the place for lunch. Salvatore was seated farther down with several older associates, while other members of the organization occupied the surrounding tables in various combinations.

Franco, meanwhile, had been placed with Luciano Vitale. “Lucky”, they called him, cause he was always getting lucky.

A handsome bastard. Tall, charming, well-dressed, dark-haired, and possessed of the sort of face that made women forgive him for things they probably shouldn’t. A notorious ladies’ man, and, as far as Franco was concerned, an insufferable prick.

They were roughly the same age, though the comparison was hardly flattering.

Lucky could smile at a woman and have her practically falling into his lap.

Franco could do the same thing and have her looking for the nearest exit.

Not that he gave a shit.

“Y’know what your problem is?” Lucky was saying, swirling the wine in his glass. “You gotta relax a little. You’re home. Enjoy yourself.”

“I’m enjoyin’ myself.”

“You’re glarin’ at your fuckin’ pasta.”

“Maybe the pasta’s got a problem.”

Lucky laughed.

Franco scowled, adjusting his suspenders. He was dressed down a bit for the day— dark blue pinstripe suit, the jacket hanging over his chair, recently shined shoes, a white button up with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, and a decent tie. He’d even made an effort with his remaining hair, though there was only so much a man could do with a patchy shock of dirty blonde strands hanging over an enormous, misshapen skull.

He knew what he looked like. He’d always known.

His left eye was bloodshot, his right wandered, and the scars and surgical sutures across the left side of his head weren’t exactly conducive to making a good first impression. His face was a mess of congenital deformities and old injuries, and he was painfully aware that Lucky had been handed a considerably better arrangement by God.

Well, fuck God.

Franco had money. He had a family name. He had a shotgun and a reputation that could make grown men piss themselves.

And he wasn’t going to let some pretty-faced prick make him feel inferior.

“Besides,” Franco continued, stabbing a piece of pasta with his fork, “I ain’t here to enjoy myself. I’m here on business. Important business. My father’s business.”

“Sure, Bambino.”

Franco’s fork stopped.

“Don’t fuckin’ call me that.”

Lucky grinned into his wine.

It was then that something caught Franco’s attention.

Not necessarily a sound, or even a movement. Just a familiar presence among the restaurant’s occupants. Someone entering the establishment, perhaps, or making their way between the scattered tables.

He glanced up. The first thing he noticed was the tits— and Jesus at the tits. Second thing he noticed was the coloring. Weird colored eyes, hair so light it was practically white, milk-pale skin. He remembered her.

Lilith White.

It took him a moment to reconcile the woman standing in front of him with the memories he had of her. The lounge singer. The White Rabbit. That striking albino woman with the husky voice and the expensive gowns, who’d once been a regular fixture in the New Orleans nightlife scene.

He remembered seeing her at clubs. Remembered the flowers he’d sent her once or twice, and the gracious little acknowledgments he’d received in return. He remembered her friendship with Angelina, too. The two women had frequented the same salons, the same boutiques, the same establishments.

He’d always thought she was beautiful. A little too beautiful, if he was being honest.

She’d been surrounded by men with considerably more conventional faces, considerably more money, and considerably more charm. Franco had never particularly entertained the notion that she might be interested in him.

Not that he’d ever admit that.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Lucky remarked, following his gaze. “You know her?”

“Everybody knows her, you fuckin’ moron. That’s Lilith White. You know any other albinos with a rack like that?”

“The singer?” Lucky asked, but he was grinning like he already knew the answer.

“Yeah, the singer.”

He returned his attention to his plate. Then he noticed her approaching. Not passing by. Not heading toward another table.

Approaching his table.