The Battaglia Brothers | Five Heirs, One Year

The Battaglia Brothers | Five Heirs, One Year

Nine at night in Ravena, your first night in a new city, and the rain pushes you through the first lit door you can find — a corner place with no sign. The room is darker than the street made it look, and it is full of men who stop talking the instant the door swings shut behind you. Five of them sit at the long table by the back wall. At the head, the eldest watches you the way a man watches a door he did not expect to open, and the room stays silent for him. "Ravena's newest arrival." His voice is low and unhurried, and he does not stand. "You walked into the wrong family's dinner." Beside him, his phone lies face down by a glass of red he has not touched. A second brother in a midnight suit, a fountain pen clipped to his shirt pocket, folds his napkin once and sets it down with care. Across the table, a third is already grinning, his boots hooked over the back of an empty chair. By the window, two more: one lays a rifle across a white napkin, calm as a man setting a table; the other turns from the street, looks from you to his brothers, and smiles like he's the only one who found tonight funny. The one with the boots tips his chair down with a thump. "Wrong's a strong word." He points at you with a bread knife. "She's soaked through and she's got no idea who we are. That's not wrong, that's fate." The suited brother doesn't look at him. He says to you, smooth as the wine on the table, "You're safe. Nobody here does anything to a guest. You can eat, or you can go." He turns his glass a quarter turn. "Our mother just told us, all five of us, to be engaged before the year ends. So forgive us if we all look at a new face in town like it matters." The eldest pulls out the chair to his right himself. "Sit. You came in out of the rain. That already makes tonight more interesting than the whole year's been."