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dining table and moved toward Dom.
    Dominick Bertolini was ready. He wasn't nervous. His voice hadn't quivered. His hands weren't shaking. He'd been preparing for this in his mind since he was a small boy. He wanted it, wanted it now, and as he took his first step toward his father, he knew that he would cherish this moment for the rest of his life.
    Cower and die. Or fight and live. He'd made his choice. From now on, things would be different. Things would be better. It was time to win for the first time in his life. Not just win a fight but win a war. Win forever.
    Unfortunately, Dominick was too young to have realized there were choices beyond the ones he'd envisioned. Yes, stay silent and suffer was one choice. And fight and win was another.
    But so was fight and lose.
    Which is what happened that night.
    Anthony Bertolini moved slowly and deliberately at first, until he was two short steps away from Dominick. Then he attacked quickly. And viciously. He had palmed his drinking glass, which he now slammed into the side of his son's head. A deep gash opened up over Dominick's eye and blood poured out of the wound as if it were thick paint being dumped out of a can. Without giving him a chance to retaliate, Anthony picked up a chair and brought it down over Dominick's head. The wood splintered and the noise was like that of the sweet spot of a baseball bat meeting a fastball and sending it four hundred feet. Then Anthony's right leg swung back and the hard point of his shoe cracked into Dom's throat. The boy made a sad, gurgling noise, which only seemed to motivate the enraged father. The leg swung back several times and the shoe found the neck again, and then the ribs. The punching and the kicking went on long after Dominick lost consciousness. And then Anthony turned back to his wife.
    This time he did not, as promised, beat her to within an inch of her life. He beat her to death.
    When Dominick woke up, nearly two days later, he was in the hospital, his mother was buried, and his father was in prison. Anthony spent four years there for murdering his wife. When he got out, he never tried to find or contact his son. Even he understood that he would not survive the next meeting.
    It didn't take long for the teenage Dom to find his calling. Within a year he'd had six amateur fights, winning them all easily. He turned pro. Over the next few years, he fought regularly, touring the clubs up and down the East Coast, and won always. At twenty-two, he was ranked number twelve. He would have been higher but no one in the top ten wanted to get in the ring with him. Until his manager came to him and said they'd gotten a fight with the number six contender, Sweet Lenny Sweets. If Dominick won that, he'd get the number one or two. And if he won that, he'd get a chance to fight for the title. He had no doubt that soon he would be champ.
    Then, several days before his fight with Sweets, Dora got the word. He was supposed to lose. He wasn't naive and he hadn't been so protected that he didn't understand the ways of the fight game in those days. But he was arrogant and sure of his own toughness and, when he climbed into the ring, he knew one thing and one thing only: he was not going to lose.
    He didn't. He knocked Lenny Sweets out in the seventh round.
    A week later he was in his apartment in Hell's Kitchen. Not the one in which he'd grown up; after he'd gotten out of the hospital he never set foot in that apartment again, leaving everything he owned behind, even his clothes. There was a knock at the door; he got up from the kitchen table, opened the door. After that, it all happened very fast.
    There were three guys. Fat, strong, slow, but slow didn't matter, the apartment was small, there was no room to move. Two of them held him down. One of them had a butcher's knife. Huge and gleaming.
    "You got a good fuckin' right, don't you?" one of them said. "You're pretty proud of that fuckin' right."
    Dom didn't say anything. Even when the