Alone in his room, Frankie pulled out the stack of papers his mother gave him Sunday evening. He hadn't told anyone about the list. Looking through the pages, he saw a picture of Daria, but her name had already been scratched out. Despite Anton and Natasha's relationship, there was a long-standing feud between the families. Leading the charge seemed to be Daria's mother, who hated Natasha with a passion though Frankie and Daria could never find out why.

Some nights Frankie pictured himself finally coming clean: sitting both parents down, telling them about Daria, about the canvases he hid under the name R.E. Spect, about every stolen glance and secret message. He was almost sure his father would back him. His mother was the unknown variable. She didn’t seem to hate Doreen, didn’t carry any visible grudge, and yet she guarded whatever history lay between them like a locked vault.

When Frankie had once pressed Ian for answers, his brother had only shrugged and recited the city’s standing rule: “Reds don't fuck with Blues. Full stop.” Frankie wanted no part of the syndicate life, but he doubted his own clean hands would matter to Doreen. To her, he would always just be Natasha’s son, a child of the Red faction.

Frankie stared down at the papers again; his mother had even managed to find out Daria's favorite book: Romeo and Juliet. “Prodigious birth of love it is to me that I must love my enemy,” Frankie mumbled, silently hoping that he and Daria would have a better fate than the characters in her favorite book.