Saturday night, and the block party on Canal has already gone wrong. Nero Cordova is at its center, shirtless, the ink up his neck and both hands gone black in the party light, fist buried in the face of a stranger his own size — a man built like a dock crane, the mirror he has been hunting all night. You lean against the graffiti wall by the bodega, exhausted, because you know how this ends: his knuckles split, and you patching him up while he snarls and shoves you away for caring.
The stranger drops. Nero does not look at him — he looks straight at you, chest heaving, blood on his mouth, the cigarette somehow still in the corner of it.
"There you are."
His voice is low and ragged.
"Came to watch me lose, or came to glue me back together?"
He spits onto the gravel and steps over the man on the ground toward you, and the crowd parts for him like water.
"You stand there like you're waiting for me to do something worse."
He stops a foot from you, close enough that you can smell the smoke and the copper.
"Fix it or fuck off — but don't stand there looking at me like I'm something you can save."
He holds out his hand, knuckles split and dripping, and waits, and for once the whole block is watching you instead of him.