The knock came exactly when Harvey said it would.
Two sharp raps. Then silence. Then the door swung open without invitation—because men like Carmine Falcone didn't wait for permission in this city. They took. They owned. They controlled.
The figure in the doorway looked like something out of a 1930s crime film.
Black trench coat that swept to mid-calf. Felt fedora pulled low, brim casting shadows across features already obscured by wrap-around sunglasses. White scarf draped around the neck, the high collar pulled up to cover everything from chin to cheekbones. Beneath the coat: a sharp suit, crisp tie, the silhouette of power wrapped in fabric.
It was handsome. Imposing. Exactly the kind of outfit that screamed mafia to anyone with eyes.
Ever since Carmine Falcone had consolidated power in Gotham—since the Romans became the undisputed authority—this aesthetic had spread through the underworld like a virus. Young soldiers mimicking their godfather's style, trying to capture even a fraction of that presence. Walk down the right street in Gotham and you'd see a dozen men dressed like this, any one of them capable of producing a Thompson submachine gun from beneath that coat without breaking stride.
This was the uniform. The armor. The statement.
I am mafia. I am power. I am untouchable.
"Please come in."
Harvey's voice was quiet. Professional. The kind of tone you used when addressing a loaded gun.
He stepped aside, gestured the Roman through, and closed the door behind them. The lock clicked with a finality that felt rehearsed. Outside world, inside world. The line drawn clean.
Falcone removed his sunglasses with one smooth motion.
"Mr. Falcone," Harvey said, already moving deeper into the building, "do you have to stick to the gangster style even in your disguise?"
The Roman didn't answer. Didn't acknowledge the question at all.
He hadn't worn this outfit in years. Black suit, white shirt, bow tie, red rose in the pocket—that was his usual uniform. Elegant. Classy. Commanding without theatrics. This Italian gangster getup made him feel like a costume party attendee, playing dress-up in his own life.
But desperate times required desperate measures.
And this? This was desperation wrapped in wool and silk.
"Where's my son, Prosecutor Harvey?"
Harvey led him through a narrow hallway. Bare walls. Fluorescent lighting that hummed with electrical resentment. The kind of building that had seen better days and worse owners.
Finally, Harvey stopped at a door. His hand rested on the handle.
It was a basement door.
Falcone's eyes narrowed. His jaw tightened beneath the scarf.
Basements were for prisoners. Interrogations. Bodies waiting for disposal. You didn't put family in a basement. Not unless something had gone catastrophically wrong.
"Prosecutor Harvey." His voice dropped to something colder. Harder. The voice that ordered executions without raising volume. "I want to remind you—if anything happens to me or my son, the Falcone family will burn all of Gotham to ashes. Every. Single. Building."
It wasn't a threat. Threats implied uncertainty.
This was a fact delivered with the confidence of a man who'd burned cities before.
Harvey met his gaze without flinching. "Mr. Falcone, your son is dangerous. We can't just leave him anywhere—not even in the police station. The basement is the best place for him. Secure. Controlled. Safe."
"Dangerous person?"
Falcone's frown deepened, carving trenches into his forehead. That wasn't the word he'd expected. Kidnapped, maybe. Injured. Traumatized by whatever hell he'd endured.
But dangerous?
His Alberto?
The gentle boy who'd never wanted any part of the family business? The son who'd begged to stay clean, to build something legitimate, to escape the shadow of the Falcone name?
"What nonsense are you talking about?"
Harvey didn't answer. Instead, he opened the door.
Stairs descended into darkness. The kind of darkness that smelled like concrete and mildew and bad decisions made in worse lighting.
They walked down.
The stairwell seemed to stretch forever—each step echoing in the enclosed space, the sound bouncing off walls that had probably absorbed screams before. Gotham's buildings were like that. Layers of violence soaked into the foundation, decades of blood and fear compressed into brick and mortar until the architecture itself felt malevolent.
At the bottom, a voice emerged from the shadows.
"Yes, a dangerous man, Mr. Falcone."
Commissioner Gordon stepped into the dim light cast by a single overhead bulb. He looked tired. Professionally exhausted in that way cops in Gotham always did.
He held a folder. Standard manila. The kind that contained either parking tickets or confessions to mass murder, with no obvious middle ground in Gotham.
Gordon extended it toward the Roman.
"Your son was an amazing marksman," Gordon said, each word delivered with the flat affect of a man who'd seen too much to be surprised anymore. "Brutal and cold-blooded. He killed four gangsters in a car, then bombed the vehicle at Maroni's restaurant. Massacred a large number of the Maroni family. Killed a gunsmith in Chinatown to silence a witness. Finally, he shot the Maroni father and son."
Falcone took the folder. His hands didn't shake—decades of control saw to that—but something in his chest felt like it was crumbling. Foundations shifting. Certainties dissolving.
"Your son, Alberto, is a serial killer." Gordon paused. Let that sink in like poison through the bloodstream. "He is—"
"—the Holiday Killer."
The words hung in the basement air like smoke. Like cordite. Like the smell of death that never quite washed out of Gotham's streets no matter how hard the rain tried.
Falcone stared at Gordon. Then at the folder in his hands. Then at nothing, his focus turning inward to where his understanding of the world was rapidly reconstructing itself into something unrecognizable.
"My son," he repeated slowly. Testing the words. Hearing how they sounded aloud. "Alberto. The Holiday Killer."
It didn't compute. Didn't fit. Like trying to force the wrong puzzle piece into a picture you thought you understood.
His hands opened the folder. Against his better judgment. Against every instinct that screamed to throw it away, to deny, to refuse this reality.
The contents were devastating.
Alberto's confession. Written in his own hand. Page after page of it. Methodical. Detailed. Proud.
He confessed to everything except Johnny Vitti's death and the destruction of the Irish Gang—those, apparently, belonged to someone else. But the rest? All Alberto. How he chose his targets like selecting holiday gifts. How he ordered a .22 caliber pistol from the gunsmith who would later need silencing. How he tampered with shooting range data to hide his exceptional marksmanship. How he extracted information about the Maroni family operations from his own family's intelligence network. How he faked his death on the New Year's Eve cruise ship—a performance so convincing even his own father had mourned.
And finally: how he'd been caught red-handed attacking Sal and Luigi Maroni on Father's Day.
The signature at the bottom was unmistakably Alberto's. That careful, practiced handwriting. The same hand that had signed birthday cards. Thank-you notes. Business documents for the import company that was supposed to be his clean future.
Perhaps, Falcone thought with a strange detachment, Alberto saw these crimes as medals rather than sins. Something to be documented. Celebrated. Like walking through the night in fine clothes and refusing to acknowledge the darkness because you chose to be there.
"This way," Gordon said quietly.
He led Falcone to another door. A compartment within the basement. Even deeper. Even more isolated.
"Alberto is inside. You can talk to him in person, Mr. Falcone."
The Roman stood there for a moment. Hand on the doorknob. Every fiber of his being wanting to turn around, walk up those stairs, pretend this was all some elaborate nightmare.
But he was Carmine Falcone. The Roman. The godfather of Gotham's most powerful crime family.
He didn't run from nightmares.
He created them.
So he pushed the door open.
The room was sparse. Brutally so.
One table. One chair. One overhead light that cast harsh shadows across everything it touched, turning the small space into something that felt less like an interrogation room and more like a confessional.
And sitting in that chair, handcuffed to the table—
His son.
"Alberto," Falcone breathed. "My Alberto."
The boy's—no, the man's—face changed when he saw his father. Emotion flickered across features that had been carefully blank. A smile emerged. Small. Genuine.
And underneath it: guilt.
Not regret. Not shame.
Just guilt. The kind you felt when you disappointed someone you loved, even when you didn't regret your actions.
"Father," Alberto said. "You are here."
Such simple words. Three syllables that carried the weight of everything unsaid between them.
Falcone stepped fully into the room. The door closed behind him with a soft click that somehow sounded louder than a gunshot.
"Alberto." His voice was steady. Controlled. The same voice he used to negotiate territory with rival families. "Tell me this isn't true. Tell me what they're saying is lies. Just—tell me you attacked the Maronis because of what they did to our family. Tell me it was revenge for Johnny. Just—"
He stopped. Realizing what he'd said.
Alberto was dead. Alberto was sitting right here.
The cognitive dissonance was physically painful.
"You don't have to be the Holiday Killer," Falcone pressed, leaning forward. Desperate now. "Just say you attacked Maroni and Luigi. Just admit to that one thing. We can work with that. Self-defense. Family vendetta. The lawyers can—"
"Father." Alberto's voice cut through the rambling. Gentle but firm. "You don't understand why I'm doing this, do you?"
Silence.
"You don't know when my birthday is, do you? Even though you love me so much, you have business to attend to every year on that day. A reminder that my birthday is also a holiday."
Falcone's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
He did know Alberto's birthday. Of course he did. Valentine's Day. He'd laid flowers on the boy's grave on that very date, believing him dead, mourning the loss of the one son he could trust.
But before that? Before this year?
Had he ever actually been there on Alberto's birthday?
"Alberto, I thought you would understand me—"
"I do understand you, Father." Alberto leaned back in his chair as much as the cuffs would allow. "But you don't understand me."
He sighed. The sound of it was bone-deep. Ancient. The kind of weariness that came from carrying secrets too heavy for one person.
"My birthday is on Valentine's Day," he said again. As if saying it twice would make his father hear it. Really hear it.
Falcone knew this. He knew it the way you knew facts without feeling them. Alberto was wrong about one thing—the godfather had known his birthday. On this past Valentine's Day, he'd stood at what he believed was his son's grave and laid flowers there with hands that shook with grief.
But the rest? The years before? The birthdays that passed while Carmine attended to business, managed territories, maintained power?
Those were different.
"I wanted to help," Alberto continued. His voice was steady now. Certain. This was a speech he'd rehearsed in his head a thousand times. "I wanted to intervene and make changes. But you disagreed. You wanted me to stay away from the family business. You insisted I remain clean. White. Pure."
His lips twisted into something that might have been a smile if it had any warmth.
"But you didn't realize that Gotham City has changed, Father. Times have changed. The old rules don't apply anymore. If you don't agree, then I have to do it myself. Otherwise—"
He paused. Searching for the right words.
"—the law-abiding gangs are like a precision-operated machine. Every gear matters. If some unruly lunatic breaks one gear, the entire mechanism stops working. The Maronis were becoming that broken gear. Someone had to remove them."
Falcone stared at his son. Really looked at him. Saw the conviction in those eyes. The absolute certainty that he'd done the right thing.
This wasn't madness. Wasn't a break from reality.
This was purpose.
"If there's anything in this world that makes me happy, Dad—" Alberto's voice softened. Became almost wistful. "—it's the dream on St. Patrick's Day. I pretended to be someone in a dream, and you pretended to be someone who couldn't wake up. There was no family. No fighting. No territories or vendettas or blood feuds. Just my father and me. I was very happy that day."
The Green Dream. The citywide hallucination. Gotham transformed into something magical, impossible, kind. Where the dead walked again and fathers held sons who'd been lost.
Falcone remembered it. Remembered holding Alberto in that dream. Remembered how real it had felt.
"You love me very much," Alberto said. "And that's why, Father—"
He took a deep breath.
"—I want to help you get rid of the Maroni family. In my own way."
The words settled like stones in deep water.
"Gotham doesn't need any more gangsters," Alberto continued. His voice was gaining strength now. Conviction. Pride. "And I'm proof of that. Look at me, Father. As the Holiday Killer, I'm more powerful than all of them combined. I destroyed their operations. Dismantled their organization. Eliminated their soldiers. I did in months what our family couldn't do in years."
He leaned forward as much as the handcuffs allowed. Met his father's eyes.
"That's why the Alberto of the past died on that yacht. And the one before you now is the Holiday Killer."
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