You learn the rhythm of their work and where to put your head so you don’t split it on the floor when they change sides.
The taller one liked to talk. He had a teacher’s cadence, patient and bored. “Consequences,” he said. “This is how men learn.”
“Men,” the shorter one echoed, and the word slid wrong out of his mouth.
When they were done—when they had their story, when they had the heat out of their arms—they left us with a bucket and an apology no one meant.
Grady wiped his face with water that smelled like a mop. “Should’ve let me ride it out,” he said, trying to make light of nothing. “You’re not built for my mouth.”
“I’m built for the part that comes after,” I said. “We remember. We count. We survive long enough to bring this place down.”
He grinned then, wrecked and alive. “That’s it. Make promises you can’t keep.”
“I keep mine.”
“Sure,” he said, and the word was faith with a crack in it. “Tell me again what you’ll do when you’re big and bad.”
“I’ll salt the vines,” I said, almost smiling. “Shoot the crows.”
He laughed, then winced. “Poetic, priest.”
“You be the priest,” I said. “I’ll be the janitor.”
He stared at me long enough to understand I meant it.
We slept a couple of hours with our backs against the same wall like animals trying to make one body out of two. The next night they took someone else’s son. The nights bled. I learned the names of the men who came through, the way their hands changed when they had to pretend to be uncles in daylight, the way her uncle’s shoes sounded when he walked the stairs. He didn’t come into the rooms often. He didn’t need to. He held the ledger; the others held the straps.
Here’s the part you need to understand if you want to understand me: it wasn’t aboutmein Blackvine. Not for them. It was aboutus. About turning sons into tools and warnings. About making sure men who thought they could beat him at money or politics remembered how small they were when the door shut and the light went off and their boys weren’t men yet.
We got out because men who loved us decided they were done being obedient in the wrong direction. They took a risk on a night when no one respectable remembered where they were. They opened a door and didn’t look back. It wasn’t a triumph. It was a subtraction: fewer of us to count in the morning.
We carried names out. We carried sounds. We carried a list life has been collecting interest on ever since.
Her uncle kept walking that ranch long after they moved me out. He kept the ledger. He kept the donations coming. He used Blackvine as a private instrument the way men with soft handsuse cutlery. He smiled at his daughters at dinner and signed church checks with the same wrist.
He thought no one would put the rooms and the ledger in the same sentence out loud.
He thought wrong.
When I open my eyes in Boston after a non-stop flight from the Bahamas, I’m ready to commit murder.
It looks like I lost a fight with a house. I didn’t. The resort in the Bahamas gave me a copy of a camera feed I didn’t ask for in the right way and can’t unsee.
Nico’s hand on Caterina’s wrist, a black rectangle where a pistol should have been, my security team put to sleep they didn’t authorize or appreciate. I watched the frame where she turned and fought. I watched the frame where she disappeared. I watched every single frame and I knew that I’d do anything to get her back.
I don’t drive to the hospital. I don’t drive to the police.
I drive to Don Marco’s house with sand still on my shoes and salt and rage in my throat. His gate opens because the men at his gate know me now, and if they didn’t I would take it down with the car and apologize later.
The foyer smells like lemon oil and money and everything that we went to the Bahamas to escape for a honeymoon. The portraits on the stairs watch me like I’m not supposed to be there. I am. I walk past two men who think they can stop me. They take one look at my face and find a new assignment on the wall.
Don Marco is in his office with the door open—always open, because he’s worked his life to be the kind of man who doesn’t have to close doors when he speaks. He sees me and stands too fast for a man his age. His tie is off. His sleeves are rolled. He looks like the version of himself before grief made him decorative.
“What—” he says.
“Your daughter was taken,” I answer. “By your nephew. He and his men took us by surprise, knocked me out. I have the recording.” I put the USB on his desk.
He picks up the USB but doesn’t immediately try to view it. Instead, he reaches for the edge of the desk and holds on to it. “He wouldn’t,” he says, with a certainty that vanishes even as he says it. “Nico is a fool, not a?—”
