“When you’re dehydrated, salt tastes sweet, so your body tricks you into drinking it. When these things taste salty, you probably don’t need to be drinking them.”
“How do you know that?” I asked as he came back toward the couch carrying two bowls with steam dancing up into the air above them.
“We got a guy in the Family. Salvatore. We call him The Surgeon.”
“Does he do surgery?”
“Unofficially, yeah. The kind we need done when we can’t go to the hospital. But we go to him for lots of shit. He’s not a doctor, but he might as well be. I was at his office once and heard him explaining that to someone else. We got chicken noodle,” he told me. “The good, condensed ones we’d eat as kids. You gotta eat all yours.”
“Not hard,” I said, carefully taking the bowl with the tips of my fingers. “I’m starving. Those fancy food portions were ridiculously small.”
“Christ,” Venezio said, shaking his head. “Hard to believe that was just a few hours ago.”
“I know,” I agreed. It felt like a lifetime ago that I’d been smiling, schmoozing, and getting promises of large donations for my charity.
“It was a good night before it all went to shit.”
“It was,” I agreed.
“How you feeling?”
“Sore. How caneverymuscle be hurting?”
“Think you underestimate how much we ran tonight. The adrenaline probably made it seem like it went by faster than it did. You were pretty far into the park.”
“I was a lot further at one point. But I started making my way back. I don’t know how I didn’t freeze to death. Is it still snowing?”
“Seems more like sleet now. And, yeah, you scared the fucking shit out of me. Never felt like that before.”
“You’ve been in situations where you needed to… use lethal force. But me getting cold was as scared as you’ve been?” I asked, my tone dubious.
“In those situations, it was my life. It was nothing. This was your life. That’s everything.”
My heart squeezed hard in my chest.
“Your life isn’t nothing.”
“It ain’t much.”
“I think you’re selling yourself short.”
“Came from shit. Still live there.”
My face scrunched up at that.
“So, by that logic, my life is nothing too. Because I spent most of my childhood in shelters or on the street.”
His gaze cut to mine, sharp, seeing too much.
“It’s different.”
“Why?”
“You had a good mom. Just a bad hand of cards.”
“You didn’t choose your parents,” I reminded him. “Just because they might not have been good people doesn’t mean you aren’t.”
“I’m a fucking mobster, babe,” he reminded me. “Didn’t have to go down this route.”
