“Two fourteen. The date our parents ended up in the river.”
“Valentine’s Day. Adrian’s code. The polished voice is behind it, trying to make our families tear each other apart. Then what’s left?”
“The Commission. Adrian’s allegiance is to them. But it makes too much sense. We need to be certain.”
“It’s simple. Most things are.”
I think of the bank names I saw at the office. I think of the way the polished voice spoke in the recording. I hear the practiced weight of it again, the removal of a girl as a line item.After Valentine Week, we take the port. If the girl holds the chair, that is a problem. Remove her and their consent follows.
“I’m not a girl,” I say. “I’m a problem they can’t afford,” I add, softer.
He hears the edge in my tone and takes his hand from the wheel long enough to put it over mine. Warm. Whole. He returns it to the wheel and pulls us out, slow and deliberate.
The route he takes isn’t straight. He changes lanes when instinct says to. He lets a taxi drift in front as a shield. He reads the rearview as if the mirror writes in a language he learned young. I read it with him and learn a little more.
He makes a few calls, and we switch vehicles under a bridge where the concrete peels like bark. A teen with a baseball cap and a fear of eye contact takes the courier truck and leaves us a nondescript sedan that smells like a grandmother. Luigi borrows his hat. The man is thinking ahead. We get in. We move again.
I pull the burner and send two rings to the one number that matters tonight. A woman answers with silence because she was taught to wait. I say a name that isn’t her name, and she gives me an address that isn’t her office. I hang up and breathe through a memory of her father’s funeral and the way she stood with her chin up so a man would not dock her pay again.
“Adrian’s assistant,” Luigi says.
“Clara. She’s the one who mirrored the calls. She deserves to leave this city with a pension that buys sunlight. We will make sure of it.”
“We will,” he says, and the way the words sit in his mouth makes them feel like a check already signed.
The river cuts across our way, and the bridges are lit up. Distant bells chime, marking time, making each hour seem equally important. I think of La Sirena and the chapel bell that rang. I think of the way I said yes and the way I’m saying it again now, in a hundred small ways that will become a life if I let them.
We arrive at the address the assistant provided. A laundromat that’s half-asleep with machines like gaping mouths. A man reads a paper at the counter as if the news will change if he stares. We bypass the front and go to the back where a door looks like it hides a mop. Luigi knocks in a rhythm that would mean nothing to a stranger. It means something in our world. The lock turns. Clara stands inside.
She doesn’t appear taken aback. She looks ready. Her hair is pinned above a neck that remembers hands and learned not to flinch. She glances at my ring finger and the absence there. She doesn’t comment. She steps aside and lets us in.
We give her enough cash to buy herself a new name. She gives us a ledger she has kept for two years in a clean hand that shows the dates Adrian had meetingswith anyone. She doesn’t ask for gratitude. She asks for outcome.
“I want him to eat from plastic,” Clara says.
“Done,” I say.
She looks at Luigi to confirm the promise. He nods once. She believes him. So do I.
We leave through the same door. Night meets us like a partner who has waited at the curb. We climb into the sedan and sit with the engine off for a moment to let the city answer a question neither of us asks out loud. No sirens close. No footsteps hurry. Safe for now.
“Next?” he asks.
“Your uncle,” I say. “Then the man who likes bourbon and revenge, Rinaldi. Then to the Commission. Then the truce becomes a paper I am willing to sign.”
“And the Vendetta?” he asks.
“The Vendetta becomes a story our fathers tell when they want to feel important,” I say. “Or it becomes a headstone. I would prefer a story.”
He smiles. The kind a man saves. He starts the car. The river keeps pace to our left, black and silver, carrying the old city away an inch at a time. I lean my head back and close my eyes for a count. Not sleep. Not yet. Just a breath I have owed myself since I was a girl in ahouse where windows faced the river and all the locks were on the wrong side of the doors.
We drive toward men who will want to make my life a bargain. I think about the way Luigi’s hand covered mine when the shake came. I think about the yes, I gave him in a truck and in a suite and at a pool and now in the narrow places between errands and bullets.
The condo is behind us. The drives are in my lap. The polished voice is about to learn that girls grow into problems. The truce is still on paper. It will hold a little longer because we’re holding it. After that it will hold forever because we will write it so.
Luigi stops two blocks away from his uncle’s.
“We need to rest,” he explains, and then makes a call to a tailor who owes him. “My uncle rises with the sun.”
