I laugh, short and bitter. “Yeah, well. Not a lot of career opportunities for girls with gambling addicts for fathers. You take what you can get.”
He doesn’t respond to that. keeps watching me with those dark, unreadable eyes.
I break first and look away, shuffle the papers, pretend to study something I’ve already memorized. The silence stretches until I want to scream.
“Can I ask you a question?” I say finally.
“You can ask.”
“Why are you being nice to me?”
His eyebrows lift a fraction. “You think this is nice?”
“Compared to what I expected? Yeah.” I gesture at the room, the plush bed, the private bathroom, the meals that arrive like clockwork. “I figured I’d be chained to a pipe in a basement somewhere, getting my teeth pulled out one by one. Instead, I’m doing homework and eating fresh fruit.”
Leone’s fists clench. “We’re not animals.”
“Could’ve fooled me.” I meet his eyes, holding steady. “I saw you kill those men in the raid. I saw how easy it was for you. Don’t pretend you’re above the basement-and-pliers routine.”
A cold glint clouds his eyes. “I do what’s necessary. That doesn’t mean I enjoy it.”
“Does it matter? Dead is dead.”
“It matters to me.”
The words land harder than they should. I search his face for the lie, the manipulation, the angle he’s playing. I don’t find it.
That scares me more than anything else.
He leaves the files and tells me to keep working. I do, partly because I want to be useful and partly because it keeps my brain from eating itself. The patterns emerge slowly, like pictures hidden in static. I map routes, cross-reference dates, flag anomalies that might mean something or might mean nothing.
By afternoon, my eyes burn and my back aches from hunching over the desk. I stand and stretch, vertebrae popping like bubble wrap. Through the window, the courtyard is quiet. Two guards instead of three—shift change, or someone else pulling resources elsewhere.
I press my palm to the glass and watch the sun drop toward the horizon. Somewhere out there, my father is probably sitting at a card table, trading whatever scraps of dignity he has left for one more hand. He doesn’t know I’m gone. Probably wouldn’t care if he did.
That’s not fair. He’d care. He just cares about the debt more.
I was eighteen when she died. Old enough to understand what killed her wasn’t the disease. It was the stress. The fear. The slow, grinding weight of loving someone who would never stop destroying themselves.
My father stood at her funeral and cried like his heart was breaking. Three days later, he was back at the tables.
I’ve spent the last eight years trying to save him. Paying off debts that multiply faster than I can count. Taking jobs that got shadier and shadier because the money was better and better. Telling myself that eventually, somehow, I’d dig us out of the hole.
The hole just kept getting deeper.
And now I’m here. Locked in a cage, surrounded by men who kill for a living, trading information for the privilege of staying alive.
Mom would be so proud.
I laugh, and it comes out wet. I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand and force myself to breathe. Crying is useless. Crying doesn’t change anything. Crying is for people who have the luxury of falling apart.
I don’t.
Dinner arrives at six. Axe Body Spray, right on schedule.
I eat without tasting, then push the tray aside and return to the documents. There’s something here, something I’m missing. The gap every third Tuesday. The compensating shipments. The photographs of men I don’t recognize.
One of the faces catches my attention. Young guy, early thirties, with a jawline that could cut glass and eyes that look dead even in the photo. There’s a name scrawled on the back:Renzo Marchetti.
