It’s simple. The ease in which we can talk about mundane things. There’s no heaviness like you’d expect the closer we get.
Closer to the compound. Closer to Salvatore. Closer to the thing I've been running from for weeks and am now driving toward on purpose, in a car with a man who has a gun on his hip and my coffee order memorized and a faded bruise on his jaw from where I punched him in my sleep.
"You're thinking too loud," Claudio says.
"I'm thinking at a normal volume."
"Your normal volume gives me a headache."
"That's not my thinking. That's the coffee. You made it too strong this morning."
"You drank three cups."
"I was being polite."
"You've never been polite a day in your life, little brat."
I punch his arm from across the console. He catches my wrist the way he always does, his fingers wrapping around the bone, thumb pressing the tendon. He holds it for three seconds and then lets go, and the ghost of his grip stays warm on my skin.
This is what we are now. Coffee and body-grabs and arguments about nothing that mean everything. It's terrifying. Not the man. Not the gun. Not the mafia or the mole or the war that's grinding on without us. What terrifies me is how easy this feels. How the space between us has gone from a minefield to a room I want to stay in. How I catch myself watching his hands on the steering wheel and thinking about those hands on my body and not flinching. Not bracing. Just wanting.
I haven't wanted anything in three years. Wanting is dangerous. Wanting is how you end up in a house with a man who hits you, because you wanted the warmth so badly you ignored the bruises until they covered your arms like a map of your own stupidity.
But Claudio's hands don't hit. They hold. They count vertebrae. They make coffee with the filter facing the right way.
Different man. Different hands.
I know. I'm learning.
We stop for gas sixty miles from the compound. Claudio fills the tank while I go inside for supplies. Two bottles of water, a bagof chips, two prepaid phone chargers, and a pack of Parliament Lights because the gas station gods finally smiled on me and stocked my brand.
I'm standing at the register when I notice the man by the magazine rack.
He's not doing anything wrong. That's the problem. He's standing there with a trucking magazine in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, and he's reading. Just reading. Normal behavior. Unremarkable.
Except he hasn't turned a page in the ninety seconds I've been watching. And his coffee hand is too still. People who are actually drinking coffee fidget. They sip, they shift the cup, they blow on the surface. This man is holding his cup like a prop.
And his shoes are wrong. Work boots, broken in, the kind a trucker would wear. But the laces are new. Bright white against the scuffed leather. Nobody replaces laces on boots that worn unless they're not actually his boots.
I pay for my items. Walk outside. Don't look at the man. Don't change my pace. Don't do anything that signals I noticed him, because signaling gets you killed and I've been not-signaling since I was twenty-four years old.
Claudio is leaning against the car. I hand him the bag and get in the passenger side and wait until he's behind the wheel with the doors locked.
"Magazine rack," I say. "Grey jacket. Work boots with new laces. He hasn't turned a page in two minutes, and his coffee is a prop."
Claudio doesn't look toward the gas station. His eyes go to the mirrors. Rearview. Side. Rearview again.
"He was there when I pulled in," Claudio says.
"And?"
"And his truck has Virginia plates, but the registration sticker is Maryland. And there's a second man in the cab pretending to sleep."
My stomach drops. Not the slow sinking kind. The fast kind. The elevator-cable-snapping kind that leaves your organs somewhere above your body while the rest of you plummets.
"They found us."
"Maybe." He starts the engine. Pulls out of the gas station at a normal speed. Doesn't rush. Doesn't signal urgency. "Could be a coincidence. Could be unrelated."
