Marco answered differently than Dante. Not the first ring—the second. But when he spoke, there was no sleep in his voice. The man had been awake. The phone face-down on the armrest was a meeting posture. At three in the morning on a Tuesday, Marco was working.
“Ferrara sent her a message,” I said. “Burner number, probably. Told her Maria Flores is alive and we’re lying. Set a meet for six AM. Giardino.”
“Giardino.” Marco repeated the name. I heard keys. A keyboard. The sound of someone who kept databases the way other people kept journals — meticulously, obsessively, because information was his currency and he never let a coin drop.
“I’m going,” I said.
“Santo —“
“I’m going, Marco.”
The pause was brief. Marco was smart enough to know when a thing was decided and arguing cost time.
“I’ll have people there in fifteen,” he said. “Don’t kill Ferrara before we can debrief him.”
I hung up.
Midge was at the bedroom door.
She stood on the threshold—the fawn body rigid, the good ear straight up, the flopped ear straining forward like it was trying for once in its life to match the other one. Her brown eyes tracked me as I moved through the room. The stub tail was still. No trembling now. Something had shifted in her—the distress of abandonment converting into the focused attention of a creature who had identified the rescue mission and was reporting for duty.
I picked her up.
She went inside the jacket. Against my ribs—the left side, away from the stitches, the small body settling into the leather the way she settled into Cora’s jacket. The same position. The same warmth. The zipper came up to hold her. Her head poked out above it—one ear up, one flopped, the brown eyes scanning.
I didn’t think about it. I just did it.
The way Cora did it. The way she’d been doing it since before I knew her.
Dante called back as I hit the driveway.
“Ferrara’s got three known locations. The Brassante club—Albany Park. A rental in Lincoln Square under an alias. And a restaurant on Grand called Giardino, which Marco’s already confirmed. If they’re not there, we hit the others.”
“Marco confirmed. I’m driving.”
“Santo.” The don voice. The voice that stopped rooms. “She walked into this knowing what it was. She’s not stupid.”
He was right. The rational part of me knew it—the part that had watched Cora operate for weeks, had seen the way her mind worked, the thief’s calculus that ran underneath everything. She would’ve read that message and known.
But all that was academic. She was with him, right now, in the wolf’s jaws.
The city was dark. Pre-dawn dark—the streetlights still burning, the sky that particular shade of blue-black that meantthe sun was coming but hadn’t committed yet. I drove fast. Not reckless—fast. The distinction mattered. Reckless was emotion. Fast was decision.
Grand and Oakley. Eight minutes from my house if I ran the lights. I ran the lights.
Midge’s heartbeat against my ribs. Fast. Steady. The small metronome marking the time I was burning. Six minutes. Five. The streets narrowing as I moved west, the residential blocks giving way to the commercial stretch — storefronts dark, gates down, the particular emptiness of a neighborhood that wasn’t awake yet.
Four minutes.
ThealleybehindGiardinosmelled like old grease and November. The kind of cold that settled into concrete and didn’t leave until April.
The building was dark from the front—papered windows, unlit sign, the padlocked look of a place that had closed and stayed closed. But the back was different. A light in the kitchen. The faint hum of something electrical—a walk-in cooler left running, or a generator feeding power to a building the grid had forgotten. And the door. Metal. Industrial. The handle that should have been locked but wasn’t, because someone had unlocked it for a woman they expected to arrive alone and afraid.
I tried the handle. It gave.
Midge was silent against my ribs. Not a sound. Not a tremor. Her body pressed flat against me, her breathing shallow. She felt like she could sense the danger.
The kitchen was industrial. Stainless steel surfaces, commercial hoods. The equipment was shrouded—plastic wrap over the ranges, towels draped on the prep tables, the carefulpreservation of a restaurant that expected to reopen and hadn’t. But the lights were on. Two fluorescent tubes, one flickering. The shadows they threw moved in irregular rhythm, the whole room pulsing.
