Silence. The garage was three cars wide and mostly empty—my black SUV, a covered shape in the far bay that was my father's old Cadillac that nobody drove and nobody would sell,and a workbench along the back wall that I used for exactly nothing. The overhead light hummed on its sensor and threw a flat industrial glow across the concrete. I could smell gasoline and cold stone and, faintly, my own blood.
I pressed my hand against my ribs. The shirt was wet and warm and my fingers found the place where the gauze had given up, and underneath I felt the specific softness of a stitch that had blown—the wound's edges separated, no longer held, weeping into the mess of fabric and tape with the steady indifference of something that didn't care about my schedule.
Two stitches, I thought. Maybe three. Not enough to call Ferraro. Not enough to justify the look he'd give me, the one that said I told you not to strain it with the professional patience of a man who'd been stitching Carusos back together for twenty years and had long since stopped expecting them to listen.
I got out of the car. Stood for a second while the wound recalibrated to vertical—a bright, specific pull that ran from my ribs to my hip and settled into a steady throb. Breathed. Moved.
The side entrance was through a short corridor off the garage, a door I'd had reinforced two years ago with a steel core and a deadbolt that would take a battering ram to break. I disarmed the security panel with my left hand—four digits, muscle memory, the green light confirming the system recognized me—while my right held pressure against the wet mess of my side. The panel beeped twice. Armed. Disarmed. The small rituals of a man who lived alone and kept his walls high.
The house opened around me. Dark. Quiet. The hallway that ran from the side entrance to the main staircase was unlit, the way I'd left it this morning, the way I always left it.
But something was off.
I stopped. One hand on the wall, one hand on my side, my breath held without deciding to hold it. The hallway air had a quality I couldn't name — not a smell, not a sound, somethingsubtler. A displacement. The faintest suggestion that the air had been disturbed, moved, pushed around by a body that wasn't mine. Like a window opened and closed. Like a door that had swung on its hinges and settled.
Crazy. I was going crazy.
Disturbed air? Did I think I was psychic?
Even so, I truly felt like something was wrong.
I stood there for five seconds. Listened.
Nothing.
The refrigerator hummed in the kitchen. The house settled, the way old houses settle, with small creaks and adjustments that sounded like breathing if you let yourself think about it. The heating system clicked on somewhere in the walls.
Nothing.
I exhaled. Attributed it to the garage door—the seal had been wearing and cold air drafted in when the door cycled. It would push through the corridor and into the hall and displace exactly the kind of air I was standing here reading like a threat assessment.
I was tired. I was bleeding.
Time to fix myself up and crash the fuck out.
I went upstairs.
Itookmyclothesoffcarefully, one by one. First the jacket, dropped on the bathroom floor, then the button-down, peeled slowly from the left side where blood had fused fabric to gauze to skin in a single damp layer that didn't want to separate. I worked it free with the patience of someone who'd done this before and would do it again and had stopped having feelings about it. The gauze underneath was a lost cause—soaked through, copper-brown, clinging to the wound edges with thestubborn adhesion of something that had been asked to do a job and was refusing to quit. I pulled it off in one motion. The wound said hello.
The mirror gave me the full picture. Two of the fourteen stitches had torn—the third and fourth from the bottom, the ones that sat right over the muscle where movement pulled hardest. The wound was weeping, not gushing. A steady seep that ran in a thin line down my side and collected at my waistband, darkening the fabric there. The edges gaped slightly where the stitches had let go, pink and raw and angry in the way flesh gets when you ask it to heal and then refuse to let it.
The rest of the stitches had held. Small mercies. Ferraro's work was good—always had been, precise and even, the sutures of a man who'd trained as a vascular surgeon before the Caruso family offered him a salary that made hospitals look like charity work.
He'd close this gap in three minutes and lecture me for ten, his gentle voice going through the usual script: strain, recovery time, the mechanical limits of tissue under tension.You are not twenty, Santino. A sentence he'd been saying for years with diminishing hope that it would change anything.
I ran the tap. The water came cold first—the house had been empty all day, the pipes carrying winter in their bones—and I let it run until steam started to rise, then soaked a washcloth and pressed it against the wound. The heat bloomed through my side, half comfort and half punishment, and I held it there with my eyes closed for a count of ten.
When I opened them, I looked at myself in the mirror. A body that was a record. Not a portrait—a ledger. Every line, every scar, every mark a transaction recorded in skin.
The tattoos started at both wrists and climbed — saints on my right forearm, their faces detailed and sorrowful, eyes lifted toward something I'd never believed in. Roses on myleft, thorned, winding between dates I didn't explain to people who asked. The Madonna across my chest, her hands open, her expression the particular combination of compassion and resignation that the artists got right and the priests got wrong. Across my ribs on the right side—the undamaged side—a line of text in Italian that my mother had loved and my father had never understood, which was fitting because that was generally how it went with the two of them.
Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra, trafitto da un raggio di sole, ed è subito sera.
Everyone stands alone at the heart of the earth, pierced by a ray of sunlight, and suddenly it's evening.
And the scars. The old bullet graze on my right shoulder, faded to a pale ridge that looked like nothing now—a crescent, a half-moon, the kind of mark a doctor would glance at and file under childhood injury.
Below it, newer damage. A knife scar on my left forearm from a bar in Bridgeport, 2019. A raised line across three knuckles on my right hand where I'd split them on someone's teeth. And now the fresh wound, nine days old, weeping and open, a four-inch line below my ribs that would add itself to the collection and fade and join the rest and be another entry in the ledger of a body that kept taking punishment because that was what it had been built for.
