I said nothing.
I watched his face. The crooked nose—broken twice, at least, the bridge sitting slightly left of center. The stubble along his jaw, dark and heavy. His eyes were nearly black in the low light, and they held mine with a steadiness that should have been threatening but instead just . . . was. Present. A man looking at me and actually seeing what was there.
"The laptop," he said. "What did you want with it?"
Nothing. I kept my face flat. Didn't blink. Didn't swallow. Fear was currency and I wasn't spending it here, not in this room, not on this man. I let the silence sit between us like a physical object and I waited.
His hands were on his knees. His knuckles were scarred, same as mine. His fingers were loose. Relaxed. Not curled, not tightening, not doing the slow unconscious clench that preceded a hit.
"Your name," he said.
Nothing.
He didn't move. Didn't shift in his chair, didn't exhale loudly, didn't do any of the things that signaled the internal thermostat climbing toward the red. He just sat there, elbows on knees, dark eyes steady, and waited for an answer he wasn't getting.
Then he tried again. Different angle.
"The security system. You bypassed the keypad—that's not amateur. Someone gave you the code or you cracked it yourself. Which one?"
I looked at the wall behind his left shoulder. There was a painting there. Landscape. Hills and water and a sky that looked like it had been borrowed from somewhere warm.
"The jewelry," he said. "You went straight for the safe in the bedroom. You knew where it was. You knew the combination was mechanical, not digital. That's specific intelligence. Someone briefed you."
His voice hadn't changed. Same register, same pace, same low steady frequency. He was working through the questions the way someone works a combination lock — trying one number, listening for the click, moving to the next. Methodical. Patient. Not angry. Patient.
Five minutes passed. He asked about my entry point. He asked about the timeline. He asked whether I'd been watching the house, how long, from where. Each question was precise, specific, designed to offer me an easy answer—a small truth that cost nothing, a crumb that might lead to a trail.
I gave him nothing.
Ten minutes. Fifteen. He asked the same questions in different configurations, approaching from new directions, and I sat in the chair and bled quietly from my wrists and watched his hands and waited for violence. It would come. It always did.
But not this time.
Santo Caruso sat across from me for a further twenty minutes asking questions I refused to answer, and his hands stayed on his knees, and his voice stayed low, and the violence didn't come.
I didn't know what to do with that.
It broke something in my calculation—not the resolve, not the silence, but the framework underneath. The model I'd been running since I was old enough to understand what men did when they ran out of words. He wasn't performing patience. He wasn't building toward something. He was simply . . . patient. The way a wall is patient. The way weather is patient. Without agenda, without limit, without the coiled energy that preceded violence.
He sat back. Studied me. And the quality of his attention shifted—I felt it, the way you feel a change in air pressure before a storm. He wasn't trying to break me. He was trying to understand me. Reading my silence the way I was reading his hands, looking for information in the absence, in the shape of what I wouldn't say.
He said it like a man closing a door. The click of a latch, the turn of a lock, the quiet finality of a thing that was done.
"You're staying here until you talk."
No inflection. No threat, no promise, no performance.
Just the statement, delivered in that low basement voice, and the absolute certainty behind it. He wasn't negotiating. He wasn't testing. He was informing me of a fact the way someone informs you that it's Tuesday or that the highway is closed. Not a conversation. A weather report.
I absorbed it.
My brain did what it always did — ran the math. The study: one window, painted shut, the same window I'd spent forty minutes prying open hours ago and which he had presumably locked or sealed since. The walls: plasterboard over older construction, maybe, but the exterior walls were solid, brick or stone, the kind of walls that belonged to houses built before cutting corners was an industry standard. The door: solid wood, heavy, and he was between me and it. The hallway beyond: I'd mapped it on the way in. Stairs at the end, twelve steps down, side entrance off the garage. The garage door was automated, keyed to his car or a remote. The main entrance I hadn't seen.
Distance from Oak Brook to North Kedzie: twenty-three miles. I knew because I'd looked it up before the job, back when twenty-three miles was the length of an escape route and not the width of a cage. Twenty-three miles of expressway and city streets between this chair and everything I had left, which wasn't much, which was almost nothing, which was —
Midge.
The thought arrived like a blade between the ribs. Not gradual. Not building. Instant, total, a full-body understanding that hit me in the chest and took my breath in a way the fight hadn't managed and the zip ties hadn't managed and twenty minutes of interrogation hadn't come close to managing.
