I said nothing. There was nothing to say that wouldn't end with someone on the floor, and this wasn't the venue. Enzo knew that. The comment was designed precisely for a room where I couldn't respond the way I wanted to, delivered with the surgical courtesy of a man who understood that the greatest insult was one you couldn't answer.
He moved on. His two men fell into step behind him. They went down the creaking stairs—fourth step, seventh step—and out into the world, and I stood there breathing through something that felt less like anger and more like a promise.
The room emptied. The mediator gave Dante a nod that carried the weight of old debts and older alliances, and then he was gone too, and it was just us. My brother and me, in a scratched-up dining room that smelled like cigars and tomato sauce and the particular staleness of tension that had nowhere left to go.
Dante exhaled. It was a small sound, controlled, but I heard the release in it—the fraction of a second where the don stepped offstage and the man stepped back on. He pulled his phone from his jacket.
"Give me a minute," he said. Not a question.
I nodded. Stepped into the corridor.
The hallway was narrow, dim, wallpapered in something dark and vaguely floral that had been there since the eighties. I leaned against the wall and let my weight settle, and the wound in my side sent up a bright flare that I acknowledged and filed away. My hands ached. My knuckles — the scarred ones, the ones that never fully healed between rounds — throbbed in time with my pulse.
Through the door, I heard Dante's voice.
It changed. That was the thing. It physically, audibly changed, the way a room changes when someone turns the lights down. The authority bled out of it. The precision relaxed. What was left was something I didn't have a word for—warm, low, private, a voice that belonged to a room with a closed door and a woman who'd made him eat breakfast.
"Hey. Yeah, it's done. No—it went fine. How are you?"
How are you.Three words that had nothing to do with strategy or territory or the balance of power in Chicago. Three words that meantI'm thinking about you. I've been thinking about you this whole time. Even in a room full of men who want to take everything I have, I was thinking about you.
I heard him laugh. A real laugh, quiet, surprised out of him by whatever she'd said. I hadn't heard Dante laugh like that in — I didn't know. Years. Maybe ever.
"Yeah," he said, and his voice did something soft around the word. Almost tender. "I'll be home soon. An hour, maybe. Do you need anything, Baby Girl?"
The don who ran the South Side, who dismantled power plays with receipts and controlled silence, asking a woman half his size if she needed him to pick up something on the way home.
I looked down at my hands. Scarred knuckles, swollen joints, the faint rust of old blood in the creases no amount of scrubbing ever fully removed. These hands had broken noses, cracked ribs, ended arguments in ways that didn't allow for rebuttals. They were good at their job. They'd been trained for their job since I was old enough to make a fist, maybe before that, maybe since the day my father looked at me and Dante side by side and decided which one would be the strategist and which one would be the weapon.
What would these hands do if someone asked them to be gentle?
I didn't know. I genuinely didn't know. Not in the way of a man being modest—I mean I could not picture it. Could not imagine the mechanics of reaching for someone without intent to restrain, or hold, or hurt. Touching someone's face because you wanted to, not because you were checking for a wound. Pulling someone close because they needed it, not because the situation required control.
Down the hall, Dante said something I couldn't hear. Whatever it was, it made his voice go quieter still. A sound like a door closing behind him, leaving the rest of us—the violence, the politics, the sit-downs and the provocations—on the outside.
I stood in the corridor with my busted hands and my aching side and the particular loneliness of a man who had been the knife for so long he'd forgotten that knives don't get held. They get used. They get put away. They wait in the dark for the next time they're needed.
Chapter 2
Cora
Thebagswungbackand I hit it again. Left jab, right cross, left hook—the chain rattling against the basement ceiling like loose teeth in a jaw. Five forty-five in the morning. The Kedzie Avenue YMCA smelled like bleach and old sweat.
Nobody was down here. Nobody waseverdown here at this hour except me, which was the point. Dolores at the front desk didn't check membership cards before seven. She barely looked up from her phone before seven. I'd been walking through those doors three mornings a week for four months, and the most Dolores had ever said to me waswatch the step, which I appreciated more than she knew because the step was uneven and I'd almost gone down on my face the first time.
I drove my fist into the bag and felt the impact travel up my arm and into my shoulder, a shudder that saidgoodandstopat the same time. The leather was cracked in two places, patched with duct tape that was starting to peel. Someone had drawn a smiley face on one of the patches in black marker. It stared at meevery time the bag swung back, this dumb cheerful circle, and I hit it in the mouth.
My hands were wrapped in medical tape I'd taken from the CVS on Pulaski. Not bought. Took. There's a difference, and the difference is eighty-three dollars in your bank account and a working understanding of which aisles have cameras and which don't. The tape was the good kind—the white athletic stuff, not the paper garbage that unraveled the second you started sweating. I'd lifted three rolls. Two for training, one for Midge's paw when she cut it on glass last month.
Left jab, right cross, left hook. Repeat. I'd learned the combinations from YouTube videos on the library's free Wi-Fi—a woman in a tank top with beautiful form and a calm voice who said things likerotate through your hipsandkeep your guard upandyou're doing great.
I didn't train for sport. I didn't train for fitness or stress relief or any of the reasons the posters upstairs suggested, the ones with stock photos of smiling women in clean sports bras who had clearly never been grabbed by the arm outside a shelter on West Madison at two in the morning.
I trained because a woman who can throw a punch is a woman who can fight back.
And I needed to be able to fight back.
The specifics weren't interesting. They were the same specifics that belonged to every woman I'd ever met in a transitional housing unit or a welfare line or the back row of a free clinic waiting room. Hands that came out of nowhere. Situations that turned. The particular combination of being small and female and alone in a city that didn't care about any of those things except as categories on an intake form.
