Three words. Quiet. Her eyes on mine.
I leaned forward. My hand found her cheek. My palm against her skin, my thumb at the edge of the scar through her eyebrow, the contact so gentle it barely registered as touch and so total it registered as everything.
“I love you.”
Her hand came up. Found my wrist. Held on.
Dona, beside us, was crying. Silently, her mascara holding, the tears tracking down her cheeks without sound. She didn’t wipe them. She just knelt there with her hand still in Cora’s hair and let them fall, and I thought: this is my family. Loud and impossible and incapable of doing anything at a reasonable volume or in a reasonable order, and I wouldn’t trade a single one of them.
Cora’s fingers tightened on my wrist.
She opened her mouth—
My phone rang.
The sound cut through the room like a blade through cloth—clean, efficient, severing the moment at its seam. My hand was on Cora’s cheek. Her hand was on my wrist. Dona was on her knees beside the couch. Midge was pressed against Cora’s hip. And my phone was vibrating in my back pocket with the specific pattern I’d assigned to one contact, because some calls you needed to feel before you heard.
Dante.
I pulled my hand from Cora’s face. The loss of contact registered in both of us — I saw it in her eyes, the flicker, the small contraction. But my body was already pivoting, the years of conditioning overriding the tenderness the way they always would, the way they had to. When Dante called, you answered. Not because he demanded it. Because the only time Dante called instead of texted was when the world had changed shape and you needed to hear the new dimensions in his voice.
I answered.
“Bridgeport. Now.”
Two words. One location and one instruction. His voice was compressed to its smallest possible form — no modulation, no inflection, each syllable stripped to the structural minimum the way you stripped a weapon for transport. I’d heard Dante speak in a hundred registers. I’d heard him calm and clipped and cold and, once, in the hallway outside Gemma’s room, something close to afraid. This was none of those. This was a frequency I’d heard exactly twice before — the night our father died, and the morning six months ago when the first Valenti payment surfaced in the ledgers.
“Who?” I said.
“Everyone. You, Marco, Dona. And Cora, of course.”
Time was up.
Chapter 12
Cora
Thesuburbsthinnedoutand the city came in like a tide. I watched it through the back window of Santo’s car—the lawns shrinking, the houses pressing closer, the sky narrowing between buildings that had opinions about each other. My hands were in my lap. My body was still doing the thing it did after fainting: running diagnostics, checking systems, confirming that the floor was where it was supposed to be.
He loves me.
The thought sat in my chest like something swallowed wrong. Too large for the space. Pressing against organs that hadn‘t been consulted about rearranging themselves to accommodate it.
I couldn’t believe it.
Santo was in the front seat. Driving. His hands on the wheel at ten and two, his jaw set, knuckles white.
Dona sat beside me. Her coat was expensive. Her perfume was something with gardenia in it. The ring on her right hand had stopped spinning.
She’d been quiet since the house. The woman who had arrived like a weather system—loud, righteous, incandescent with fury on behalf of someone she‘d never met—had gone still. Not subdued. Recalibrating. I recognized the process because I lived inside it: the constant adjustment of expectations to reality, the recalculation that happened when the data changed faster than the model could accommodate.
“Dante’s going to ask you questions,” she said. Not looking at me. Looking out her window at the city assembling itself around us. “He’s not cruel. He’s just—thorough.”
“Thorough.”
“He’ll know things about you before you tell him. He does that. It’s annoying.” A beat. “Don’t let it scare you.”
I was already scared. The fear had been there since before the faint, before the kitchen, before the three words that had blown the circuits my body used to stay upright. The fear was older than any of it. The fear was twenty-three years old and had Maria’s face and lived in the space between who I was and who I’d told Santo I was, and it was growing.
