Marco’s grip on Santo loosened. Not releasing—easing. The tension in the room recalibrating, the pressure finding a new level, the way water finds a new level after the dam shifts.
Santo’s breathing was hard. His chest rising and falling. His right hand—the hand that had just hit his brother, the don, the head of the Caruso family—hung at his side with the knuckles already darkening, the skin split across the second and third joints.
Dante wiped his mouth again. Looked at me. Back at Santo.
“Take her home,” he said.
He said it the way he said everything—with the absolute authority of a man whose word was law. But the tone wasn’t a command. It was permission. It was a brother telling another brother: I see what this is. Go.
Santo’s hand found my elbow. Careful. The bleeding knuckles gentle against my sleeve.
“Come on,” he said. Rough. Wrecked.
I stood. My legs held. I didn’t look at Dante—couldn’t, not yet, the guilt of what I was withholding pressing against my chest so hard I thought it might crack a rib. I looked at Dona. Her dark eyes were bright, her lipstick perfect, her face holding an expression that was fury and tenderness and exasperation in equal parts.
She nodded. Once. Go.
We left.
Myhandswouldn’tstopshaking.
I pressed them between my knees. The car was quiet except for the engine and the particular silence of two people who had just walked out of a room where something irrevocable had happened. The suburban sprawl hadn’t started yet—we were still in the city, still in the dense grid of Bridgeport, the brick buildings sliding past the windows like scenery from a life that belonged to someone else.
Santo’s knuckles were split. Sothat’swhere the scars came from. The skin torn across the second and third joints of his right hand, the blood drying in dark lines between his fingers, his grip on the steering wheel leaving rusty smears on the leather. He drove with the focused precision of a man whose body was still running on adrenaline and whose mind was working to catch up.
He’d hit Dante. The don. His brother. The head of the family. He’d put his fist through the hierarchy of a criminal organization because someone had used a word that sounded likebaitin the same sentence as my name.
“You hit your brother,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Because of me.”
“Yes.”
Nobody had ever hit someone for me.
The thought was simple and enormous and it sat in my chest beside the other thing—he loves me—and the two of them together took up so much space that I could barely breathe around them.
“Dante wasn’t wrong,” I said.
Santo’s jaw tightened. I watched the muscle work along the hinge—the familiar compression, the body processing a truth it didn’t want.
“I owe you the truth,” I said. “All of you. He was right to ask.”
The car was quiet for five seconds. Ten.
“Not tonight,” Santo said.
Two words. Quiet. The gentleness in them almost worse than the violence had been, because the violence was honest and the gentleness was honest and they came from the same place—the same hands, the same man, the same deep well of caring that expressed itself in whatever form the moment required. He wasn’t sayingnever. He wasn’t sayingI don’t want to know. He was sayingyou’ve had enough today. He was sayingI can wait. He was saying, in the language of two words and split knuckles and a car pointed toward the only place in the world where I felt safe,rest first.
“Soon,” I said.
“Okay.”
We drove.
Chapter 13
