I stepped into the hallway. Pulled the door mostly closed—not shut, never shut, the gap of four inches that let her see the hallway light and know she wasn’t sealed in. The screen lit my face in the dark.
Dante.
Saturday. My place. Dinner. Gemma wants to meet her. Bring the dog too.
I read it twice.
Maybe he wouldn’t kill me for hitting him, after all.
Chapter 14
Cora
Dinnerwithamafiadon.
Nothing to worry about, right?
But I had been worrying, every moment since Santo told me about the summons. He assured me that Dante wouldn’t be doing anything bad, but I just couldn’t believe it—I’d been let down before.
Maybe Saturday just wouldn’t come?
Of course, it did.
I sat in the passenger seat with Midge zipped inside my jacket and my hands in my lap and my heart doing something that felt medically significant.
Midge shifted inside my jacket. Her nose pressed against my collarbone — warm, wet, investigative. The stub tail moved against my ribs. She could feel my heartbeat and was conducting her own assessment of its rhythm, the way she always did when my body ran ahead of my brain.
“You’re shaking,” Santo said.
“I’m cold.”
“It’s sixty-two degrees in this car.”
“I run cold.”
He didn’t argue. His hand left the wheel and found my knee. The split knuckles had scabbed over—dark lines across the second and third joints, the evidence of what he’d done in Dante’s office.
The building was brick. Old. A converted something—warehouse, maybe, or factory—with the kind of renovation that cost more than the original structure and was designed to look like it hadn’t. Santo parked. Came around. Opened my door with the hand that wasn’t holding my elbow, guiding me onto the sidewalk with the careful precision of a man delivering something fragile to a destination he trusted but she didn’t.
Sal‘s grey sedan settled at the curb behind us. The constant satellite.
I adjusted Midge inside the jacket. Her head poked out above the zipper — one ear up, one flopped, the brown eyes scanning the street with the particular vigilance of a creature who had opinions about new locations and would be sharing them shortly.
The door opened before we knocked.
She was small. That was the first thing—small in a way that went beyond height. Dark hair, long, pulled back. Wide brown eyes that took in everything and gave away nothing—until they landed on Midge.
“Oh,” she said. The word came out involuntary, stripped of the careful softness that preceded it. Her hands came up. Her face transformed. “Oh, hello.”
“That‘s Midge,” I said. “She bites.”
“She won’t bite me! Look at her. She’s magnificent.” Gemma Caruso dropped to her knees on the threshold of her own homeand extended her hand, palm down, fingers loose. Not reaching. Offering.
Midge assessed her from the safety of my jacket. The stub tail went still. The good ear rotated forward. Three seconds of silence while a four-pound chihuahua determined the fate of an inter-family relationship.
Then Midge leaned forward and licked Gemma’s knuckle.
“She never does that,” I said. Midge’s affection was rationed with the precision of a creature who’d been abandoned once and considered every subsequent human encounter a probationary period.
