I knew what was coming. My body knew before the words arrived—the coldness spreading through my chest, the hands going still on my thighs, the specific physiological response of a man whose instincts had identified a threat before his brain had finished processing the language.
“We need Cora,” Dante said.
I went quiet.
Cora in a room full of mafia heads. Cora standing before the Morettis and the Lombardis and the DeSantos and saying I was used as a weapon and here is the man who loaded me. Cora visible. Cora exposed. Cora with her bitten nails and her scarred knuckles and her flat, economical voice delivering testimony that would paint a target on her back the size of Bridgeport.
“She’s not bait this time,” Dante said. Reading me. The way he always read me—the same precision he brought to every other assessment, applied to the brother he’d known for thirty-two years and could decode without instruction. “She’s a witness. There’s a difference.”
“I know the difference.”
“Do you?”
I looked at him. He looked back. The bruise on his jaw. The severity in his face, and underneath it, the thing he’d shown me my whole life whether I’d known how to recognize it or not—the care that operated through structure, through strategy, through the careful architecture of plans that kept the people he loved alive.
“I need to be beside her,” I said.
Dante held my eyes.
“Of course,” he said. Simple. Absolute. The voice of a man who had never needed the word explained.
Marco picked up his phone. The briefing was over. The plan was set. Four days.
I sat in the chair and I felt the weight of it settle — not on my shoulders, where I was used to carrying things. In my chest. Where she lived.
Four days.
Itookthelongwayto Dante’s.
Not for time—for clarity. The briefing was still in my head, the timeline and the photographs and the four-day countdown sitting behind my eyes like something bright I’d stared at too long.
I was thinking about the sit-down. About Cora’s voice in that room—the flat, economical delivery she used for facts. She’d begood at it. She’d be precise and unembellished and every man at that table would believe her because she wasn’t a performer. She was a person telling the truth in the plainest possible language.
The thought comforted me. The thought terrified me. Both things true at once. Both things occupying the same space in my chest.
I took the exit toward Dante’s neighborhood. The streets narrowed. The converted lofts and the brick buildings and the particular density of a neighborhood that cost money but didn‘t want you to know it. Two blocks from Dante’s building, I turned onto the cross street.
My eyes caught it before my brain named it.
A car. Dark blue. Four-door sedan — not Sal’s grey Buick. A Nissan Altima, maybe three years old, the kind of car that was chosen specifically because it was unremarkable. Tinted windows—darker than factory standard, the aftermarket treatment that said the occupant didn’t want to be seen. Parked on the right side, two spaces back from the intersection, angled with a clear sightline to the entrance of Dante’s building.
Engine running.
The exhaust was visible in the cold air. A thin plume from the tailpipe, white against the street. The car was occupied and warm and had been there long enough to need the heat but not long enough to have turned it off.
My hands didn’t tighten on the wheel. My posture didn’t change. My eyes registered the vehicle—make, color, approximate year, plate number committed to memory in the two seconds it took to pass—and then moved forward, found the road, continued.
I didn’t stop.
The discipline was automatic. Thirty-two years of this life had built the circuitry: you don’t react to surveillance. You don’t slow down, you don’t speed up, you don’t turn your head. Youabsorb the data and you file it and you keep moving because the moment you acknowledge a watcher, you confirm their hypothesis. You tell them: yes, something worth watching is here.
I parked in front of Dante’s building. Normal. Got out. Normal. Walked to the door. Normal. Everything normal.
The door opened and Cora was there.
She smelled like crayons. The specific, waxy scent of Crayola—I could smell it from two feet away, the smell embedded in her fingers, in the cuffs of the sweater she’d borrowed from Gemma. Her hair was loose around her shoulders. Her eyes were bright—actually bright, the dark irises catching the hallway light with a quality I’d never seen before. The quality of a woman who had spent an afternoon coloring and drinking warm milk from a sippy cup and being told she was good by another woman who understood exactly what that word meant and how much it could hold.
The rabbit was under her arm. Midge was in her jacket, the stub tail going.
