Midge was on the chair beside me, her chin on the table’s edge, watching the pen move with the focused attention of a creature who suspected all writing implements of being threats. The kitchen smelled like the pasta he’d made for dinner—garlic, olive oil, anchovies. My plate was clean. He’d checked.
“Marchetti’s is neutral ground,” he said. “Old restaurant on Taylor Street. Been there since the seventies. The owner owes nobody anything, which is why everybody trusts him.”
He drew more shapes around the oval. Squares. Rectangles. The architecture of a room I’d never seen, rendered in ballpoint on a paper napkin.
“The table’s oval. Dante sits here.” An X at the head. “Marco here.” Another X, flanking. “The Morettis will be across—Gemma’s birth family. Alberto, probably his oldest son, Carlo. Good people. The Lombardis on the left. DeSantos on the right.”
Names I didn’t know. Families I’d never met. Men who controlled territories and made decisions that rippled through neighborhoods like the one I’d grown up in, the one Maria had died in.
“Where’s the door?” I asked.
He looked at me. The question told him something—I saw it register, the recognition that I was asking about exits, not entrances. The thief’s instinct. The survival math that never turned off.
“Behind Dante,” he said. “Kitchen access. Two exits from there—one to the alley, one to the street. Sal will be in the alley. Eddie on the street.”
“Okay.”
“You tell them what you told us.” His voice shifted—lower, steadier, the register he used when he was giving me something important and needed me to hold it. “Your name. Maria’s name. Ferrara. The recruitment. The money. How you were pointed at me. That’s it. Plain. The way you talk.”
“The way I talk.”
“Flat. Direct. No decorating.” The corner of his mouth moved. Almost a smile. “You’re the most convincing person I’ve ever met when you’re just stating facts. It’s when you try to embellish that you’re full of shit.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
He told me what not to say. Nothing about the contract, the arrangement, the rabbit on the bed or the sippy cup with stars. Nothing about Caruso operations—not that I knew much, but the boundary was clear. Nothing about Dante’s strategy or Marco’s intelligence work. Just my story. Maria’s story. The human link in the chain of evidence that would justify whatever came next.
I looked at the napkin. The oval table. The X marks. The small kingdom of ink and paper where tomorrow’s war would be decided.
“What if they don’t believe me?”
Santo set the pen down. His eyes found mine—dark, steady, the particular quality of attention that I’d stopped being able to look away from somewhere around day three.
“They will.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I know you.” Simple. Absolute. The voice of a man who had decided something and was not interested in revisiting the decision. “You walk into that room and you tell them what happened to your sister, and every man at that table will know it’s the truth. Because it is. And because you don’t know how to be anything else.”
The words settled in my chest. Warm. Heavy. The specific weight of being seen clearly by someone who liked what he saw.
“What if Enzo is there?”
The pause was physical. I felt it in the air — the temperature dropping a fraction, the kitchen contracting around us. Santo‘s jaw did the thing. The compression. The muscle along the hinge working, the body processing threat in real time.
“He won‘t be at the table,” Santo said. “It’s a sit-down about him, not with him. But his people might be watching. Outside. Down the street.”
“And if he shows up anyway?”
Three seconds. His eyes didn’t leave mine.
“I’ll be there.”
Three words. No volume behind them. No bravado, no chest-puffing, no performance of danger. Just the fact of him—two hundred and ten pounds of scar tissue and loyalty and the particular violence of a man who had already put his fist through his own brother’s face for suggesting I be put in harm’s way.
I knew he would protect me.
