"I want a kiss. Just a small one." He tilted his head, performing thoughtfulness. "A gesture of goodwill."
The café continued around us. The espresso machine hissed. A woman at the counter ordered something in Spanish and the barista answered in English and neither of them looked our way. Normal afternoon. Normal sounds.
I looked at Toni for three seconds without blinking. I counted them the way I counted everything—deliberately, precisely, giving the silence its full weight. His smile held. His flat eyes held. Midge's growl climbed half a register.
"Go fuck yourself," I said.
I stood up. The chair scraped back against the tile floor and the sound was loud enough to turn the barista's head. I didn't care. My hands were at my sides and they weren't shaking, which was good, because shaking hands meant the anger had gotten past the controls and I needed the controls right now. I needed the flat face and the even voice and the clean, single-syllable refusal that didn't leave room for negotiation.
I was two steps from the door.
"Sit down, Cora."
His voice had changed.
The playfulness was gone. The circling, the grinning, the practiced charm—all of it stripped back in three words, and what was left was something flatter and colder and more honest than anything I'd heard from him in a year of transactions. Something that sounded less like Toni deciding and more like Toni relaying. A man reading from someone else's script.
I turned around.
He wasn't smiling anymore. His face had settled into a version of itself I hadn't seen before—the surface charm pulled away like a cloth off a table, revealing the bare wood underneath. His dark eyes were the same, flat, watching, but the calculation in them had shifted. He wasn't weighing what he could get from me. Hewas weighing what would happen if I walked out, and whatever the answer was, it wasn't good. For him.
Whoever wanted this done, it wasn't him.
Midge had stopped growling. She was pressed flat against my chest, silent, the way small animals go silent when the real threat arrives and bravado won't save them.
I went back to the table. I sat down.
Toni exhaled—barely, a small release through his nose that he probably didn't know I caught. Relief. He was relieved. Which meant he'd been scared, which meant whoever was pulling his strings had given him a clear picture of what happened if he came back empty-handed.
"The kiss thing," he said quietly. "That was me being stupid. Forget it."
"Already forgotten," I said. "Talk."
He talked.
ThemarklivedinOak Brook. That was the first thing Toni said, and the wordsOak Brooklanded differently than Lincoln Park or the Loop—heavier, farther, the kind of neighborhood that meant gates and cameras and the sort of quiet that money could buy and keep.
"Big place," Toni said. His voice was still in its new register — stripped, businesslike, the entertainer replaced by something more like a foreman reading specs. "Brownstone. Gated property, security system, but nothing you can't handle. Standard residential setup—keypad on the door, cameras on the perimeter, maybe a motion sensor in the main hall. Nothing military."
I filed it. Keypad meant a code or a bypass. Cameras meant timing and angles. Motion sensor meant knowing where it was and where it wasn't.
"He lives alone," Toni continued. "No wife, no girlfriend, no roommates. Out most nights, unpredictable hours—the kind of guy whose schedule runs on other people's emergencies. You go in when he's out. You get what I'm about to tell you. You leave."
Simple. In theory, jobs were always simple. The complications lived in the space betweenin theoryandon the ground, which was a space I'd learned to navigate the way you navigate a dark room — slowly, by touch, expecting furniture.
"What am I getting?"
"Two things." Toni held up two fingers. "First: a laptop from the study on the second floor. Should be on the desk or nearby. Silver, newer model. You grab it, you bring it to me."
I nodded. Laptops were easy. Laptops wanted to be taken—they were light, portable, designed for movement.
"Second." He lowered his voice, though we were the only people in the back of the café and the barista was busy pretending we didn't exist. "There's a safe in the master bedroom. Combination lock, not digital. Inside, there's a set of family jewellery. Old pieces. Italian. Rings, a necklace, maybe a brooch—I don't have the full inventory. They're not worth much on the open market, but they're worth a lot to whoever wants them."
"Worth more for what they represent," I said. It wasn't a question. I'd been in this world long enough to know that the most dangerous things to steal weren't the valuable ones. They were the meaningful ones. Valuable things were insured, replaced, forgotten. Meaningful things were pursued.
"Something like that." Toni's flat eyes gave nothing. "You get in, you take both, you get out. Four thousand dollars when you deliver."
Four thousand. The number hung between us. Four thousand was rent for eight months. Four thousand was Midge's food for a year.
