Not empty—Chicago expressways were never empty. But thin. The traffic spread out and unhurried, the cars spaced at intervals that felt generous, the city in one of its rare cooperative moods. Through the windshield, the skyline assembled itself in the distance.
Sal’s hands were steady on the wheel. Santo was beside me. His hand on my knee. He was monitoring. Always monitoring.The constant, involuntary surveillance of a man who’d been raised to treat every environment as a potential threat.
I rehearsed.
The words moved through my mind the way water moved through a familiar channel—worn smooth by repetition, following the grooves I‘d carved over three days of practice.My name is Cora Flores. My sister was Maria Flores. She was sixteen years old when she was killed in the summer of 2003.The sentences had the quality of stones I‘d been turning in my hands — polished now, the edges gone, each word selected and tested and confirmed.
I was approached by a man named Antonio Ferrara. He told me the Caruso family was responsible for Maria’s death. He gave me money and an address. He told me to break in.
The truth. Plain. No decorating. The way I talked.
Ferrara recruited me to infiltrate the Caruso family. When I failed to deliver, the same network sent Bratva operatives to eliminate me. The recruitment, the attempted abduction, and the community center firebombing all trace back to the same source: Enzo Valenti.
The words sat in my chest like ammunition. Loaded. Ready.
I counted mile markers. Watched the city grow. Felt Santo’s hand warm and heavy on my knee and tried to memorize the feeling in case I needed it later—the specific pressure of his palm, the weight of his fingers, the grounding fact of contact.
Then his hand changed.
The shift was so small that someone else might have missed it. A tightening. Not a squeeze—not the affectionate compression he gave me when he was reassuring or proud or just wanted to touch me. This was different. The fingers closing with a specific quality of tension that I‘d felt once before—in Dante’s office, the second before he’d put his fist through his brother‘s face.
I went still.
My body responded before my brain—the same circuit that had kept me alive through group homes and bad jobs and the night the Bratva came. The internal alarm that fired below conscious thought, the animal system that read threat in the posture of the humans around it and adjusted accordingly.
I didn’t turn around. Didn’t look at Santo. Didn’t move. I kept my eyes forward and let my peripheral vision do the work—the edge of the mirror, the slice of road visible through the gap between the front seats, the rectangle of the rearview where Sal’s eyes had shifted.
Something was behind us.
I could feel Santo seeing it. The tension radiating from his body into his hand into my knee—the chain of information, physical, wordless. His jaw had locked. The muscle at the hinge doing its familiar work, but harder now, the compression deeper. His other hand—the one that wasn‘t on my knee—had moved to his waist. The motion casual. Practiced. The hand finding the weapon that lived there.
I let my eyes drift to the side mirror. Casual. The kind of glance anyone would give.
A car. Dark blue. Four-door sedan. Tinted windows—darker than they should have been, the aftermarket treatment that said whoever was inside didn‘t want to be identified. Two cars back, matching our speed with the particular precision of a vehicle that was following rather than traveling.
My stomach dropped.
Then movement on the left. The side mirror caught it—a shape pulling forward in the next lane. Black. Large. An SUV with tinted windows and a chrome grille that caught the morning light like teeth. It was pulling alongside us. Not passing. Matching. Settling into the lane with the deliberate positioning of something that had chosen its spot.
One behind. One beside.
Santo’s hand left my knee.
He leaned forward. One word to Sal—low, clipped, a word I couldn’t hear over the sound of my own blood in my ears but that I could read in the way Sal’s shoulders squared and his hands adjusted on the wheel and the grey sedan’s engine note changed as his foot found a different relationship with the accelerator.
Midge went rigid inside my jacket. Her body stiffening against my ribs, every muscle locked, the small frame going taut the way it did when she sensed something wrong before the humans had finished processing it. No bark. No whine. Just the silence of an animal who had identified a predator and was deciding whether to fight or freeze.
I looked at Santo.
The SUV hit us like a fist.
Metal on metal. The sound wasn’t a crash—it was a scream, high and grinding, the particular shriek of two vehicles making contact at sixty miles an hour when only one of them meant it. The impact came from the left. The sedan lurched right—hard, the tires losing and finding and losing grip, my body thrown against the door, my shoulder hitting the window with a force that registered as fact before pain.
Sal fought the wheel. I could see his arms—the muscles rigid, the grey sedan swerving and correcting, swerving and correcting, the constant adjustment of a man keeping a two-ton machine from spinning at highway speed.
Then the glass.
The rear window exploded inward. Not shattered—detonated. The sound was so loud it erased all other sound, a concussive pop that turned the world white for a fraction of a second before the noise came back in a rush: wind, engine, the high whine of something I’d never heard before but recognized instantly.
