Chapter 3 #2
I ignored them. The music was nothing in my ears, just white noise under the freight train in my head.
The girl hadn’t moved. She was still posted up by the wall, hands white-knuckling her bag, face like she was waiting to get called for a jury.
Every so often the door would open and someone would stumble in, or out, and her eyes would track them, log the approach, then slide back to the exits and the bouncers and—yes, fuck, me.
She looked at me again. I did not look away.
Tonio leaned in, stage-whispered, “What do you think, she thinks you’re a cop or a hitman?”
I sipped the wine, kept my eyes on her, said nothing. The truth was, if you lined up every person in this place and asked who was hiding, I would have picked her in half a second. I knew that look. I had seen it on the faces of men in Catania.
There was a pressure behind my sternum, a hard pulse that made my right hand ache.
Sal was watching me now, not the girl. He set his glass down, made a noise in his throat, and said, “Leave it alone, Pietro.”
I almost laughed. As if I had ever been able to leave anything alone. “You think I want to do something?”
“You look like you’re about to eat the table.”
I shrugged, which was as close to a yes as I could get with them in the booth.
Tonio’s attention span, which usually burned out after thirty seconds, had now locked onto the drama like a terrier on a tennis ball.
“Go down there,” he said. “Talk to her. You used to be good at that. The old Pietro, he’d have her at the bar inside three minutes.
The new one, I don’t know. Maybe the ghost doesn’t like company.
” He made a spooky face, stuck his tongue out.
The girl at his side, Marta, giggled and tried to nuzzle his neck. He didn’t notice.
I should have been annoyed. But it was better than the usual bullshit.
I did not move. The girl did not move. We were two points of stillness in a sea of people who thought movement was what mattered.
Sal broke the stalemate. “If you want her, go get her. Otherwise you’re gonna have to stare at your wine for the next hour while Toe gives you a play-by-play.”
“Go,” said Tonio, poking my thigh with a chopstick he’d stolen from the sushi platter on the bar. “Bring her up here. If she murders you, I’ll split the insurance with Sal.”
He grinned, full teeth.
I looked at the girl again.
She was not smiling. She was not pretending to be part of anything. She had noticed me, cataloged me, and now was waiting for the next move.
For a second, I thought about just letting it go.
Drinking my way to the bottom of the bottle, watching her leave, never having to wonder what would happen if I got within ten feet of her.
That had been my strategy since Catania.
Distance, then more distance. Nobody got hurt.
Nobody got close enough to find the broken stuff.
But she was still looking at me. And my body was already halfway off the seat.
Tonio started to say something, but I did not wait for him to finish. I set my glass down, pushed up from the table, and took the stairs down to the floor.
I did not look back.
I wanted her. I did.
I hit the floor running.
The music was a living thing now, making my ribcage throb.
The crowd was so tight it took real work not to start shoving.
I moved through the bodies like I’d done it my whole life, not by muscling in but by reading the gaps, the second-before-they-move, the flow of elbows and hips and the drunk sway of shoulders that told you which direction the next person would be.
I didn’t look for her face, I looked for the coat, the flash of hair, the shape of her as she slid between a couple by the bar.
She was gone.
I kept moving. Ten seconds, fifteen, still nothing. I caught a bouncer’s eye, read the tension in his shoulders, the way he was watching the far wall. I scanned where he was looking. Nothing. I cut right, angled for the back of the club, the corridor by the bathrooms.
I’d done this before—different country, different year, same move. If you were trying to run, you didn’t head for the main exit, you went for the one they kept unmarked for VIPs and deliveries. You got to the corridor, you took a left, you were out of the building and nobody ever saw you again.
I went after her.
Halfway down the corridor, I saw her, or at least I saw her coat, caught in the hand of a man in a grey suit.
He was holding her by the wrist, trying to steer her toward the service exit at the end of the hallway, but she was fighting it.
Not loud, not panicked, but grinding her heels into the floor, twisting against his grip, her bag swinging wild like it might connect with his face if she timed it right.
It was too familiar. My blood hit the roof of my skull.
I pushed through a knot of people waiting for the bathroom, caught a girl with my shoulder—she yelped, called me a bastard, I didn’t slow down.
I was close enough now to see the man’s face: pale, thin, the kind of ugly that came from being cruel over and over until it stuck.
He wore a kitchen badge at his belt. Fake.
If you knew what to look for, you could tell from twenty feet.
She’d seen it, probably, and that’s why she hadn’t screamed. She was saving it.
I closed the distance in three steps.
The man turned, saw me, and for a second it looked like he might run. You could see it in his eyes. Then he yanked on her wrist, hard, and her bag slipped off her shoulder and hit the floor.
I was on him before he could reset.
I grabbed his free arm, the one on her, and broke the grip, not with force but with leverage—thumb on his wrist, fingers on the bones.
He tried to turn on me, but I used his own momentum to spin him into the wall, face-first. His nose made a small, satisfying crunch.
I held him there, not letting go. The girl staggered back, breathing hard, then bent down and grabbed her bag with both hands.
I looked at her. “You okay?”
She didn’t answer. She looked at the man, looked at me, then at my hand pinning him to the wall. There was no fear in her face, just calculation.
I stepped off the man, who slid to the floor, clutching his face and making a thin, ugly noise. The corridor was too loud for anyone to really notice, but I could feel the heat of a dozen eyes on us.