Chapter 2 Charlotte
Chapter Two: Charlotte
The first thing I do when I wake up is count the ceiling tiles.
Fourteen across. Nine deep. One hundred and twenty-six total, minus the two above the bathroom door that are cracked and yellowing from moisture damage.
I know this because I've counted them eleven times in two days, and if that sounds obsessive, you've never been locked in a room by men with guns who brought you nice sheets as a consolation prize.
I swing my legs off the bed and sit on the edge, bare feet on cold tile. The room is nicer than any apartment I've ever rented, which is either a compliment to Aurelio Bonaccorso's hospitality or an insult to my life choices. Probably both.
The sheets are Egyptian cotton, high thread count, the kind that whisper against your skin when you roll over.
The bathroom has actual towels, not the sandpaper rectangles I've been buying in bulk from Target for three years.
There's a window with heavy curtains, and beyond it, a courtyard full of men who would kill me as easily as they'd light a cigarette.
Speaking of cigarettes.
I dig through the pockets of the jacket I was wearing when they grabbed me.
The pack is crushed, bent almost in half from being shoved into the back of an SUV by a man built like a refrigerator with a personality to match.
Three smokes left. I tap one out, straighten it between my fingers, and realize I don't have a lighter because Claudio fucking DiAngelo confiscated it along with my phone, my keys, my wallet, and every shred of autonomy I've spent three years building.
"Shit."
I put the cigarette between my lips anyway.
Unlit. The taste of the filter is enough.
Tobacco and paper and the faint chemical burn of whatever they coat these things with.
I started smoking the week I got to the new city, the week I became Charlotte Richardson.
It was the only vice I allowed myself because everything else about my new life was so goddamn controlled.
New name, new wardrobe, new posture, new way of speaking.
I even changed the way I laughed because my old laugh sounded too much like a woman I was trying to kill.
The smoke hangs from my lip while I stand and walk to the window.
The courtyard is grey in the early light.
Two guards at the east gate, one at the south entrance, one doing a slow loop along the perimeter wall.
They rotate every four hours. I know this because I've been watching them since I got here, and patterns are the only thing that make me feel like I have any control over a situation that is, objectively, completely fucked.
I press my fingers to the back of my neck.
The vertebrae are there. Solid. Stacked like coins under skin.
I do this when the fear creeps up, when the old panic tries to claw its way out of whatever hole I buried it in.
It's a grounding thing. Therapist taught me, back when I could afford a therapist, back when I was still her.
Feel your spine. You're still standing. You're still here.
I'm still here.
In a goddamn mafia compound. Surrounded by killers. With an unlit cigarette in my mouth and no fucking lighter.
Great life choices, Charlotte. Really nailing it.
The door clicks. I don't flinch. I've trained myself not to flinch at doors, which is a skill set nobody puts on a resume but probably should.
The guard on morning shift slides a breakfast tray through the slot at the bottom.
Scrambled eggs, toast, orange juice, a small bowl of fruit.
I can smell the coffee from across the room. Not good coffee, either.
Instant. Yuck.
I drink it anyway. Black, one sugar, stirring it with my finger because they didn't include a spoon and I'm not about to ask for one. The heat of it burns a line down my throat and settles in my chest like a small, bitter fire. Better.
I eat standing up. Always standing. Sitting still for too long makes me twitchy, and twitchy leads to thinking, and thinking leads to places I can't afford to go right now. So I eat my eggs by the window and watch the guards.
The compound is well-maintained. Not flashy, not the gold-plated mob palace you see in movies. Functional. Clean lines, reinforced doors, cameras at every junction. The kind of place built by someone who values efficiency over aesthetics. I respect that, in a deeply fucked-up way.
I think about what I saw at Marchetti Holdings, and my stomach turns over in a way that has nothing to do with the eggs.
Three weeks ago. Late on a Tuesday. I was working overtime because I always work overtime, because overtime means extra pay and extra pay means another month of being Charlotte Richardson instead of whoever the bill collectors and the man I ran from think I still am.
The office was supposed to be empty. The floor was dark.
I was walking to the copy room to pick up a print job when I passed the corner conference room.
The door was ajar. Not open fully. An inch, maybe two. Enough to see through if you happened to glance sideways.
I happened to glance sideways.
Three men at the table. Two I didn't recognize.
One older, silver hair, European-cut suit, the kind of man who looks like he was born in a boardroom.
The younger one across from him had military written all over his posture.
Shoulders back, hands flat on the table, eyes scanning the room at intervals even though they were behind a closed door.
The third man I recognized. I'd seen him in the building before.
Hard jaw, thinning hair, expensive watch that caught the light every time he moved his left hand.
And on that hand, a scar. Thick, raised, running from his thumb to his wrist like someone had tried to take his hand off with a knife and mostly failed.
They were talking about routes. Timelines. A payment schedule. The older man used a word I didn't understand then. Apex Meridian. He said it like a brand name, like it was something they'd all agreed to call a thing that had a different name in the real world.
Then the man with the scar looked up. Through the crack in the door. Directly at me.
I didn't breathe. I didn't move. I turned and walked to the copy room and picked up my print job and went back to my desk and sat there until my hands stopped shaking, which took approximately forty-five minutes.
That was three weeks ago. Then I found the ledgers and well… four men with automatic weapons kicked down my apartment door at 2 AM.
At least Claudio was there to save me.
Save me. Like I’m some helpless fucking puppy.
I haven't told anyone what I saw. Not Leone, who seems like the reasonable one.
Not Alexandra, who has sharp eyes and asks too many questions.
And not Claudio, who showed up at my door at the dead of the night and crouched in front of me and told me I was lying with the calm certainty of a man who has never been wrong about anything in his life.
He's not wrong.
I am lying. I'm holding the one piece of information that might actually matter, and I'm holding it because I've been doing this long enough to know that the moment you give someone everything, you become disposable.
A woman with secrets is a woman with value.
A woman who's told everything she knows is a loose end.
I've been a loose end before. I didn't like how it felt.
The coffee is gone. I set the mug on the windowsill and tap the unlit cigarette against my palm. The guards have rotated. New faces, same posture. The courtyard is filling with weak sunlight that makes the concrete look almost warm.
My fingers find the back of my neck again. Spine. Vertebrae. Still there.
You're Charlotte Richardson. You're twenty-seven. You work in legal support. You like your coffee black with one sugar. You smoke Parliament Lights because they were on sale the first week you got to the city and you never switched. You are not the woman you used to be.
I mouth the words like a prayer. I've been saying some version of this every morning for three years, and some mornings it works and some mornings it doesn't and today it lands somewhere in the middle, which is about as good as it gets when you're trapped in a concrete box by the Italian mafia.
At least the sheets are nice.
I almost laugh at that. Almost. The sound catches in my chest and dies, because laughing alone in a locked room is one step from crying alone in a locked room, and Charlotte Richardson does not cry.
She folds newspapers. She counts ceiling tiles.
She catalogues guard rotations and drinks bad coffee and keeps her secrets locked behind her teeth where they can't be used against her.
She survives. That's what she does. It's the only thing she's ever been good at.
The door opens at nine.
Not the food slot. The actual door, swinging inward, and Claudio DiAngelo fills the frame like a threat someone forgot to defuse.
He's bigger than I remember from this morning.
Not just tall, but wide. Shoulders that strain the seams of his black henley, forearms roped with muscle and scattered with scars I didn't notice before.
His sleeves are pushed to his elbows. Tattoo on the inside of his left forearm, script I can't read from here.
His hair is dark, cropped short on the sides, longer on top in a way that would look styled on anyone else but on him just looks like he ran his hand through it once and called it done.
His eyes are the wrong color for a warm-blooded human being. Pale green, almost grey, the color of ice over still water. They sweep the room in a single pass. Bed, window, me. They land on me and stop.
"You look like shit," he says.
"Good morning to you too."