Taking Grace (Vicious Kings Mafia #5)

Chapter One Carmelo

The restaurant she works at has a crack in its front window. Lower right corner, three inches long, held together with clear tape that's gone yellow at the edges. Someone “fixed” it months ago and never came back to do the job properly. I've been staring at it for two days from my window.

The apartment Danila found for me is across the street and one floor up, a studio with a kitchenette that smells of the previous tenant's cigarettes and a window that faces the restaurant dead-on.

I moved in forty-eight hours ago with a bag, my knife and a file folder that weighs less than a pound and contains the entire manufactured life of a woman named Grace.

Grace is not her birth given name.

I pull the knife from my belt and work the edge under my thumbnail.

The replacement is lighter than the original by two ounces.

I noticed the first day I carried it and I notice now, every time, the way you notice a picture that doesn't hang straight.

The old knife is in the ground with Aurelio.

I put it in his hands myself. Folded his cold fingers around the handle and pressed until they held.

He gave me that knife and it felt right to retire it with him.

This one I bought from a shop on Arthur Avenue three days after the funeral.

The owner tried to show me six different blades, but I pointed at the one behind the register, the one he wasn't selling, and he looked at my face and sold it with tight lips and a frown on his face.

It does the job. It doesn't do anything else.

Through the window, the restaurant's dinner rush is winding down.

Seven tables still occupied. A couple by the door wildly swinging their arms, an argument about the check, I presume.

A four-top of women who've been there since six and are on their third bottle of wine.

A man at the bar nursing what looks like a bourbon and reading something on his phone.

And her.

She comes out of the kitchen carrying three plates balanced on her left arm and one in her right hand.

She's small. The file says five-three, a hundred and ten, but the numbers didn't prepare me for how little space she occupies.

She moves through the dining room, nobody adjusts for her because there's nothing to adjust for.

She flows around the tables and the chairs and the other bodies in the room without disrupting any of it.

She’s basically invisible unless you’re looking.

Like I am.

Dark hair, pulled back. The face I've been studying in photographs for months, except the photographs were surveillance images taken by the people who put her here, and they were shot from distance with long lenses, and they caught her features but not the way she holds them.

In the photos she looked still. In person, her face moves constantly, small adjustments, reading the room, tracking the tables, checking the kitchen door with her peripheral vision.

She’s in her zone and she looks damn fine hustling around.

I've been watching for five months. Not here, not in person. In coded placement records and sealed foster files and Social Security cross-references that took me three weeks to crack. In the database Danila pulled from the Bratva's supply chain records, the one that listed her as GF-0817, female, age thirteen, placement Philadelphia, status active. Active, even as a retired trafficked girl, she is still labelled an active asset. As if being ‘in circulation’ since she was eight until thirteen wasn’t enough abuse. Eleven years of being in the Silent’s pipeline.

Eleven years of pills and monitoring and check-in reports filed by the family that the Silent's network installed in a house in the suburbs to make sure this girl never remembered what was done to her.

GF-0817. Graziella Ferrara. Renzo's daughter.

Renzo didn't ask me to find her. He said he'd been looking for sixteen years. He said he'd tried everything.

I heard it once and couldn't stop thinking about it. There’s no reason why I should care about this particular woman. Maybe because Renzo did us a solid and I want to do one for him, but it became so much deeper than that the more I looked. She became mine.

The connection was there if you knew where to look.

The trafficking pipeline that the Silent ran through the eastern seaboard had records; not clean records, not a spreadsheet with names and dates, but coded entries in supply chain databases that Danila had access to through his Bratva contacts.

Danila got me in. I spent two months cross-referencing entry codes with foster placement records from the mid-2000s, matching ages and dates and intake locations, and when I found the match.

GF-0817, female, age eight at intake, age thirteen at placement, Philadelphia.

I ran the Social Security number the placement network had generated for her, and it came back to a woman named Grace who worked at a restaurant in South Philly, lived alone and took a daily prescription for anxiety that was filled through a pharmacy that doesn't exist.

I told Matteo first. Not because I trusted him more than Leone but because I needed to see how he'd react.

Matteo is a lawyer and a strategist, and the way a man handles information about a trafficked child tells you whether he sees people or opportunity.

It was a test designed to see his character, to see if he could be a Bonaccorso.

He passed. Matteo saw a person. I told Leone after.

Neither of them told me to come here. I simply told them I was going.

The knife finds the edge of my index fingernail, and I scrape the flat of the blade along the cuticle. Slow. The restaurant is emptying. The four-top pays and leaves. The couple by the door resolves their argument and the man puts his card down. The drinker at the bar closes his tab.

Grace clears the four-top. She stacks the plates with one hand and wipes the table with the other and her right index finger taps the edge of the top plate twice before she carries the stack to the kitchen.

The tapping is quick and light and if I weren't looking for it I'd miss it.

But I am looking for it because I've been looking at her for five months and I know what subconscious habit looks like.

Aurelio used to rub the base of his left thumb when he was making a decision.

Emilio paces. Antonia grips her karambits.

Everyone who's lived through enough has a place their body goes when their mind won't cooperate.

Grace taps.

I don't know what it means yet. I don't know if it's stress or habit or the residue of whatever was done to her between the ages of eight and thirteen that the pills won't let her remember.

I know she does it with her right index finger.

I know the pace varies. I know she did it nine times in the last hour, and three of those were while she was talking to the man behind the bar, the one who touches her shoulder when he passes her and who walked her home last night at eleven fourteen.

I watched them from this window. He walked on her left side.

She kept her hands in her jacket pockets.

He talked. She listened. At her door, he waited until she was inside, then walked back toward the restaurant with his hands in his pockets, and I watched him go and cataloged him — six feet, lean, early twenties, left-handed, no threat indicators, posture says friend not boyfriend.

His body tracked hers the way a man tracks someone he's decided to protect without being asked.

Protective but not possessive. Open hands. Easy stance.

He cares about her.

I care about what he is to her because I need to know every person in her radius. The planted family in the suburbs, the coworkers, the regulars, the neighbors. All of it. I need the full picture before I move.

Through the window, Grace disappears into the kitchen and comes back without the plates.

She unties her apron and folds it and says something to the man behind the bar and he grins and she shakes her head and her finger taps the bar top once.

She walks toward the back of the restaurant and out of my sightline.

I wait.

Four minutes later, she’s waving goodbye, the front door opens and she comes out with her friend.

Black jacket, bag over one shoulder, hair still pulled back.

She turns left. The walk home is three blocks.

I know because I walked it myself yesterday at two in the morning, counting the steps, noting the streetlights, checking the alleys.

She doesn't check behind her. She doesn't look at the alleys.

She walks with her shoulders loose and her head up and her pace is unhurried.

The confidence in that walk is the worst thing I've seen since I got here because it was given to her by people who wanted her to feel safe so she'd stop asking questions, and it worked.

I watch her until she turns the corner at Ninth Street and disappears.

The knife is still in my hand.

I haven't moved.

Danila shows up at eleven with Thai food and information.

He comes in without knocking because I gave him the second key and because Danila has never knocked on a door in his life unless the person behind it was someone he planned to kill. He drops the takeout bag on the counter and sighs when he see’s me staring out the window.

"You eat today?"

I don't answer because the answer is no and he already knows.

“Come.” His accent is thick and as much as I want to ignore him, I can’t because my stomach growls.

Danila opens the containers, sets them on the counter, pulls two forks from the drawer and hands me one. He eats standing. I eat because if I don't, he'll stay until I do, and I need the briefing more than I need the quiet.