17. Chapter Seventeen Carmelo #2
"The girl you were going to extract," I say.
"Her name is Graziella Ferrara. She's home right now, meeting her father for the first time in sixteen years.
She's wearing my shirt and holding his hand, and she just learned she was trafficked for five years and drugged for eleven.
The bartender you killed was the only friend she had.
The only person in her entire manufactured life who chose to be there. "
I lean closer. "I need you to understand what you took from her before I take everything from you."
He understands. I can see it in his face. The full, useless comprehension of a man at the end.
The knife slices away pieces of his flesh until they hang in long strips, the sound of his screaming muffled by the fact that I took his tongue just before starting work on his face.
He’s gurgling, choking on his blood as it slides down his throat, coughing, trying to get it out as I keep slicing, trying to get his face off in one piece.
He doesn’t deserve pity, he doesn’t deserve anything except dying a faceless, nameless man.
After I’m done, I tug until the last of the skin pulls free and he’s left wide-eyed, sputtering and looking like a road rash. Smiling, I grab his tongue from the floor and shove it deep into his throat, watching as his eyes water and he chokes, his air supply cut off.
It doesn’t take long before he falls on his face in his blood.
“Damn Carmelo, that was savage.” Matteo says.
“Only what’s deserved.” The truth is, I’d have been more creative if I had the time, but I don’t. We need to move fast, so I did the best I could. I take his face and wrap it around the lamp shade, the light warping as it seeps through the skin.
Claudio handles the cleanup. Matteo clones the phones, pulls the communications, downloads every message between these men and Royce. The data goes to Alexandra through a secure channel. She'll add it to the placement network file she's been building.
Leone stands by the door and watches us work and doesn't say anything because Leone has already said everything he needs to say.
Clean. Both of them. Done.
We're out in twenty minutes. The room is wiped. The bodies are wrapped. Danila's disposal contact in Philadelphia will handle the rest. The gray sedan with Delaware plates gets driven to a chop shop on the south side that Delvecchio connected me to three weeks ago.
In the SUV on the way back, Leone drives and Claudio rides shotgun and Matteo is on his laptop in the back seat, already parsing the cloned communications.
"Royce knows the Marinos are gone," Matteo says.
"But he doesn't know who did it. The verification team was supposed to report back this morning with a visual confirmation and extraction plan.
When they don't report, Royce will flag it.
He'll send another team or escalate to the network's operations layer. "
"How long?" Leone asks.
"Seventy-two hours, minimum. The network moves carefully. They won't send another team without assessing why the first one went dark."
"Seventy-two hours," I say.
"At minimum.”
"So we have time to figure it out."
"We have enough."
Leone parks at the corner of Ninth. The restaurant is closed.
Grace's apartment windows are lit. She's in my apartment with Renzo, and the lights in my apartment are on too, and from the street I can see the glow through both sets of windows and the distance between them is thirty feet and for the first time the two apartments feel like they belong to the same person.
"The Ferrara girl," Leone says, turning to face me. "What's the plan?"
"She stays with me."
"In Philadelphia?"
"For now."
"And then?"
"Then she decides. She just met her father. She just lost her best friend. She just remembered being trafficked for five years. She gets to decide what happens next. If she wants to stay, I’ll kill every agent they send, each more painfully than the last. If she wants to go, we go.
I’ll build her a new life. One where she’s safe. "
Leone studies me. "You love her.”
"Yes."
"Good." He puts the SUV in park. "Then we finish this and we go home and you go home to her.”
Claudio grips my shoulder from the front seat. Matteo nods without looking up from the laptop. Leone holds my gaze for three seconds, then looks forward and puts his hands on the wheel and waits.
I get out and walk across the street and go up the stairs. I open the door to the apartment and Grace is sitting on the bed with Renzo and they're both holding cups of coffee from the kitchen I never use and they're speaking Italian.
Grace is speaking Italian.
Slow, halting, the words coming back to her one at a time from wherever the pills hid them, and Renzo is patient, filling in the gaps, and his face is the face of a man who is hearing his daughter's voice in his language for the first time in sixteen years and is trying not to fall apart.
She sees me in the doorway and looks at the blood on my hands.
"It's done?" she asks.
"It's done."
"They're dead."
"Yes."
“Good.” She nods. One nod. Then she turns back to Renzo and says something in Italian that I don't catch because her voice is quiet and the word is for him, not for me, and her finger taps his wrist twice and he smiles through his tears and answers her, and they keep talking.
I sit in the kitchen. I put the knife on the counter.
The blade is clean. I cleaned it in the motel bathroom with paper towels and cold water, the same routine, the same hands, the same automatic process I've used my entire career.
But this time the cleaning felt different.
This time the blood on the blade belonged to men who killed Javi and were going to take Grace and put her back in the machine, and the cleaning felt like closing a door.
A text from Danila comes through. Heard it's done. You good?
I text back: Yes.
The brothers?
Here. Handled.
Good. I'll be in Philly next week. Buy me pizza.
I put the phone down and just sit. Blood drying on my hands and my girl reuniting with her father. Everything in the world is right again… until the next time I need to keep her safe.
The nail curls on the windowsill catch the morning light. I count them without meaning to. Twenty-three. Twenty-three nights of standing at this window watching a woman through glass. Twenty-three nights of cleaning my nails while her lights went on and off and watching her tapping.
The watching is over. She's not across the street anymore. She's in the next room, mine. My girl.
I pick up the knife and fold it closed and put it in my pocket instead of on my belt. It feels different there. Less like a weapon. More like something I'm keeping because I want to.
Through the wall, Grace laughs. Short, quiet, surprised. The same laugh from the restaurant, the one I kept, the one I put somewhere inside myself where I keep very few things.
Renzo's voice, answering her, then silence. Then her laugh again, a little longer this time.
I sit in the kitchen and listen and don't move and don't clean my nails and don't plan.
For the first time since I came to Philadelphia, I have nothing to do except be here.
So I'm here.