Chapter 15 Nico
NICO
Elisa agrees to escape with me for the weekend.
I take her out the back stairs with the bag that looks like it belongs to a long shift.
We keep to side streets, then the bridge, then the service road that runs past the marinas.
The cabin sits where the tide forgets to make noise.
It used to belong to a fisherman who ran whiskey for the Riccaris when the law thought alcohol was a sin.
The porch sags a little.
The paint is the color of old salt.
I park under the pines and kill the lights.
Inside, the room is one long box—stove, table, two windows, a narrow hallway to a bedroom that fits a bed and not much else.
The walls look ordinary until you know where to knock.
I tap a board with my knuckle and it gives a softer note.
A panel slides with a push to reveal a compartment the size of a breadbox.
There are five like it, spaced like ribs.
Empty now.
Not always.
Elisa runs a hand over the sill and checks the lock.
She notices the second deadbolt.
I put wood in the stove, open the windows for ten minutes to clear the air, then close them tightly and set water on to boil.
If you do the simple things first, the rest comes easier.
The first night is quiet.
I cook the way I did when I had nothing but a burner and a pan that wasn’t mine.
Olive oil, garlic, a handful of tomatoes I cut with a paring knife that still remembers someone else’s kitchen.
She sits on the counter and watches me taste the pasta water before I salt it, like that is a trick.
We eat at the table under a crooked print of the pier in summer.
She smiles at the first bite and leans back like the ground came up under her feet after a long day of thinking it might not.
In the morning, the bay is glass.
We walk along the frost at the edge of the shoreline and don't say much.
She keeps her hands deep in her pockets and I keep my eyes on the water and the street above it.
The cold makes everything sharp.
When we turn back, we leave two sets of prints running side by side until they disappear at the porch.
We make the bed and don't rush to leave it.
We keep the radiator low and the quilts high.
We talk about small things—the patient who brings her cookies at Christmas, the baker who taught me to score a loaf with a razor so it blooms right.
We don’t pretend the city stopped turning.
We give ourselves a day where it feels like it might have slowed down for us.
I tell her about my first Christmas with the Riccaris because the cabin asks for an old story.
I was fifteen and too thin, in a coat someone else had worn out, doing runs no one should trust a kid to do.
Don Vincent called me into the back room at the trattoria on Christmas Eve.
He handed me a suit in a box and a pair of shoes that didn’t squeak.
He said, “You sit with us tonight. Family now.”
I tied the tie wrong and he fixed it without making a show.
We ate after the late mass and the room was loud in a way I had never heard, with men who put their knives down to pass bread.
I understood right then that I wouldn’t eat alone anymore.
She listens without filling the quiet with advice.
She asks what color the suit was.
Charcoal.
She asks what I did with the old coat.
I left it on the church steps for whoever needed it next.
At night, the phone glows on the table like it wants to be looked at.
Sometimes I let it ring twice and let it stop.
Sometimes I step outside and take the call with my breath making smoke while the bay sits black and stubborn.
When I come back in, she studies my face and doesn’t ask right away.
I tell her what I can—vendors questioned, a driver tailed in Queens and shook him loose, a rumor that the Bureau is drawing a map of who lights candles at St. Adrian’s and when.
She nods, files it with her own quiet, and turns the burner down under the pot before it boils over.
On the second day, the wind comes up.
We walk again and cut it short.
She tucks into my side on the way back and I feel the fight in me go still.
I make soup with what we have and slice the good bread we brought from the bakery into thick pieces you can’t see through.
She reads on the couch, feet under my thigh.
I run laundry in the sink and hang it over the line in the kitchen.
When it dries, everything smells like pine and salt and a place that kept us safe for another hour.
At night, I talk about Marco.
Marco grew up across the river and liked noise early.
He learned the business fast and never learned patience.
He was at my table when we were young because our fathers were tied by godfathers and favors.
We did jobs on opposite corners and sometimes in the same car.
He liked the kind of fear that shows.
I liked the kind that keeps the street quiet.
That difference is small until it isn’t.
The last five years, he has taken corners that didn’t belong to him and called it growth.
He wants the Council to be a stage.
I want it to be a room that ends problems.
If he finds a way to hold hands with the Feds while he plays the tough guy in public, he will burn the city and call it winter.
Elisa listens with her chin on her knee.
“You still talk like you could pull him back,” she says.
“I can’t,” I say. “I can only make sure he doesn’t pull everyone else with him.”
On the third morning, we wake before the sun and lie there until the room turns gray.
I make coffee on the stove and plate the last of the biscotti the owner’s wife pushed on us.
Elisa takes one, bites, and smiles like she is somewhere safer than this.
I watch her look at the window and know she is thinking about her patients, her charge nurse, the man who comes in for blood pressure and a joke.
I want to give her a world where this cabin is a choice and not a tactic.
The day drifts.
I check in with the priest at St. Adrian’s through a man who does maintenance and keeps his eyes open.
All clear for now.
I get a ping that says the Bureau sat down with a flour supplier and asked about cash orders.
Expected.
Manageable.
I breathe once and let it out.
We eat early because the stove runs warm when the wind pushes from the bay.
I do the dishes while she dries.
Her shoulder bumps mine and stays there.
I like the weight of that.
I like knowing where she is when I look up.
The message comes after dark, when the room is quiet enough to hear the stove tick.
The phone lights the table.
It's from a number I trust because I know the man who keeps it charged.
Four words at the top, then a second line that takes the air out of the room.
Marco spotted in broad daylight.
Rumor is he is planning something big.
I read it twice to be sure I’m not taking it the way I fear.
My thumb hovers.
I type back one word.
Where?
The answer is a cross street in Manhattan where the Bureau’s cars like to nose in and out of an underground garage.
Reliable.
Bad.
Elisa is already watching me. “Tell me,” she says.
“Marco is making appearances,” I say. “Not by accident. He wants to be in the room when the Council sits or he wants to set it on fire before it does.”
She goes still.
“It also can’t be a coincidence that he’s showing up when we’ve…”
I nod.
She doesn’t need to finish the sentence.
Marco knows I have someone in my life, someone I love.
And he’s planning to ensure it doesn’t last.