Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
Luca
Import-export. Logistics.
She says the words the way someone reads a label they've never looked at closely. A job title repeated at dinner parties, written on tax forms. Nothing she questioned until it was too late to ask.
I know the shape of that story. I've seen it before. Wives who didn't want to see, girlfriends who looked the other way, mothers who convinced themselves the money came from somewhere clean.
But Gemma isn't stupid.
She's holding back.
"I respect you keeping secrets," I say. "But I can't help you if you don't help me."
Her jaw tightens. Just a flicker, there and gone.
"Was your husband in a mob?"
She holds my gaze for three full seconds, then exhales slowly through her nose. Her shoulders drop half an inch.
"I believe so." She says. I wait for her to continue.
"He never told me." She uncrosses her arms, lets her hands hang at her sides. "Not once. Not in five years of marriage. But the men he had company with..." She pauses. Picks her words carefully. "They didn't look like men who move shipping containers for a living."
I wait.
"They looked like men who hurt people." Her eyes find mine. Hold. "They looked like you."
I let the corner of my mouth pull up. "I work for a mob. Yes."
Gemma's face goes through two expressions in two seconds. Surprise first. Her eyebrows lifting, her lips parting.
Then fear. Her whole body going still the way prey goes still when a predator moves. Her face closes down, calculating. That motel-room look, sizing up whether to bolt or swing.
I knew this would happen. The moment I said it, she'd look at me differently. I'd stop being the stranger who helped her and become the stranger who could hurt her.
Same category as the man with the gun.
She rises and takes a step back. Stops herself
"You—" She swallows. "You work for—"
"The Sartori family." I keep my voice flat. No reason to dress it up. "I've worked for them for many years."
"Doing what?"
"Whatever they need."
Her breath comes faster. I can see her pulse jumping in her throat, quick and rabbit-fast. But she doesn't run. Doesn't scream. She stands in my socks with her daughter asleep in my bed, and she looks at me like she's trying to solve an equation that won't balance.
"Luca, I'll ask you again. Why did you help me?"
"You needed help," I say. "You had nowhere to go."
"That's not a reason." Her voice is steadier now. Still scared, but pushing through it. "Men like you don't help strangers. Men like you—"
"Hurt people." I finish the sentence for her. "Kill people. Yes."
She flinches. Can't help it.
"I've done both." I watch her face as I say it. Watch the fear flare brighter. "I'm not going to lie to you about what I am. But I'm also not going to hurt you or your daughter. You have my word."
"Your word." She almost laughs. "The word of a man who just told me he kills people for a living."
"The word of a man who could have left you in that motel room." I push off from the counter, straighten. "The word of a man who could have let that piece of shit with the gun take you. The word of a man who's standing here telling you the truth when I could have lied."
"Why didn't you?"
"Lie?"
"Any of it." She gestures vaguely with her free hand—at me, at the apartment, at the night that's brought us here. "Why didn't you just take your car and leave? Why did you bring us here?"
I don't have an answer to that.
"I don't know," I say finally. The words taste strange in my mouth. I don't say I don't know often. I don't like admitting there are things I haven't figured out.
Gemma's shoulders drop. She looks exhausted. Bone-deep tired in a way that goes beyond one sleepless night.
"The people after me," she says. "If they're connected to the same world you're in—"
"I might be able to find out who they are." I finish the thought she won't say. "What your husband owed. Who he owed it to."
"And then what?"
"Then we figure out how to make them stop."
She laughs. It's a small sound, bitter and tired. "Just like that?"
"No." I hold her gaze. "Not just like that. Nothing is ever just like that. But it's a start."
Gemma looks at me for a long moment.
"I need to sleep," she says finally. "I need to—I can't think right now. I can't—"
"Go." I nod toward the bedroom.
"Thank you," she says. "For helping us. Even if I don't understand why."
She turns and walks into the bedroom.
Gemma
Nina's breath warms my neck. She's curled into me.
I can't sleep because thoughts pop up in my head.
My dad sold insurance. My mum taught third grade and made tuna casserole on Wednesdays.
I didn't sneak out. I didn't drink in parking lots.
I didn't try anything stupider than a wine cooler at my cousin's wedding when I was sixteen, and I felt guilty about it for a week.
I went to UW–Stevens Point because it was close and cheap, and I studied early childhood education because I liked kids and I liked schedules.
I waitressed at an Olive Garden on weekends. I called my mum every Sunday.
I met Dominik at a coffee shop in Madison the summer after I graduated. He held the door for a woman with a stroller. He had a paperback in his back pocket. He asked me what I was reading and listened to the answer like it mattered.
I press my lips against the top of Nina's head and close my eyes.
He was kind. That's what I keep snagging on, even now, even after. He was kind for a long time. He took me to dinner and asked about my parents. He sent flowers to my mother on her birthday because I'd mentioned it once, in passing, three months earlier. He remembered.
I didn't know what he did. I didn't ask, and when I did ask he said consulting, and when I asked what kind he said boring. I laughed because he made it sound boring, and I believed him because why wouldn't I?
I had no shape in my head for any other answer. I knew what a consultant was. My uncle in Minneapolis was a consultant.
The first time I saw a bruise on Dominik's knuckles he said he'd helped a friend move a couch. I believed that too. I believed every word for a long time. Then I believed half of them, and at some point I stopped asking, which is its own kind of believing.
Nina shifts and I rub a slow circle on her back until she settles.
The ridiculous part isn't that I'm here.
The ridiculous part is the road. A girl who used hand sanitizer after the library and called her dad when her tire pressure light came on is lying in a bed three feet from a man who's killed people.
Killed. People. He said it like he was telling me his middle name.
And I didn't run.
That's the thing that puts a cold finger on the back of my neck. I should've run. I should've grabbed Nina, walked into the night and tried my luck. I didn't, because somewhere along this road I learned that men who tell you what they are out loud are not the ones who hurt you.
Dominik never said.
My hand goes to the scar on the inside of my wrist before I decide to move it. The skin there is smooth where it shouldn't be. I made up a story about a frying pan and told it so many times I forget, sometimes, which version is mine.
I think about my mother in her kitchen. The yellow phone on the wall she refuses to replace. The way she answers, Holt residence, like it's 1994. If I called right now she'd pick up on the second ring and she'd say honey and I'd cry.
And then what? I'd say, Mum, I stole a car tonight. I'd say, Mum, there's a man who kills for a living.
I'd say… Mum, I don't know how I got here.
She'd come. She'd drive through the night in her Subaru and she'd come. And with that she'd bring whoever's behind me right to her door.
I open my eyes. Nina's hand has unfisted from my t-shirt and gone slack against my chest. I cover it with mine.
A floorboard creaks in the other room. Once, then quiet. He's awake.
I lie very still and listen, and for the first time tonight I'm not sure which side of the door is more dangerous to think about.
Luca
I move to the kitchen and stand with my back to the counter, where I can see the hallway and the front door at the same time.
I pick up the phone.
If I called Fabio he would do the research clean, not asking why. But he's not the one I must call. I think about this for the time it takes to scroll past his name in the contacts.
The truth, when I bother to be honest, is that I don't work for Valentino. Valentino gives me the orders because he is in Sicily and Bruno is in Chicago. The chain of command in this family has been reshuffled so many times in the last three years that everyone has stopped tracking it out loud.
The Don now is Bruno. The Don has always been Bruno since the morning they pulled his oldest brother, Riccardo, out of that church dead. But Valentino is the voice in my ear. I have let the voice in my ear be the boss.
I tap his name.
It rings twice. Three times. I lean a hip against the counter and look at the bedroom door. She might be asleep.
"Luca."
His voice is half-roughed with sleep.
"Need a name run," I say.
"What happened."
"Nothing happened."
"Luca."
"Nothing fucking happened to me. I need a name run."
I hear him take a breath out through his nose. Patient. Valentino has been patient with me for a long time. Longer than most men would be.
"Whose name."
"Voss. Dominik Voss. He ended up dead about eighteen months. Robbery. I want everything. Who he owed. How much. Who's still collecting."
He remains silent for a second.
"Why?"
"I'll tell you after."
He doesn't answer right away. But he doesn't push because he never pushes me. He waits, because he knows the shape of my silences too, and he knows the difference between a thing I won't say and a thing I can't say yet.
"You're supposed to be resting," he says.
"I am resting."
The line goes quiet again. I can hear him breathing.
"Okay," Valentino says, soft. "Voss. Dominik. I'll get back to you."
"Today."
"Today, Luca. Yes. I heard you the first time."
He waits, in case I want to give him more. I don't. After a beat, he sighs and the line goes dead.