Chapter 34
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Gemma
The café under our building does cinnamon rolls on Thursdays. The girl behind the counter knows me now. She started my americano before I finished saying it, which means I've been here too many mornings in a row, which means I have a routine, which is also a strange thing to have again.
I take the table by the window. Back to the wall, both doors in view.
Nina is at the compound. Again. Third time this week, and when Kristen called this morning to ask if Nina could come play, I stood in the kitchen with the phone against my ear and did the math on how many hours my daughter has spent in that house versus this apartment.
The number wasn't good. I almost said no. Then I thought about what no looks like — Nina on the couch next to me, quiet, drawing the same house with the same tomatoes — and I said yes. She screamed. The happy kind. She had her shoes on before I hung up.
So. She has a friend. She has a playroom, a woman who braids her hair and a girl who taught her how to put dolls to sleep. She laughs there. She takes up the whole couch there, arms out, legs everywhere, four years old the way four-year-olds are supposed to be.
And I sit in a café by myself and drink coffee like a woman in a commercial.
It's fine. It's good, actually. I keep saying that until it sounds true.
I text Luca. At the café. Nina's with Lily. Do you want anything?
Three dots. Then: No. Stay where Marco can see you.
Marco is the man in the gray coat two tables over.
He nodded at me when I came in. I nodded back.
We have an understanding, Marco and I, which is that we don't talk, he follows me everywhere and I pretend that's normal.
I used to go everywhere alone with a kid on my hip, and now I can't buy tampons without an armed escort. My life has range, I'll give it that.
The americano comes. Then, a minute behind it, a waiter I don't know brings a small plate with one of the cinnamon rolls on it.
"I didn't order this."
"It's taken care of." He sets it down. His hands are steady. Young guy, maybe twenty-two, apron tied twice around a thin waist. "And this came with it."
A piece of paper, folded once, tucked half under the plate like a receipt.
"Who's it from?"
But he's already walking. He gets back behind the counter. Marco is still on his phone because a waiter bringing a pastry is not a thing that registers.
I look at the folded paper for a long time. Longer than a normal person would. It's just paper. Cheap, lined, torn from a notepad.
I open it.
The handwriting is small and careful, all capitals.
A time. Two o'clock today.
An address. A clothing store downtown — I know the street, I've walked past it with Nina.
Dressing room 4.
And under that, two names.
Susan Holt. Gerald Holt.
My mother's name. My father's name.
The last line:
COME ALONE OR THEY GET HURT. NOBODY GETS HURT IF YOU SHOW UP.
Cold drops through my stomach and keeps going, all the way down, like swallowing ice water too fast. I fold the paper back along its crooked crease and set it on the table next to the cinnamon roll.
I look out the window at the street, at the cars, at every parked sedan, every man standing still, and none of them looks back.
A saleswoman folds sweaters near the register, and soft piano plays from a speaker in the ceiling.
I count two exits. The front door behind me and a fire door past the dressing rooms, marked with a green sign.
Then I count the people. One saleswoman.
One older man by the coats who never looks up.
My hands won't stay warm no matter how deep I push them into my pockets.
I told Marco my stomach hurt, that I needed the café restroom, and I went out through the kitchen instead, past a cook who didn't even blink.
Then I took a cab I paid for with cash from Luca's card, drawn from an ATM three blocks over.
The whole ride I held the note flat on my knee and read the two names again.
That's why I didn't call Luca. The note said alone, and whoever wrote it already knows more than I do. I can be angry at myself later. Right now my parents are in danger because of me.
The dressing rooms sit in the back, down a short hallway with gray carpet. Four doors. The first three stand open. The fourth is closed.
My mouth has gone dry, and I notice my own breathing, which is never a good sign. I knock once, low on the wood, the way you'd knock if you weren't sure you wanted an answer.
"Come in."
I know the voice before my hand finishes turning the handle. My body knows it first — my shoulders drop and pull in, making me smaller, an old habit I never asked for. I open the door anyway, because my legs are already moving and my brain hasn't caught up.
Dominik stands against the mirror with his hands loose at his sides.
Alive. Sandy hair cut neat, the way he always kept it. Blue eyes, clear and warm, looking at me the way he looked at me across a coffee shop in Madison nine years ago. He's thinner.
A scream builds in my chest, real and physical, pushing up my throat.
"Don't scream, Gemma." He says it quietly, the way you'd remind someone of a small rule. "Please."
The please is worse than a threat would be. My back finds the doorframe and I hold onto it, because the floor doesn't feel level anymore. I buried this man. I stood in a cold room in a hospital basement, looked at a body under a sheet and said yes, that's him, that's my husband.
He watches me put it together. His face stays kind. It was always kind, right up until the moment it wasn't, and then kind again after, saying he was sorry before I finished falling.
I turn for the hallway.
He crosses the small room in one step and his body comes against mine, pressing me into the wall beside the door, chest to my back, one forearm flat against the wood above my head. The door clicks shut under his other hand.
"Stay calm," he says near my ear. "For your own good, Gemma. Stay calm."
His weight holds me there, and the smell of him reaches me. The faint mint he always kept in his coat pocket. My knees want to fold. I press my palms flat against the wall and make myself still, small, quiet, the way I learned to be around him.
"You're dead," I say. My voice comes out flat and thin. "I saw you. I identified you. It can't — you're dead."
"You saw a body." His breath moves the hair at my temple. He's calm, so calm, and the calm crawls over my skin worse than shouting ever could. "You saw what I needed you to see."
I stare at the wall two inches from my face.
There's a small scuff in the paint there, and I fix my eyes on it because it's the only thing in this room that makes sense.
Nina is at the compound. Luca thinks I'm drinking an americano at my usual table.
Nobody on earth knows where I am except the man pressing me into this wall.
"Why," I say. It doesn't come out as a question. Nothing in me has room for a question yet.
Dominik lowers his head until his mouth is at my ear, and his voice drops to a whisper, gentle, patient, the voice he used when he explained my mistakes to me.
"Before anything else, sweetheart, you need to prepare yourself." His arm stays braced above my head. "Because what you're about to hear is going to change everything you think you know."
Dominik steps back and gives me room. I turn around with the wall still holding most of my weight. The dressing room has a bench and a mirror.
"Sit down, sweetheart. You'll want to sit."
I don't sit. My legs have gone stiff, and standing feels safer than putting myself lower than him. He accepts that with a small nod, patient, and leans his shoulder against the mirror like we have all the time in the world.
"You know you were adopted," he says. "You've known since you were seven. Susan and Gerald, the house in Wisconsin, the dog. A good, clean story."
"It's not a story."
"No. It's true. But it's not the whole thing.
" He watches my face while he talks, and his voice never rises above the piano coming through the ceiling.
"Your birth mother left you at St. Agnes in Milwaukee when you were four days old.
Her name was Ashley. She was twenty-three.
Three months later she went into the lake and didn't come out. "
The bench catches the backs of my knees.
"My mother worked at St. Agnes," Dominik says. "She did the paperwork, the intake files. And she knew who Ashley was, because everyone in that neighborhood knew who Ashley was seeing." He pauses. "Your father is Cesare Orsini."
"No," I say, but it comes out with nothing behind it.
"You've met him." Dominik's mouth softens. "I know you have. Vico looked at you and saw his sister's face, didn't he? You look like your mother. It's remarkable, actually."
I sit and press my hands together in my lap to stop them from shaking.
"The coffee shop in Madison," I say. My voice stays flat because flat is all I have. "You knew when we met?"
"I'd been looking for you for two years by then.
" He says it gently, like he's confessing to forgetting a birthday.
"The daughter nobody knew about. The way into a family worth more money than either of us will ever count.
I married you, Gemma, and then I went to Cesare and introduced myself as his son-in-law.
" He lifts his pant leg an inch and taps his calf.
"He shot me here and had me carried out of Milwaukee like garbage.
That was the end of the plan. So I built a new one. "
"You died." The words feel useless in my mouth. "I stood in a basement and looked at a body."
"A body," he agrees. "Not mine. The debts were real by then — I'd borrowed against money I never got — and dead men don't pay. It was cleaner for both of us."
"Cleaner." I hear myself repeat it and I can't stop. "They came after me. They came after Nina. Men followed me for eighteen months because of your clean."
"I know. I'm sorry about that." He says sorry the way he always said it, complete and calm, an apology that closes the subject instead of opening it.
Then he crouches in front of me so our eyes are level, and I go very still, because Dominik at eye level was never a kindness.
"But you should be asking a different question now.
You should be asking how the Sartoris found out who you are. "
My stomach drops before my head catches up.
"Two months ago a man named Liam found me in Milwaukee," he says. "I told them everything. Ashley, St. Agnes, Cesare. Everything I just told you. They paid me fifty thousand dollars for it." He tilts his head, reading me. "And what did they do with it, Gemma? Think. What happened right after?"
The apartment. The compound. Luca coming back from Bruno's office and taking me up ninety-five floors, telling me we were getting married in three days.
"He knew," Dominik says quietly. "Your enforcer.
Before he ever put a ring on you. Bruno wanted Milwaukee's docks, Cesare wanted his daughter, and Luca Farro got handed you as the price of the deal.
They even required proof the marriage was real.
Did he tell you that part? That old man asked for proof of your wedding night. "
Every meal Luca ordered for me. Every warning before he touched my hand. There are things I want to tell you about the Orsinis, he said at the kitchen table, I need time to do it right, and I told him okay, went to bed and slept next to him.
"You're lying," I say.
"You know I'm not."
Everything lines up.
Dominik stands and straightens his coat.
"Cesare is dying," he says. "Weeks, not months.
And you, sweetheart, are about to be a very rich woman — or you would be, if the Sartoris weren't standing between you and your inheritance.
" He picks a piece of lint off his sleeve and lets it fall.
"We're going to talk about that. Not today. Today was just the truth."