29. Lydia
LYDIA
WEEKS LATER
My phone buzzes on the counter, screen lit up with a name I never bothered to change to something crueler.
Frank.
I let it ring twice before I pick it up, because some stupid part of me still wants him to think I have a life he's interrupting.
"What."
"That's how you answer your father now?"
"You're not my father."
"I'm the man signing off on your mother's care." His voice has that easy, greasy warmth it gets right before he says something cold. "Figured that earns me a hello."
"Say what you called to say."
"Direct. I like that in a woman." He smacks his lips, wet and loud. "I need something real on your boy. We talked about this. Weeks now, and you're giving me nothing."
"I told you no."
"You told me no." He laughs, short. "Cute."
"I'm not handing you anything to use against Nico. Not now, not ever. Find another way to justify your paycheck."
"Sweetheart." His voice goes soft on purpose. It always does right before he means to hurt me. "You think this is about my paycheck?"
"I think this is about you being a leech who needs a badge to survive."
"Careful. That badge is the only reason your mother's got a room with a door that locks. For now."
My stomach drops before he even finishes the sentence.
"What does that mean."
"Means I do a lot of favors to keep her comfortable. Calling in guys I trust. Making sure nobody bothers her." He exhales, and I can practically see him leaning back in some cracked leather chair like this is a social call. "Check your messages, baby girl. I sent you something this morning."
The line goes dead before I can answer.
I pull the phone from my ear and stare at it, my whole body gone cold and stupid, and then a red notification appears on my screen.
Photos. Three of them.
I open the first one and the room tilts.
Bianca on the hospital bed, two men flanking her, one gripping her wrist too hard, her eyes glassy and unfocused for reasons that have nothing to do with the drugs anymore. I can't look at the second one long enough to understand what it's showing me. The third, I don't look at, at all.
The caption sits under all three like it belongs there.
The boys had a great time with her this morning.
I'm shaking. I don't notice until I go to set the phone down and it clatters against the counter twice before I get a grip on it.
I call him back. He answers on the first ring, like he was waiting.
"You sick piece of shit."
"Now, now."
"I will kill you myself."
"There's my girl." He says it fondly, like I've done something to make him proud. "Next time there'll be video. Something to really keep you company on the lonely nights."
"If you touch her again..."
"If I touch her again, what? You gonna call your boyfriend? Sic the mob on me?" He laughs, low. "Here's the thing about threatening a dead man, sweetheart. It doesn't work."
"What are you talking about."
"Your Nico's already made it plain I'm walking around on borrowed time.
I'm not stupid. I know how this ends." Something shifts in his voice, gone flat and almost bored.
"So what exactly do I have left to lose here?
You want to threaten me with something, it better be better than dead, because I'm already there. "
My throat closes.
"A man with nothing to lose can get real careless in a hospital room," he says. "Real careless with a woman who's got a history of using. Wouldn't be the first time a junkie relapsed on her own supply, would it? We all know junkies love to relapse."
"Don't you dare."
"I'm not saying I would." His voice goes soft again, worse than the shouting would've been. "I'm saying accidents happen to people with no protection. And your mother, God love her, doesn't have much."
I press my free hand flat against the counter to keep myself upright.
"What do you want," I say. Flat. Done pretending there's a version of this call where I get to keep my dignity. "What do you actually want from me."
"Same thing I've wanted for weeks now. Something real on Nico D'Ambrosio. A name, a ledger, a body, I don't care. Something solid enough that I can finally walk into my captain's office with more than excuses, after two years on this family."
"I don't have anything."
"You've been in his house. His bed, probably, from that look on your face at Terminal 7." A wet chuckle. "You're telling me you've got nothing."
"I'm telling you I'm not giving you anything right now."
He's quiet for a second, and it's worse than the threats, because it means he's thinking.
"Tell you what," he says, almost bored now, like the whole conversation has cost him more than he wanted to spend.
"There might be something worth looking at back home.
Gravesend. Your father kept things I never got my hands on.
Bianca never gave up the combination, God knows why, loyal to the end for a dead man.
You want to feel useful, go look. Bring your bodyguard along if it makes you feel better. I'm not gonna stop you."
"Why would you tell me that."
"Because I want this over with, same as you." A yawn, or something meant to sound like one. "Go dig around your daddy's old safe. See what you find. Bring me something real, and your mother gets to keep both eyes open in that bed."
He hangs up again.
I stand in my kitchen holding a phone with three photographs on it that I will never be able to unsee, and I think, distantly, that I have never wanted to put my hands around someone's throat this badly in my life.
Anastasio doesn't ask a single question until we're already on the BQE.
"So," he says, eyes on the road, "Gravesend. On a Tuesday. With me. Not exactly the tour I had planned for us."
"I need to get into my old house."
"Yeah, you said. Looking for something on Frank." He glances over. "You gonna tell me what?"
"Not yet."
"Right." He drums his fingers on the wheel. "You know I'm supposed to keep you safe, not drive you into your childhood home to dig through a dead guy's stuff on a hunch."
"It's not a hunch."
"Okay, so tell me what it is."
I don't answer, and he lets it sit for a mile, which is its own kind of pressure.
"Nico doesn't know you're doing this," he says. Not a question.
"No."
"Lydia."
"I know."
"You know I report back to him. That's the job."
"Do what you need to."
He exhales through his nose, long and unhappy, but he doesn't turn the car around. "You're gonna owe me for this."
"I know that most of all."
He parks half a block down from the house, engine idling, and looks at it through the windshield like it might do something. It's smaller than I remember, siding gone gray, the porch step still cracked in the same spot it's been cracked since I was nine.
"I'll wait here," he says. "You go in, you do your thing, you come out. Anybody so much as looks at this street wrong, I'm coming in after you, cover story or not."
"Deal."
"And Lydia." He catches my wrist before I open the door, gentle, nothing like Frank's grip in that photo. "Whatever this is. It's not just about him, is it?"
I look at him, and for a second I consider telling him everything. The photos. The videos he's threatening. The safe. All of it.
"It's not," I say instead. True enough not to feel like a lie.
He lets me go.
The key still works, which surprises me more than it should.
The house smells like dust and old carpet and, underneath that, something that might be my father's aftershave thirteen years gone or might just be my memory playing tricks.
I move through the front hall fast, past the water-stained wallpaper, into the den where his desk still sits shoved against the far wall like nobody ever had the heart to sell it.
The safe is where it's always been, bolted into the floor of the closet behind a false panel Frank never found, because Frank never had the patience to actually look.
My hands are steady on the dial. That surprises me too.
1... 4... 3.
The number my father used to scrawl inside my lunchbox notes when I was small, instead of writing the words out.
I love you, folded into three digits, a private joke between the two of us that outlived him by over a decade and that I haven't let myself think about in years, because thinking about it hurts in a place I don't visit on purpose.
The lock gives with a heavy click.
Inside, there's less than I expected. A stack of papers gone soft at the edges, an old watch, a folder with my father's accounting firm letterhead on it.
I pull the folder out and my hands are less steady now, flipping through pages of incorporation filings, formation documents, a business registered under a name I recognize instantly because I've walked through its doors.
Terminal 7.
My father's accounting firm handled the books for the formation. His signature is on half these pages, careful cursive, a young accountant's handwriting before life wore it down into something faster and messier.
And there, on the engagement letter, the name of the man who brought him in for the work in the first place.
Vincent D'Ambrosio.
I stand there in a closet that smells like mothballs and hold my father's handwriting in one hand, and something in my chest starts moving before my brain catches up to it.
I think of what Martina told me in that garden in Italy, that Nico was forced to kill a man at eleven. He was eleven. He didn't have a choice.
Eleven.
I was eleven when my father died.
My father, who did the books for the D'Ambrosio family. My father, who dealt directly with Vincent, whose younger brother, Nico, was already deep in the business by then, old enough by their world's twisted math to have already been asked to prove himself.
The two facts sit next to each other in my head, close enough to touch, and I don't want to let them.
Nico might have killed my father.
The thought doesn't crash into me. It settles, quiet and complete.
I don't cry. I don't make a sound. I stand very still in a dead man's closet holding proof that the two most important men in my life were connected long before I ever walked into that club, and I let the horror sink into my bones one slow inch at a time.
I photograph every page. My hands are careful now, steadier than shaking would have been, and that scares me more.
Then I put the folder back exactly where I found it, spin the dial back to zero, close the false panel, and walk out of that house with my face arranged into something that will pass for normal.
Anastasio straightens up against the car when he sees me coming.
"Well?"
"Nothing." I get in, pull the door shut. "Waste of a trip. There's nothing in there."
He watches me for a second too long before he starts the engine. "You sure?"
"I'm sure."
He pulls out onto the street, and I watch Gravesend slide past the window, the house shrinking in the side mirror until it's just another gray shape on a block full of them.
Somewhere past the bridge, nausea rolls through me in one long wave, and my mouth fills with something bitter and metallic that has nothing to do with the coffee I had this morning.
I don't examine it.
I've got too much else to hold right now.