Luca (Feretti Syndicate #14)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

Gemma

The diner smells like burnt coffee and floor cleaner, which is basically my cologne at this point. Nine hours of it soaked into my hair, my shirt, the skin under my nails. I wipe down table fourteen with a rag that should have been swapped out an hour ago and glance toward the back corner.

Nina sits in the booth by the kitchen door, the one with the torn vinyl seat I stuffed a folded napkin under so it wouldn't pinch her legs. Her feet don't reach the floor. They hang there, swinging a little, and she's bent over a sheet of paper with a green crayon gripped in her fist.

The grip is wrong. She holds it like a knife, the whole fist wrapped around it and I keep meaning to show her the right way. I think I keep not doing it because she draws just fine, she's four and I pick my battles.

She hasn't looked up in twenty minutes.

The other waitress, Dee, left at nine. The cook is in the back scraping the grill and swearing at it, which means he's almost done. Two customers left. A guy in a trucker cap reading his phone over cold eggs, and an older woman with a coffee she's been nursing since before my break.

I spray table twelve and wipe it in circles, working the dried ketchup stain near the edge.

My shoulders ache. My lower back has been doing this thing for the last week where it locks up if I stand too long, which is a problem when your job is standing.

I shift my weight, press my knuckle into the spot above my hip, and keep wiping.

Mariela's in San Antonio. Her mother had a fall — nothing broken, but Mariela was on the bus before she finished the phone call.

She left Tuesday. It's Thursday. Diego and Camila are with Mariela's aunt on the south side, and Nina is here.

In a diner. At ten-fifteen on a Thursday.

At least she doesn't have school tomorrow because I can't afford preschool. I deserve small mercies.

She's fine. She ate a grilled cheese at seven that Sal made without me asking, which was decent of him. She drank her milk. She went to the bathroom twice and washed her hands both times without being told. She hasn't cried or whined or asked to go home.

She's four years old and she never gives me a hard time.

I stop wiping and look at her.

That's the part that sits wrong in my gut when I let it.

A four-year-old should give you a hard time.

Should throw the crayons. Should want to leave, should say so, loudly, in front of everyone.

Camila does. Camila would have been on the floor screaming an hour ago, and that's fine, that's normal, that's what four looks like.

Nina learned quiet the way I learned it. From the same teacher.

She picks up the blue crayon. Puts down the green. Her lips move a little — she's talking to herself, narrating whatever she's drawing, and the sound doesn't carry.

I fold the rag over my arm and walk to her booth. Slide in across from her. She looks up and her face does that thing — not a smile exactly, more like her whole body loosens. Shoulders drop. Eyes open wider. She pushes the paper toward me.

"It's a house," she says.

It's green and blue and has seven windows and no door.

"That's a good house."

"It has a garden."

"I see that." The scribble at the bottom. "What's growing?"

"Tomatoes." She says it like it's obvious. "And a fish."

"You're growing a fish in the garden?"

She nods. Dead serious.

I push her hair back off her forehead. It's tangled. I'll brush it when we get home.

"Okay," I say. "Fish garden. I like it."

Luca

The pharmacy sits at the edge of a strip mall, its sign buzzing against the gray Chicago sky. I pull into a spot near the entrance and kill the engine, but I don't get out.

My shoulder aches. The kind of ache that settles into bone, that reminds me with every breath that two bullets found their home in my body six weeks ago.

One through the meat of my thigh, one clipping the edge of my shoulder blade on its way out.

The thigh is worse. It makes me limp when I'm tired, which is always now, and I fucking hate limping.

I sit in the car and watch an old woman shuffle through the automatic doors with a plastic bag swinging from her wrist.

Valentino ordered rest. Rest. As if I'm a machine that needs its oil changed, a car that can be parked in a garage until someone needs it again.

Valentino Conti — the man who runs Sartori's security, who manages the family's European connections, who has never in his goddamn life sat still for longer than it takes to reload — told me to take time off.

"You're no good to anyone dead," he said. Calm. Certain. The way Valentino says everything.

I wanted to tell him I'm no good to anyone alive either.

The heater clicks off. Cold seeps through the windows.

Six years I've worked without stopping. Six years since Elena. Since I stopped being a man and became something else. A function, a tool, a pair of hands that knows how to end things cleanly.

That's what Valentino needed, what the family needed, and it suited me fine. Work meant I didn't have to think. Work meant I fell into bed too exhausted to dream.

Now there's nothing.

I drag a hand down my face. The stubble's getting long. I should shave. I should eat something that isn't cold takeout. I should do the fucking exercises the physical therapist wrote down on that sheet of paper I threw away three weeks ago.

I should want to get better.

The wound in my thigh throbs, and I press my palm against it through my jeans. The pain is almost good. It's something. It's proof I'm still here, even when I'm not sure why that matters.

There are days when I think the bullets should have done their job. Clean. Quick. An ending that made sense. Instead I'm here, parked outside a pharmacy in a city that isn't mine, waiting to pick up pills that will dull the ache in my body but do nothing for the rest of it.

I feel dead either way. The bullets just would have made it official.

A kid runs past my car, chasing a woman who's probably his mother. She catches him by the hood of his jacket and swings him up onto her hip. He laughs. That bright, startled sound kids make when they're not thinking about anything except this moment, this second.

I look away.

The prescription's been ready for two days. I should go inside. Get it. Go back to the apartment and do absolutely nothing.

I open the car door and the cold hits me like a slap. My leg protests when I stand, a sharp pull through the healing muscle, and I let myself lean against the car for a second before I start walking.

One foot in front of the other. That's all anyone can ask.

It's not enough. It's never fucking enough. But it's what I've got.