Chapter 14
Angela
Isat in the passenger seat of his car, hands folded tight in my lap.
Last night, I’d slept so hard I left a damp mark on his chest. Woke up to his mouth at my collarbone and thought, for one stupid, chemical moment, that we might spend the whole day in bed, slow, lazy, the way people in movies did when they were in love and not running for their lives.
I’d pictured us talking, or not talking, or eating toast in silence.
I’d pictured a version of myself that was safe.
Instead, this.
The whiplash was real.
Pietro said, when I rolled over, that he needed to talk to me. But not here, not now. He wanted to take me somewhere. There was a carefulness in the way he said it. Like a doctor with a prognosis he didn’t want to deliver at home.
Now we were two blocks out from his building, eastbound, the streets so empty the stoplights felt like theater.
The sidewalks were scored with the blue drag-marks of snowplows.
The wind raked the last week’s trash into the curb.
A salt haze crusted everything above the sidewalk line.
The sky over the city was iron: a flat, matte grey, nothing soft about it.
I watched him drive. Both hands at ten and two, not that the roads were icy. He drove like a man with respect for rules, or maybe like a man who’d had to break so many that the ones he could keep had become precious to him.
He hadn’t looked at me since we got in the car.
Not once. His face was set to something I didn’t have a word for.
Not fear, not anger, not even the blank that came with a hard job.
Just the face of a man who’d been awake for hours, replaying every possible version of the conversation he was about to have.
I let it ride for two blocks, maybe more. Each cross street slid past in perfect increments, no pedestrians, no movement in any of the windows. Only pigeons, cold as the bricks, huddled at the steam vent behind a deli.
It was too much. The not-knowing. The way the silence didn’t even feel like a standoff—just a waiting room.
I said, very quietly, “Pietro. Daddy. Where are we going?”
He didn’t answer right away. He drove past another intersection, then turned left without signaling. He said, “Somewhere I can talk to you properly, sweetheart.”
I watched the city slide by. The buildings got lower, older, pressed in by the warehouses and the chain-link lots where companies stored their white vans and salt bins. It was the part of Chicago that looked like nowhere, like every city’s industrial back end: brick, blacktop, forgotten signage.
“You . . . regret what happened last night?”
Like a flash, he glanced over. His hand shot from the wheel and took mine.
“Baby, no. I don’t regret it. Not for a second. I’m proud. It’s one of the best things I ever did. No, this isn’t about that, you hear?”
I didn’t push. I just watched.
He made a right onto a street I’d never been on, a skinny, dead-end block that terminated at a train overpass.
Halfway down, he pulled the car into a diagonal parking space outside a building so nondescript it could have been condemned.
Only the hand-painted sign over the window betrayed it as a bakery: Forno di Capri, old letters, the blue faded to white.
The windows were steamed up, lights on behind them.
He killed the engine. He didn’t move for a second. Then he turned to me, his eyes fixed hard on mine.
He said, “I am sorry, Angela. For what I am about to tell you. I wish I didn’t have to.”
I didn’t answer. I just nodded, once.
He got out of the car. I followed, boots hitting the salted pavement, the cold burning my nose and making my eyes water. The wind stung my ears, but I barely felt it. My heart was doing something violent in my chest.
He waited at the curb for me, then opened the door to the bakery and held it, a perfect gentleman, like this was just breakfast. Like anything was ever just breakfast.
We sat in silence for almost a minute.
The woman at the counter brought two small coffees in white ceramic, a plate of sugar packets, and a refill of the bread basket.
She set it down, smiled at us both, and then disappeared into the back room.
Nobody else came in. The city outside the steamed glass felt like it belonged to someone else.
Pietro steepled his fingers. When he spoke, his voice was lower than usual. It didn’t sound like the voice he used on the phone, or with his cousins. It was a voice meant to report something terrible, but also to keep you calm.
He said, “Yesterday, Dante called a meeting. It was at the Carriage House, early. Sal, Tonio, Marco, myself. We had new intelligence—confirmed, not just rumor.”
I watched the coffee swirl. I didn’t touch it.
He said, “Marseilles sent a crew. French, not Italian, not local. They specialize in extractions—taking people alive, not dead.” He paused.
“They arrived two days ago. We picked them up at O’Hare, followed to a motel on Mannheim.
Sal thinks they made us within the first hour. These men are . . . very, very good.”
His voice stayed calm, even as his hands twisted together on the table.
He said, “They’re not here for a random hit. It’s contracted, expensive, a lot of money for one job. It’s you. We know that because we intercepted a message from Enzo, through Toronto, to the Marseilles cell. The wire money was marked with a number—the case number from your trial.”
He let that hang there.
I thought: this is all exactly what I would have done, if I wanted to disappear a person. Outsource. Use a channel with no ties to Chicago, no traceable history. Move fast, work only in daylight, keep the operation as quiet as possible. If it had been someone else, I might have admired it.
He said, “The plan—Dante’s plan—was to let them make their play.
Not to catch them, but to follow. The only way to reach Enzo is to watch how the Frenchmen operate, how they get you out, who they hand you off to.
If we intervene too soon, we only get the foot soldiers. If we let it play, we get the chain.”
He looked at me, just a flick up and back, as if afraid of what I’d do with the information.
He said, “It’s a good plan, in theory. In practice . . . it means you are the bait.”
I nodded, just once. I felt ice in my gut.
He said, “Dante asked me, specifically, not to tell you. I argued, of course, but he insisted that if you knew, somehow you would blow it. Give it away.” He sighed a deep sigh.
“I said yes. I thought—” and now his voice caught, just a fraction, “—I thought I could shield you from the worst of it. That if you didn’t know, you would be safe. ”
He looked at his hands, then back at me. “I made that choice for you. I’m sorry.”
I sat very still. The bakery felt like a photograph of itself, perfectly composed, perfectly empty.
He said, “There is more.” He was trying to get it all out at once, as if the telling was a kind of surgery. “Last night, after—” and he stopped, as if unsure if we were allowed to mention the night, “—after, I realized I couldn’t keep it from you. Even if it meant I lost you.”
His voice was softer, now. “If you want out, we can be gone by sundown. I know people, places. I have cash, documents. We can disappear, Angela. My family would hunt me, but I would do it. For you.”
It was so earnest that I almost laughed. Instead, I stared at the table, at the roll cooling in front of me, the way the light hit the surface and made a perfect gold ring around it.
I said, “What about the plan?”
He shook his head. “Fuck the plan. If you want to run, we run. If you want to stay, we stay. You choose.”
I tried to picture it. A life on the run, again, but with Pietro beside me. I tried to imagine him anywhere but here, without his family, his city, his routines. I tried to imagine me with him, and not resenting the cost.
My mouth felt full of cotton. I reached for the coffee, then changed my mind.
I said, “You’d leave your family for me?”
He said, “I would do anything for you.” The way he said it was not romantic. It was a plain statement, like saying, The sky is grey. The city is cold. I love you.
I nodded, but I didn’t answer right away.
I thought about all the ways this could play out.
I thought about the three lives I had already lost—Angela, Anna, the girl before either.
I thought about the math: the probability of us getting away clean; the probability that, even if we did, Enzo would just send another crew, and another, until one of us was dead.
I thought about what it would mean to be the woman who cost him his family.
I looked up at him, really looked, and tried to see the Pietro who had saved me from the men in the club.Who had called me Baby Girl.
Who had made such sweet love to me last night.
But I didn’t see him. Instead, I saw a man who had been holding his breath.
I saw a man who was ready to jump, if only I said the word.
I opened my mouth to say something.
He held up one hand, quick, palm out. His eyes shifted—just a tick, just enough to catch it.
He said, in a low voice, “Don’t look now, but there’s a man in a grey coat at the corner. He’s been there since we walked in.”
I didn’t turn. I didn’t have to.
“Marseilles?” I said.
“Yes. I think so.”
I thought about that. I let the information fill my body, cold and hot at once. I said, “How long do we have?”
“I don’t know. It could already be too late.”
I looked at the roll in my hand. I tore it in half, then put one half back in the basket. I placed the other half in my mouth and chewed, slow, deliberate, the way I did when I needed to kill the panic.
He reached for my hand under the table. I let him have it. I squeezed, hard, once.
He said, “We go out the back.”
I nodded.
He stood, leaving cash on the table—enough to cover the rolls and the coffee and the booth and maybe the whole bakery for a week. He looked at me, one last time, as if to memorize my face.
I said, “I’m ready.”