Chapter 6
NICO
The back room is colder than the rest of the house. Marco runs it that way.
Three monitors glow on the desk. Marco’s comms feed on the left, Izzy’s pattern board on the right and the third pulled toward my chair.
I sit.
“Morning,” Marco says, not looking up.
“Morning.”
“Coffee’s Nonna’s. Don’t ask.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
Izzy is at her laptop across from me, her hair pulled back and her sleeves shoved past her elbows.
“I have him,” she says.
I look at her screen.
A face, beard grown in, the same shoulders we have been watching at the port. She has him beside three other photographs from different cities and decades, all of them the same man.
“Konstantin Lebedev,” she says. “Velikov network. Port logistics. Two years in New York before they pulled him east. A winter in Chicago. Three Bratva payrolls in the last decade. He doesn’t ask twice.”
“How long until he asks past the port.”
“He already has. He just hasn’t asked the right person yet.”
Marco looks up. “Define right person.”
“Someone with a face memory who’s been to the basement. Someone who had access to her in the year before we pulled her out. Three men in this city fit. I have eyes on two of them.”
“And the third,” I say.
“He’s the one I can’t find.”
I take the coffee and drink it.
“Move on the two you have,” I say. “Quiet. I want what they ate for breakfast and who watched them eat it.”
“On it.”
“Marco.”
He does not look up. “Yeah.”
“Casa Lucia perimeter.”
“Adding a third rotation. Cleared with Dante. The clinic doesn’t see it.”
The coffee is bitter at the bottom. Nonna lets it go bitter on purpose.
Izzy is watching me sideways without making it look like she is.
“What.”
“Nothing.”
“Iz.”
“I said nothing.”
She goes back to her screen.
I stand.
“Find me the third,” I say. “By Friday.”
“Before Friday.”
“Good.”
I walk out.
Marco brings me the breakfast intel on the back porch, the heat already rising off the yard. One of the two is at a diner on the West Bank. The other is at a Marigny barbershop that has been a Bratva front since I was a kid.
At sundown the New York office comes on the line and I work through it standing at the back-room window — rotation orders for two soldiers, a broker in Algiers who has gone quiet since Thursday, a payment dispute, a man in Houston who wants a door opened that I am not going to open for him.
Marco runs the first half. I take the second.
I say no in three languages and watch the yard go dark through the glass while I do it.
When the call ends, Marco says, “Maria left the tray outside her door earlier. It’s gone now. The fork was on top.” He says it without looking up from his screens.
“Thank you.”
He nods. Back to his screens.
The house quiets. I can tell by the way the kitchen goes silent and the light under Nonna’s door disappears.
I shower in water that stays too cold.
I leave the cufflinks in the dish and the watch on my wrist, and walk back to her door.
The jasmine is heavy tonight, thicker than it has been all week, heat that sits on the skin and does not lift even after dark. The plate is not on the floor outside her door. Maria has already taken it down. The wood is closed.
I settle against the wall beside her door with my knees bent, one hand on my thigh, the other pressed flat against the wood at the height where her palm has come to meet mine every night for weeks.
I do not open the book.
The floor creaks when I sit.
I do not read tonight.
I just sit.
The cicadas are going and the heat presses in through the open window at the end of the hall, carrying the faint river smell that comes up from the south after midnight, muddy and wide and older than the house.
I wait.
Her palm does not come to meet mine. The wood under my palm is just wood.
I stay still. My breath stays even.
Then it comes.
Behind the door, so quiet I would not catch it if I did not know what kind of silence to listen for.
A hum.
Barely. Under her breath, under the house itself, under everything. I catch two notes and lose them. Catch the edge of a third. The shape slips every time I reach for it.
My other hand goes flat against the wall beside me before I have asked it to.
My ribs answer it without asking permission. I want to press my ear to the wood and stay there all night. I press my palm harder against the wall instead. I hold still. I do not let her know I have heard her.
Then it stops.
The wood is silent again.
I close my eyes.
My hand is still flat against the wall. The plaster is warm under my palm. I press harder. The wood frame underneath.
Plaster, plaster, plaster.
Not concrete.
I open my eyes.
I stand. My back aches from the floor and my knees take a beat to straighten, which I let happen without hurrying because there is no one in this hallway to see it.
I do not let my breath change until I am two doors down.
I lie on top of the covers with the window open and whatever I caught through that door turning over in my chest without resolving into anything I can name.
The moths are at the porch light below my window. The magnolia at the edge of the property has gone still. The house is at its deepest quiet and I am nowhere near sleep.
I do not let myself think about why.
The sound comes through the wall.
A breath, wrong shape, wrong throat. Then a second one, sharper, wetter. Then something that is not quite a word and not quite a cry, broken off in the middle.
I am on my feet and in the hallway before it finishes.
I stop outside her door.
I do not open it.
Don’t.
She is not awake yet. If she opens her eyes and a man is standing over her she will go for the knife under her pillow. She will be right to.
I press my palm flat against the wood and wait. That is all I can do. Wait on my side of the door and let her find her own way back.
Inside, she is breathing fast and shallow, half-words that are not aimed at me.
I keep my palm on the wood and I wait.
Her breath stutters. Stutters again. Then slowly, unevenly, it evens out.
The latch clicks on her side.
She opens the door herself. First an inch, then another, then all the way, and she is standing in the gap in the slip she sleeps in with her bare feet on the wood floor and the chain at her throat and her hair damp at the temples.
Her eyes are open but not all the way back yet, pupils wide in the dark.
She sees me.
She does not flinch or step back. She lifts her left hand across the space between us, not waving, not reaching for the doorframe, just her hand, open, coming toward me.
Cristo.
I cross to her in two steps and put one arm around her shoulders and one at her back and let her step into me. That is all. I do not pull her. She comes.
Her forehead lands against my chest. Her hands close on the front of my shirt at my ribs, gripping hard, and I close my arms around her and hold on.
She is shaking. Every shake moves through me.
I keep my hands where they are. Right hand at her shoulder blades.
Left at the small of her back. I do not move them and I do not speak and I stand in her doorway holding her until her breath slows against my chest and her pulse, which I can feel through the chain pressed between us, begins to settle.
The shaking stops. Her shoulders lift slightly and her grip on my shirt loosens. Not all the way. Enough.
She lifts her face off my chest and looks at my collarbone.
I lower us both slowly to the floor with our backs against the doorframe, half inside her room and half in the hallway, and she folds against my side with her cheek on my shoulder and her hands still loosely on my shirt.
I want her. She is shaking against me and I want her and tonight is not for that. I keep my right hand at her shoulder blades and my left hand away from her hair. I sit with her. I stay quiet. I let her sleep.
She falls asleep against me.
I sit through the rest of the night.
Before dawn her grip loosens completely and I lift her, three steps to the bed, and lay her down on the side she’d been on. I pull the comforter up to her shoulder and stand over her in the dark until I am sure her breath is even.
I pull her door to the inch she always leaves it and walk back to my room. I lie down on top of the covers in my clothes, the watch still on my wrist, and my ribs are still ringing, and I do not sleep.