Dario
TWELVE
I am completely, irrationally obsessed with Lena Swan, and I know it, and I have no plan to do anything about it.
The obsession is there in the morning when I check my phone before I’m fully awake, not for the messages I’m expecting but for the ones she sometimes sends after Opal falls asleep.
I mentioned one time that people ought to write letters Civil War-style in modern times, and that it was a pity that we’ve lost the art of letter writing, settling instead for cheap communications and nothing more.
Evidently, Lena has decided to single-handedly resurrect the notion. Today, I woke up to this text.
“Dario,
It is with a most grateful & contented heart that I take up my pen this evening to write to you, for I have news of a most pleasing kind.
Little Opal, who, as you know, has theretofore been of a solitary disposition upon the yard, has at last acquired her first victory, thanks to her new friend, Bea.
Bea’s mother, furthermore, does pack her a luncheon of some considerable quality. Sandwiches of a proper construction, & the superior variety of crisped potato, which Opal has remarked upon with no small degree of admiration & barely concealed envy. Again. And again. Ad nauseam.
But it is in the field of battle that their alliance has most gloriously distinguished itself.
You will know the game of Hopscotch, Dario, that ancient & honorable contest of the yard.
This very week past, our two girls did present themselves as a united force against the assembled opposition of the other children, and I am most proud to report that they carried the day entire.
Opal herself told me of it with such fire in her eye as I have not seen since before her illness fell upon her.
The enemy was routed. Utterly & completely routed.
I do believe this Bea to be a most wholesome influence & true friend. My heart is quite full. All of this is thanks to your dedication and hard work. Thank you for providing succor and aid to bring an end to this time of despair.
Your devoted friend.”
I’m grinning by the end. When was the last time I grinned properly and not as a threat? My face hurts.
I set the phone down and lie back, trying to ignore the ache in my sternum. Perhaps I have a subluxated rib. This ache has been bugging me there for a while now.
I text back: “That was good. Know what’s better?”
“?”
“You, bent over the end of my bed.”
It takes her a moment. “Is everything sex with you?”
“You’ve had sex with you—can you blame me?”
“What do you mean? I’ve never had sex with myself.”
I blink a few times at her message. “You’re saying you don’t touch yourself?”
“Oh.” Blushing emoji.
“Yeah, you have, haven’t you? Naughty pet.”
She doesn’t respond.
So I add: “I want to see you touch yourself while my cock slides in and out of you.”
The text bubbles pop up. Disappear. Pop up again. Like she’s debating what to say next.
And then she sends: “While I wear nipple clamps.”
A pleasant surprise from my pet, upping the ante like that. She’s a gambler.
“Diamond clamps. To match the diamond gag that I’ll put in your mouth. Maybe a diamond-tipped butt plug. You should sparkle for me.”
“I will if you make me come.”
“You’ll beg me for it.”
“Yes.”
It’s that yes of hers that does it for me. The other stuff, that’s dressing. Her yes is the meal. She likes saying it. Likes acquiescing to me.
My balls ache, but I ignore them. Too much to do for that.
I’ve restructured my schedule so that I’m at the penthouse when Opal gets home from school.
I’ve framed this internally as health monitoring.
The framing is thin, and I know it’s thin, and I maintain it anyway, because the alternative is admitting that I’ve rearranged my professional calendar around the arrival of a five-year-old who wants to tell me about whatever she learned that day and will, if I sit down at the kitchen table with her, climb into the chair next to me and draw while she talks.
The drawings are good. The talking is better.
She has opinions about everything. The justice system as it applies to fish, the correct number of sprinkles on a cupcake (many), and whether dinosaurs would have made good pets (yes, specifically the small ones).
She delivers these opinions with the complete authority of someone who has thought very carefully about the subject and arrived at the correct answer.
The truth is, I like being there when she gets home.
I like it more than I’ve liked most things in recent memory.
Talking to a child is not unlike talking to my inner self.
There’s no subterfuge, no sugar-coating, no politeness like adults try to fake.
Opal is direct and honest, and talking to her is a strange relief, but I never know what she’s going to say next.
Normally, I hate that kind of thing. Not with her, though.
Today, Marco texted before seven. Someone needs help.
I text Alanda before I’m out of bed to let her know, and she responds in thirty seconds: omw.
When I get to Marco’s office, he’s in a mood. “The message,” he says, setting down the paper he was not actually reading, “is the same as last time. Stay out of Esposito’s business.” He folds his hands. “Last time I was informing you of a policy, and this time I’m informing you of a consequence.”
I keep my face still and my posture easy. “I thought I had a patient.”
“You do. You have me first. Explain yourself.”
I stand. “Delaying patient care is unacceptable—”
“Accept it and explain yourself. Where the fuck do you get off, threatening my man, Dario?”
“Esposito moved from debt collection to physical surveillance. He was tracking her movements. Tracking her kid. The school. The park. That’s not collection behavior—that’s preparation for something else.
I addressed a security risk in my immediate environment.
Efficiently and quietly. Not my fault if Esposito can’t take the heat. ”
“You threatened a man in a public park,” Marco says.
“I had a conversation with a man in a public park.”
Marco’s jaw shifts. He’s patient—I’ve always given him credit for that—but his patience has a floor, and I see he’s about to drop me on it from a very tall building if I keep pushing back.
“Dario,” he says, and his voice drops into the register that means he’s being deliberate now, choosing every word.
“I’ve known you longer than almost anyone.
I know the difference between what you call a conversation and what other people call a threat.
And I’m telling you that this situation—this woman, this arrangement, whatever it is—it’s made you visible in a way you have never been visible before.
Esposito sees it. Which means other people will see it.
And people in our world who have enemies, which is everyone in our world, do not get to have visible vulnerabilities. You know this.”
He’s not wrong. I don’t say this, but he knows I’m not arguing it.
“She’s out of the arrangement in weeks. The situation isn’t a situation. It’s a temporary solution, nothing more.”
Marco looks at me for a long moment. Something in his expression tells me he doesn’t believe what I just said, and the more unsettling thing is that I’m not certain I believe it either.
“And in the meantime, you stay away from Esposito. You don’t approach him, you don’t send anyone to approach him, you don’t make any moves in his direction. His business with her is his business. Are we clear?”
“We’re clear,” I say through gritted teeth. The fuck I’m backing off.
He picks up his phone. The conversation is over. He tells me Caruso is in the infirmary with a knife wound to the shoulder and needs suturing. It’s a clean dismissal—you’ve been handled, here’s your next task, go be useful in the way I need you to be useful.
I’ve been receiving this dismissal for years, and it has never once failed to produce in me a slow, controlled burn that I direct nowhere and let cool on its own. I go to the infirmary. It’s near Marco’s basement, cold and clinical. Decently stocked, all things considered.
Caruso’s wound is clean and not deep—careless work, someone who didn’t know what they were doing or didn’t care to. I clean it and close it, my hands doing the work while my mind goes somewhere else entirely.
It goes, as it has been going with increasing frequency, to a question I don’t usually let myself ask.
Years ago, when my father was dying, and the family was deciding what came next, I was offered a choice.
I could come home and take a position in the organization—a real position, not the medical contractor role I’ve held since, but an actual seat at the table, the kind that comes with authority and risk and the acknowledgment that the Spinelli name means something.
But my parents didn’t want that for me. My father, from his hospital bed, asked me to finish my residency. Said the family had enough muscle and not enough brains, and that a doctor in the organization was worth ten capos. My mother, who understood the business better than anyone, agreed.
I honored their wishes. I finished the residency.
I built the practice. I carved out this particular niche—the doctor who can handle anything, who doesn’t ask questions, who is useful in ways that keep him adjacent to power without being subject to it.
For years, this felt like the right call.
It gave me the freedom that Marco’s capos don’t have. It gave me insulation.
What it didn’t give me was the authority to walk into Marco’s office and end a conversation like that on my own terms, rather than his.
I tie off the last suture. Caruso thanks me with a terse nod, a man who considers all medical treatment a personal inconvenience. Understandable. I don’t like slowing down for my own injuries either.
I strip off my gloves, wash my hands, and think about my father, a man of genuine intelligence and warmth, who made decisions based on who he wanted his son to be rather than on what his organization needed. He was right about most things, though possibly not about this.
Something twists in my gut at that thought. I was raised to respect my father, and looking at him now as an adult, he made a lot of good choices.
But he was a man, just like any other. Men make mistakes.
Maybe I have too.
The residency made me good at what I do.
I don’t doubt that. The years of training, the clinical rigor, the particular discipline that comes from learning medicine properly rather than picking it up piecemeal in back rooms—it made me precise.
Trustworthy in a world where trust is scarce.
Irreplaceable in a way that most people in my position are not.
My parents were right about all of that.
What they didn’t account for is Marco. He took the role my parents offered. They didn’t realize who he was. He’d been working for them for five years at the time, and he seemed the second-likely candidate behind me. I understand why they chose him at the time. He was a hard worker, a smart capo.
But he’s the particular type of man who accumulates authority not through intelligence but through longevity and the patient accumulation of other people’s debts.
My father’s generation of the organization had a different structure, a different center of gravity.
Marco prefers to be a bottom-feeder, going after everyday folks for their money, instead of patiently dismantling their oppressors the way my parents did.
The men who would have been my peers, had I come home when I had the chance, are either dead or running things now.
The seat that was available to me years ago is no longer available.
That window closed, and I chose to let it close, and I’ve been living inside the consequences of that choice ever since.
I drive home thinking about Opal. About the fact that she’s almost certainly already home, sitting at the kitchen table with Lena, telling her about the fish or Bea’s eraser collection or the aerodynamics of paper airplanes.
I find myself rather jealous of Lena at the moment, but I know it makes her incalculably happy to be there for her daughter. A sentiment I share.
Then there’s the fact that Marco is right. Caring about them makes me visible.
I find I don’t give a fuck about that.
Let me be visible. Let others eye me with suspicion that I’m getting soft. I’ll slit their throats without a blink, and they all know it. If they’ve forgotten, I’ll remind them.
The only trouble is, I don’t want that visibility to fall onto Lena and Opal. They are innocent and pure, and they don’t deserve this kind of bullshit in their lives.
Well, Lena’s not innocent or pure, but she still doesn’t deserve this kind of bullshit in her life. I’d feel guilty for putting a target on her back were it not for the fact that Esposito did it first.
The man is a problem. I like making problems disappear. He should have thought about that before he ran squealing to Marco.