Chapter Forty-One
Max
Grease lives in this room. I can smell it as the crusty cloth tied behind my head slides down the side of my face, revealing the old commercial kitchen we are in. I turn my ankles slightly feeling my bare feet slide against the floor. I grimace at the grease smell, again.
It slicks the tiles, ghosts the air, turns the old fryer hoods into sleeping animals that breathe when the wind kicks down through the roof fan. My head lolls to one side.
I’m not sure how long it’s been. I keep drifting in and out. There are no windows in here and this is the first time I’ve opened my eyes since feeling the car moving under me after the man grabbed me.
I tried keeping track of turns, like people do in movies sometimes. But after what felt like hours lying on the floor of the car blindfolded, I gave up trying to remember. It got colder and the light around the edges of the blindfold faded. I tried sitting up, wiggling my hands, everything.
Then they came back. And brought me here.
Where I’ve been kept in this chair for who the fuck knows how long. When we got here, a woman’s voice met my ears, and she took me to a bathroom. I begrudgingly went with her and used it.
That moment gave me hope though. If they were going to kill me, they wouldn’t care if I peed on myself or if the men saw me with my skirt pulled up. That gave me hope that I was leverage. And I’ve been holding onto that hope as I drift in and out of sleep.
With the blindfold around my neck, I can see three men with two guns out, and one bored voice rings out from across the space littered with boxes, metal prep tables and other old, rusty kitchen equipment: “He’s not coming. Bosses don’t bleed for side pieces.”
“Side pieces,” the thick-necked one snorts and shakes his head in disagreement, his accent thick. “She’s his. Property.”
They are saying it for my benefit and I know it. Because the entire drive here they were speaking a foreign language. Something eastern European, maybe Russian.
I laugh, ugly and small, giving them a reaction against my better judgment. “Whose property are you?”
One of the men closes the distance between us.
The slap is quick. Not the worst I’ve had. It spins the room and drops me sideways; out of the chair they had me in. I’m almost grateful to not be upright anymore.
The tile kisses my cheek—cold, grimy, old-onion sour smell. I can’t wipe the tears that creep out of my eyes and fall down the bridge of my nose because my wrists are plastic-bitten behind me. The wet drops fall anyway, and I follow the hot tracks plopping through kitchen dust.
He’ll come.
He said he’d always get to me.
Cal is Cal.
He went to Ellison for me. He went back for me.
He’ll come.
Except their words move like oil under my skin: what if he doesn’t?
What if I built him out of hope the way I built Patrick out of excuses? Patrick would have saved himself, saved his reputation, saved whatever he could salvage. He would have stepped over me so he wouldn’t come out of this smelling like…
Old kitchen grease.
I breathe. In. Out. The room steadies and I lift my eyes.
Through a gap in the boxes stacked by the far wall—an old fryer oil delivery, the labels long peeled—I see a vent panel shiver. I narrow my eyes, trying to see movement again; trying to make this not a hallucination from lack of sleep.
Two screws loosen but don’t fall. I blink. The tears have stopped and I can clearly see a shadow behind the mesh of the vent.
And eyes become visible as the vent shifts down a few inches.
Eyes I know from my dreams.
Cal lifts a finger to his mouth as he crawls out and sets the vent cover to the side.
My bottom lip trembles. I nod the smallest nod I’ve ever made. A tear falls, relief instead of fear, and camouflages the way my breathing changes.
He glides where the light doesn’t reach and I can’t see him anymore.
Tile, shadow, box, shadow, breath.
He settles behind me; the heat of him sends adrenaline through my veins, replacing the relief, and I look across the room towards the last place I heard the voices, but I can’t see the men.
Metal touches the plastic at my wrists. A blade slides and plastic snaps.
Don’t move, his breath says almost inaudibly against my hair. Out loud, he says nothing, but he has his fingers wrapped around both my wrists, soothing the places the plastic was cutting into, holding me in place.
The men argue in a language I don’t know, vowels hard, consonants like knives.
“When I tell you to run, you run,” he murmurs, the softest thread at my ear. “And you don’t look back, Max.”
His fingers find mine and I consider glancing behind me. He squeezes once. “Squeeze my fingers if you understand.”
I squeeze. Once, then twice, because the tears won’t stop. I don’t want to let go, but his fingers slide from mine anyway.
He is gone from behind me and then he’s not—he’s everywhere, voice from the dark:
“How we doing here, boys?”
I straighten and push up on my knees. Every muscle and joint aches and screams from being tied up for who knows how long. I look over the boxes at the scene in front of me.
Three heads whip. Four guns lift.
One trains on me; two on the shadow that becomes Cal as he steps into the low-lit kitchen, his gun already up, stance like a wall. He’s between me and the men before I can stand, and air floods my lungs in relief.
“Max. Up.”
I stand. My hands are free; the plastic loops are on the floor behind me like shed skin.
“Three steps to your right.”
I move three precise steps. He mirrors them, taking my lane, blocking their sight line. His gun never wavers, his eyes don’t move from his target.
“Stop there,” one of them barks at Cal. “She can go. You—drop the gun.”
“Go ahead, sweetheart,” says Bored Voice, smiling like a dent in the world. “Take the door.”
Cal doesn’t move. From behind him, I can see his jaw tick. The room goes still and silent.
“Cal,” I say, because I can’t not.
Because leaving without him wasn’t actually what he meant when he said to run.
I step to the side slightly to look at his face.
He was going to be behind me when he told me to run.
Wasn’t he?
His eyes flick—only to me, only once. He tips the muzzle of his pistol up slowly, freeing both hands, palms open to the ceiling.
The gun tilts backwards but doesn’t leave his grasp.
I suck in air, tears brimming the lids of my eyes, knowing what’s coming and not ready to listen. Not ready to leave him behind.
One of the men steps forward to Cal and places the barrel of his own gun inches from Cal’s forehead.
“Get on your knees, Renzetti.”
Cal takes half a step forward to put the muzzle of the man’s gun flush against his own forehead.
My heart drops.
“Never will you find a Renzetti on their knees for anyone. I’d die before I put myself on my knees for you or anyone else.”
Cal holds the man’s stare for a moment before blinking.
And then, his voice is cold as ice, flat: “Run.”
I run.
Every cell of my body says to turn around, every muscle yells at me that I am running the wrong way, and my heart begs me to go back. But I follow the rule about listening this one time.
Through the swinging kitchen door, down the dim back hall where the exit sign hums like the chandelier did, breath burning, lungs raw, gasping or sobbing, or both.
Behind me, someone calls, “After her!”
The crash bar gives.
I pitch into night air, take four or five strides, and fall right into arms that smell like cologne and gunpowder and family.
“Got you. I got you.” I look up into the familiar voice as Nico lifts me, sounding like steel.
Gio is upright beside him, pale and wrapped, Rudi already sighting the alley. Both armed.
Another shadow lunges from the door behind me; the night explodes with the controlled thunder of three guns. I make sounds but I don’t hear them through the ringing in my ears.
Gasping. Sobbing. Screaming?
It feels like my throat rips open again.
Then the man in front of us folds. Nico hauls me back, his eyes and gun never losing sight of the man on the ground.
Across the narrow alley, he presses my spine to a cold car hood.
He starts checking me. He presses into my head, bobs his head side to side and presses into my arms, my legs, my shoulders. He looks relieved when his hands turn up free of blood each time.
“Cal,” I think I retch as I say it and my voice is gravel. “Cal’s coming. He’s coming,” I say it again, and again, until the words are everything and nothing.
Then there are two shots from inside. A few more all at once. Then another.
A long pause.
Then one more.
We wait. They all train their guns on the back door.
A breath.
Another.
The sirens begin as a whisper in the distance.
“We have to go,” Nico says, hand on my shoulder. “Rudi—get her in the car. Gio, with them.”
Nico drops something out of the butt of the gun, reloads smoothly, looks both ways like he’s crossing any ordinary street, and takes one step toward the door I came from.
“I’ll get him,” he promises with a glance back at me, to where Gio reaches for my elbow.
Nico faces forward and takes another step.
The building breathes.
The lights flicker like a failing heart.
Somewhere inside, something implodes.
I feel a blast of air and then nothing.
Nico flies backwards towards us.
The world goes white.
I scream Cal’s name as hands close around my torso and haul me into the car, metal shrieking, glass raining, fryer hoods howling like animals finally awake.