Chapter 2 #3
There it was. The circling. Toni always circled.
He asked questions he already knew the answers to because the asking was the point.
It demonstrated that he had the information, that he'd been paying attention, that the distance between his knowledge of your life and your knowledge of his was a gap he enjoyed maintaining.
"Let’s get down to business," I said. Which answered everything and nothing.
"That's not an answer."
"It's the one you're getting."
He smiled. Wider this time. Toni liked resistance the way some men liked it—not as a boundary to be respected but as a texture to be enjoyed. A taste of something before the real meal.
"You need money," he said. Not a question.
I didn't answer. He didn't need me to. We both knew why I was sitting here. Money was the gravity that pulled me into Toni's orbit every time, and he knew it, and knowing it was the thing he liked best about our arrangement.
He leaned forward. Elbows on the table, fingers laced. The jacket creaked.
"I've got something special for you. Real work. Four figures." He let the number sit there, gleaming. "But first."
A pause. Toni loved a pause.
"I want a kiss. Just a small one." He tilted his head, performing thoughtfulness. "A gesture of goodwill."
The café continued around us. The espresso machine hissed. A woman at the counter ordered something in Spanish and the barista answered in English and neither of them looked our way. Normal afternoon. Normal sounds.
I looked at Toni for three seconds without blinking. I counted them the way I counted everything—deliberately, precisely, giving the silence its full weight. His smile held. His flat eyes held. Midge's growl climbed half a register.
"Go fuck yourself," I said.
I stood up. The chair scraped back against the tile floor and the sound was loud enough to turn the barista's head.
I didn't care. My hands were at my sides and they weren't shaking, which was good, because shaking hands meant the anger had gotten past the controls and I needed the controls right now.
I needed the flat face and the even voice and the clean, single-syllable refusal that didn't leave room for negotiation.
I was two steps from the door.
"Sit down, Cora."
His voice had changed.
The playfulness was gone. The circling, the grinning, the practiced charm—all of it stripped back in three words, and what was left was something flatter and colder and more honest than anything I'd heard from him in a year of transactions.
Something that sounded less like Toni deciding and more like Toni relaying.
A man reading from someone else's script.
I turned around.
He wasn't smiling anymore. His face had settled into a version of itself I hadn't seen before—the surface charm pulled away like a cloth off a table, revealing the bare wood underneath.
His dark eyes were the same, flat, watching, but the calculation in them had shifted.
He wasn't weighing what he could get from me.
He was weighing what would happen if I walked out, and whatever the answer was, it wasn't good. For him.
Whoever wanted this done, it wasn't him.
Midge had stopped growling. She was pressed flat against my chest, silent, the way small animals go silent when the real threat arrives and bravado won't save them.
I went back to the table. I sat down.
Toni exhaled—barely, a small release through his nose that he probably didn't know I caught. Relief. He was relieved. Which meant he'd been scared, which meant whoever was pulling his strings had given him a clear picture of what happened if he came back empty-handed.
"The kiss thing," he said quietly. "That was me being stupid. Forget it."
"Already forgotten," I said. "Talk."
He talked.
The mark lived in Oak Brook. That was the first thing Toni said, and the words Oak Brook landed differently than Lincoln Park or the Loop—heavier, farther, the kind of neighborhood that meant gates and cameras and the sort of quiet that money could buy and keep.
"Big place," Toni said. His voice was still in its new register — stripped, businesslike, the entertainer replaced by something more like a foreman reading specs.
"Brownstone. Gated property, security system, but nothing you can't handle.
Standard residential setup—keypad on the door, cameras on the perimeter, maybe a motion sensor in the main hall. Nothing military."
I filed it. Keypad meant a code or a bypass. Cameras meant timing and angles. Motion sensor meant knowing where it was and where it wasn't.
"He lives alone," Toni continued. "No wife, no girlfriend, no roommates. Out most nights, unpredictable hours—the kind of guy whose schedule runs on other people's emergencies. You go in when he's out. You get what I'm about to tell you. You leave."
Simple. In theory, jobs were always simple. The complications lived in the space between in theory and on the ground, which was a space I'd learned to navigate the way you navigate a dark room — slowly, by touch, expecting furniture.
"What am I getting?"
"Two things." Toni held up two fingers. "First: a laptop from the study on the second floor. Should be on the desk or nearby. Silver, newer model. You grab it, you bring it to me."
I nodded. Laptops were easy. Laptops wanted to be taken—they were light, portable, designed for movement.
"Second." He lowered his voice, though we were the only people in the back of the café and the barista was busy pretending we didn't exist. "There's a safe in the master bedroom.
Combination lock, not digital. Inside, there's a set of family jewellery.
Old pieces. Italian. Rings, a necklace, maybe a brooch—I don't have the full inventory.
They're not worth much on the open market, but they're worth a lot to whoever wants them. "
"Worth more for what they represent," I said. It wasn't a question. I'd been in this world long enough to know that the most dangerous things to steal weren't the valuable ones. They were the meaningful ones. Valuable things were insured, replaced, forgotten. Meaningful things were pursued.
"Something like that." Toni's flat eyes gave nothing. "You get in, you take both, you get out. Four thousand dollars when you deliver."
Four thousand. The number hung between us. Four thousand was rent for eight months. Four thousand was Midge's food for a year.
It was freedom.
I didn't let it show. The number was a hook, and hooks only worked if you bit.
"Who's the mark?"
Toni reached into his jacket—the inside pocket, the one that probably cost more than its own lining—and produced a photograph. He slid it across the Formica table the way you slide a card in a game where you already know you're winning.
I picked it up.
The photograph was shot from a distance, slightly grainy, the kind of image taken by someone who didn't want to be noticed taking it.
A man leaving a building—what looked like a restaurant, dark awning, a heavy door held open by his own arm.
He was tall. Broad. Built like violence was a hobby or a job or both, the kind of body that took up more space than its measurements should allow.
Dark hair, messy. Dark coat. A face that looked like it was built for silence—hard jaw, heavy brow, features arranged with the blunt economy of someone who'd never had to be charming and had decided against learning.
I studied it clinically, without attachment, looking for information.
The way he held the door said right-handed.
The way his weight sat said he favored his left side, or was guarding it—injury, maybe, or habit.
His eyes were dark even in the grainy distance of the photograph, and they were looking at something off-camera with an expression I couldn't name from this angle.
Not angry. Not calm. Something in between, something pulled taut.
He was a stranger. A mark. A means to four thousand dollars and a bank balance that didn't make me want to stare at walls.
I pushed the photo back across the table.
"Why should I care about this particular job over any other?"
Toni looked at me. For once, his face didn't perform anything. It just was—a face, a man, someone sitting across a table who knew something I didn't.
"Because," he said, "it's not just a job."
He reached into his jacket again. The same inside pocket, but this time his hand moved differently—slower, more careful, the way you handle something that might go off.
He produced a folded piece of paper. Not crisp, not new—creased and soft along the folds, the kind of paper that had been carried and put away and carried again, handled by someone who understood what it held.
He slid it across the table the way someone handles something fragile. Or dangerous. Or both.
I opened it.
My hands went still.
The blood left my face.
Holy fuck.