Chapter 10
Cora
Iwoke up warm.
Not the warmth of blankets or the heating system cycling through the night. Something else. Something that lived inside the body rather than on the surface—a heat that had settled into my bones and was still there when I opened my eyes.
I lay still. Let the ceiling come into focus. I’d slept. Actually slept—the deep, weightless kind, the kind that meant the nervous system had finally decided to stand down.
Midge was curled against my hip. One paw over her nose, her stub of a tail tucked around her, her breathing the slow metronome of an animal entirely at peace. I put my hand on her, feeling the rise and fall of her small ribs, and she didn’t stir.
I was sore.
The ache in my glutes and the backs of my thighs was specific, localized, mine—the kind of soreness that came with a map.
His hand. The exact shape of it. I could trace the heat even now, hours later, the warmth still blooming under my skin like a signature.
Not a bruise. He’d been too controlled for a bruise.
Something more deliberate than that, something that existed in the precise territory between discomfort and pleasure and stayed there, refusing to resolve into either.
He’d told me I’d feel it the next day.
He’d been right. I’d asked for that, had chosen it, had counted every one. Good girl. The words landed fresh in the memory, clean and exact, and something in my chest responded to the replay the same way it had responded to the real thing. Tightening. Opening. The two at once.
My body felt different. That was the simplest way to put it. Like it had been claimed. His. I held the thought, waiting for it to scare me.
It didn’t.
It should have. I knew it should have. I turned it over—his, her body is his—and all I found was something quiet and certain that had moved into the space where the fear was supposed to live and settled there with no intention of leaving.
Then Maria arrived.
She always arrived this way—not as a memory, not as a face, but as a weight.
A pressure at the center of my chest, localized, specific, the gravity of twenty-three years of carrying something I couldn’t put down and couldn’t not feel.
Maria was sixteen in 2003. She was standing outside a Valenti club on the South Side on a summer night when the crossfire found her.
She hadn’t been part of any of it. She’d been a girl in the wrong place at the wrong time when two families decided the street was a battlefield.
I sat up.
The motion was too fast. Midge raised her head, gave me the look, and then folded herself back into her comma with the profound indifference of a creature who had witnessed worse.
The cognitive dissonance was nothing new. He was supposed to be a monster. A Caruso. A family that paid to make a girl’s death disappear, that bought its peace and buried her like a line item.
And then there was this man. Who had made me a plate of eggs with avocado and knew to shred Midge’s chicken so she wouldn’t choke.
I should tell him who I was. I knew I should.
The longer I held it, the worse it would be—for me, for him, for whatever this thing between us was becoming.
He was going to find out who I was. He’d said end of the week, and he’d meant it, and that particular clock was still ticking somewhere in the house whether or not I could hear it.
Maybe that was the thing. Maybe the only reason he was keeping me here—the meals, the rules, the contract, the arms around me while I cried—was because I was a loose end he hadn’t tied up yet. Not warmth. Strategy. He’d said it himself: I need to know who you are. What happened after he knew?
I sat on the edge of the bed and watched the grey light press through the curtains and held both thoughts at the same time. Tell him. Don’t. He cares for you. He’s using you.
Three knocks. Even. Unhurried.
The beat.
The door opened and he was there, the tray in his hands, his dark eyes finding mine across the room with the specific warmth I’d been lying awake cataloging at two in the morning. The warmth that had no right to exist and existed anyway.
I looked at him. The guilt and the want occupied the same space in my chest, exactly as I’d feared.
I let neither of them show.
“Morning,” I said.
He didn’t announce it immediately. Only after I’d finished.
“You were very good yesterday, Little one. You’ve earned a treat,” he said.
I looked up. He was watching me with that level expression, the dark eyes giving nothing away except what he chose to give. I felt a rush of heat at the words. Little one.
“We’re going out.”
I set my fork down.
The last time I’d left this house, I’d re-entered over his shoulder. My exit from the normal world had been swift and unambiguous. Returning to it felt—complicated. Like there were eyes I didn’t know about and distances I hadn’t measured.
“Nervous?” he asked.
“No.”
The look he gave me said he knew better and would let me have the lie.
An hour later I was standing in the doorway of the guest room in a coat I hadn’t owned yesterday.
Charcoal wool, long, good cut. He’d left it on the chair beside the folded dress without comment.
My size—of course my size, because he cataloged everything about my body with the attentiveness of a man building a reference library.
It was warm and it fit and I resented how much I liked it.
Midge was in my arms. She knew. The collar jingling against my wrist, her body alert, the one ear up and the one flopped forward and her brown eyes holding mine with an expression of profound suspicion regarding the coat.
A security guy who’d introduced himself as Eddie was waiting at the bottom of the stairs. Early twenties, eager-faced, his hands in his jacket pockets. He looked at Midge with the careful respect of someone who’d been warned about her.
“She bites,” I said. It was half warning, half test.
“I know,” he said. “Signor Caruso told me.”
I handed her over.
She went stiff in his arms. The stub tail went still.
She craned her neck to look back at me with the expression of a creature being abandoned on the steps of an orphanage.
I felt the absence the moment his arms took her weight—a physical gap, like something had been unclipped from my chest and was now four feet away making silent accusations with its eyes.
“Chicken is in the fridge,” I said. “She gets nervous if you move too fast. And don’t—“
“Don’t make direct eye contact until she initiates,” Eddie said, reading from something he’d clearly memorized. “Don’t attempt to restrain her. Fresh water every two hours.”
I stared at him.
“He left instructions,” Eddie said, with the expression of a man who had received instructions from Santo Caruso and understood that compliance was not optional.
Santo was outside. I could hear the car. I pulled the coat tighter and walked out.
Another security guy—Sal—followed at a distance in a grey sedan—visible in the driver’s side mirror, four car lengths back, consistent. Professional.
I’d never been on a date with security before. If this even was a date.
We crossed into the city and I watched it come.
The skyline assembling itself on the horizon the way it always did—brick first, then glass, the familiar vertical geometry of a place I knew from the inside.
We went south and then west and then south again, through the grid of neighborhoods I could identify by block.
I‘d spent years moving through this city on foot and by bus and occasionally by borrowed bicycle, reading it the way you read a language you were born into. I knew the syntax of it. The way the air changed crossing certain streets. The particular light that came off the lake even when you couldn’t see the lake.
Pilsen smelled like a bakery and someone’s grandmother.
Murals on every flat surface, the neighborhood wearing its identity the way only certain neighborhoods did—loudly, completely, without apology.
He parked on a side street. A narrow one.
The kind of street with a single restaurant on it that had no sign you could read from a moving car, that you had to already know was there.
“You’ve been here before,” I said.
“Once or twice.” He got out. Came around to my side and opened the door. The gesture landed without ceremony—he wasn’t performing it, just doing it, the reflexive care of a man who opened doors because he’d decided he was the one who opened doors.
Inside, it was warm and close and smelled like garlic and wine.
Six tables. Ours was in the corner—of course it was, because Santo Caruso did not sit with his back to a room.
A candle on the table, white wax pooled at the base of the holder, suggesting it burned most days regardless of the hour. A card menu, handwritten, laminated.
He settled into the booth across from me with the particular ease of a large man in a small space who had decided the small space belonged to him.
His shoulders took up more than their share.
His hands rested on the table—the scarred knuckles, the thick fingers—and he looked at me across the candle and said nothing.
A glass of red wine appeared in front of me.
Then one in front of him. No order placed.
The woman who brought them—small, silver-haired, the face of someone who’d been cooking for fifty years and had opinions about it—looked at Santo with the recognition of someone who knew exactly who she was serving and had made her peace with it.
Nobody called him by name.
I wrapped my hand around the wine glass and looked at the man across from me and thought: this is a date.
I’m on a date with Santo Caruso in a restaurant that doesn‘t have a sign, with a tail car parked on the street outside and my dog forty miles away looking at Eddie like he’d failed some fundamental test.
The thought was completely absurd.
“Order the rigatoni,” he said, not looking at his menu.