Chapter 12
Cora
The suburbs thinned out and the city came in like a tide.
I watched it through the back window of Santo’s car—the lawns shrinking, the houses pressing closer, the sky narrowing between buildings that had opinions about each other.
My hands were in my lap. My body was still doing the thing it did after fainting: running diagnostics, checking systems, confirming that the floor was where it was supposed to be.
He loves me.
The thought sat in my chest like something swallowed wrong. Too large for the space. Pressing against organs that hadn‘t been consulted about rearranging themselves to accommodate it.
I couldn’t believe it.
Santo was in the front seat. Driving. His hands on the wheel at ten and two, his jaw set, knuckles white.
Dona sat beside me. Her coat was expensive. Her perfume was something with gardenia in it. The ring on her right hand had stopped spinning.
She’d been quiet since the house. The woman who had arrived like a weather system—loud, righteous, incandescent with fury on behalf of someone she‘d never met—had gone still.
Not subdued. Recalibrating. I recognized the process because I lived inside it: the constant adjustment of expectations to reality, the recalculation that happened when the data changed faster than the model could accommodate.
“Dante’s going to ask you questions,” she said. Not looking at me. Looking out her window at the city assembling itself around us. “He’s not cruel. He’s just—thorough.”
“Thorough.”
“He’ll know things about you before you tell him. He does that. It’s annoying.” A beat. “Don’t let it scare you.”
I was already scared. The fear had been there since before the faint, before the kitchen, before the three words that had blown the circuits my body used to stay upright.
The fear was older than any of it. The fear was twenty-three years old and had Maria’s face and lived in the space between who I was and who I’d told Santo I was, and it was growing.
“And Marco?” I asked, because I needed her to keep talking. Silence was where the fear expanded.
Dona’s mouth did something that was almost a smile.
“Marco is easy. Marco is the person in the room you think is harmless, and then six months later you realize he knows your Social Security number and your mother’s maiden name and your coffee order and he’s never once asked you a direct question.
” She paused. “He’s also genuinely sweet, which is the most dangerous thing about him. ”
“Sweet.”
“He’ll bring you food. He’ll remember your name after hearing it once.
He’ll make you feel like the most important person in the room.
” Her voice softened. The hard edges filing down.
“He means it, too. That‘s the thing about Marco. He means all of it. He’s just also collecting information while he does it.”
I looked at my hands. The scarred knuckles.
The nails I’d been biting since childhood—a habit Maria used to swat my fingers for, the sharp tap of her hand and the exasperated Mimi, para.
The nails were worse than usual. I‘d bitten them to the quick in the last week, the anxiety expressing itself through the oldest available channel.
“I won’t let them hurt you.”
I looked up. Dona had turned from the window. Her dark eyes were on me—Dante’s intensity, Santo’s fire, the combination aimed with a precision that felt like being pinned to a board.
“I don’t know who you are,” she said. “I don’t know why you’re in my brother’s house or what you were doing there or what any of this is about.
But I saw the way he looked at you in that kitchen and I saw the way you looked at him and I’m telling you—whatever happens in that room—I won’t let them hurt you. Neither will he.”
The conviction in her voice was absolute.
The voice of a woman who had drawn a line and would defend it with everything she had.
I believed her. That was the problem. I believed all of them—the sister who‘d known me for thirty minutes and was already willing to fight for me, the brother who’d brushed my hair and read me French novels and said I love you.
I believed them and I was lying to every single one of them.
My biggest fear wasn’t the meeting. Wasn’t Dante. Wasn’t whatever tactical calculation was about to be performed on my presence in their lives.
My biggest fear was this: Santo would find out who I was.
Why I’d come. What I’d been carrying since I was seven years old and who had sent me to carry it into his house.
And then the hands that had held me, the voice that had said good girl, the arms that had caught me when my body gave up—all of it would become the thing it had always been with everyone else.
Gone.
He would leave. Not physically—he’d probably still be in the room.
But the warmth would go out of his eyes the way heat goes out of a room when someone opens the window in winter.
Fast. Total. The cold rushing in to fill the space where the warmth had been, and no amount of closing the window afterward could undo the fact that the temperature had changed.
I’d survived a lot of leaving. Foster homes. Group homes. The shelter on the South Side when I was eleven. People left or I left or the system moved me and the result was the same: a door closing, a car pulling away, another place that had almost been something becoming a place that wasn’t.
I couldn’t explain it. It wasn’t rational.
But it had happened before—people found out who I really was, and just abandoned me. I’d gotten over it in the past.
But this. Him. The loss of this would be the one I didn’t recover from.
Bridgeport came in through the windows. Dense.
Lived-in. The particular texture of a neighborhood that had been here long enough to stop apologizing for itself.
Brick buildings with iron fire escapes. Corner stores with awnings.
The streets narrower, the sidewalks cracked, the trees struggling against the concrete with the stubborn persistence of things that grew where they weren’t invited.
I knew neighborhoods like this. I’d grown up in neighborhoods like this.
The air was different here than in Oak Brook—heavier, closer, carrying the accumulated weight of generations of people who’d lived stacked on top of each other and learned to make room.
Dona’s hand found mine.
The grip was firm. Not tentative, not careful. The grip of a woman who had decided to hold on and was not interested in discussing whether it was appropriate.
I let her.
Eventually, the car stopped. An alley behind a building with a green awning. The name in faded gold script—CARUSO’S—visible from the side mirror.
Santo killed the engine. Got out. Came around to my side.
He opened the door. His hand found the small of my back.
The warmth of his palm through the wool coat. The steadiness of it.
I walked into the heart of the Caruso family with his hand on my back and his sister’s grip still ghosting on my fingers and the name Maria Flores locked behind my teeth like a bomb I hadn’t detonated yet.
The back office smelled like power. I could almost taste the conversations, the decisions that had been made here.People ordered dead? Lives altered forever? I’m sure it had all happened here.
It was a small room. Wood-paneled walls, a desk that belonged to a dead man, the particular weight of a space where things had been settled for decades that couldn’t be unsettled by anything as simple as new management.
A window—high, narrow, the kind that existed to prove a room had one rather than to provide any meaningful view—let in a strip of grey November light.
Dante Caruso stood in that light.
I’d prepared myself for a version of Santo.
Bigger, maybe. Louder. The same rough edges scaled up to match the title.
What I got was something else entirely. Tall—taller than Santo, leaner, the kind of build that suggested control rather than force.
Dark hair cropped short, the grey at his temples deliberate-looking, as though even his aging followed a schedule.
A face that was handsome the way certain buildings were handsome: severely, without any interest in being liked for it.
His suit was dark. His shirt was white. A watch on his wrist that caught the window light and gave nothing back.
He was terrifying in a way that had nothing to do with volume.
Santo’s danger was heat. You could feel it—the volatility, the current running just beneath the surface, the sense that something might detonate at any moment.
Dante’s danger was temperature too, but the other direction.
Still. Cold. The particular stillness of deep water, where the pressure was immense and invisible and you didn’t realize you were drowning until you tried to move.
Marco was on the far side of the desk, phone in hand, thumb moving across the screen with the casual efficiency of someone who was always in the middle of something.
He looked up when we walked in and the smile happened—immediate, automatic, warm in a way that felt like a door opening.
The handsome brother. The one Santo had described with such agonized affection over rigatoni.
Younger than the other two, lighter, his face built for charm the way Santo’s was built for impact.
I braced.
My spine straightened. My chin came up.
Dante moved.
The motion unhurried, deliberate, each step visible, the walk of a man who understood that his size and his authority and the weight of his name made people flinch, and who chose to move through the world in a way that gave them time to not.
He stopped in front of me. Extended his hand.