Chapter 16
Cora
He spread the napkin on the kitchen table like a battle plan.
Which, I supposed, it was.
A pen from the junk drawer—the one that only worked if you held it at an angle—and Santo‘s handwriting, which had improved marginally since I’d started making him label the grocery list. He drew an oval. Put an X on one side. Then another X beside it.
“That’s me,” he said, tapping the first X. “That’s you.”
“Together.”
“Together.”
Midge was on the chair beside me, her chin on the table’s edge, watching the pen move with the focused attention of a creature who suspected all writing implements of being threats.
The kitchen smelled like the pasta he’d made for dinner—garlic, olive oil, anchovies. My plate was clean. He’d checked.
“Marchetti’s is neutral ground,” he said. “Old restaurant on Taylor Street. Been there since the seventies. The owner owes nobody anything, which is why everybody trusts him.”
He drew more shapes around the oval. Squares. Rectangles. The architecture of a room I’d never seen, rendered in ballpoint on a paper napkin.
“The table’s oval. Dante sits here.” An X at the head. “Marco here.” Another X, flanking. “The Morettis will be across—Gemma’s birth family. Alberto, probably his oldest son, Carlo. Good people. The Lombardis on the left. DeSantos on the right.”
Names I didn’t know. Families I’d never met. Men who controlled territories and made decisions that rippled through neighborhoods like the one I’d grown up in, the one Maria had died in.
“Where’s the door?” I asked.
He looked at me. The question told him something—I saw it register, the recognition that I was asking about exits, not entrances. The thief’s instinct. The survival math that never turned off.
“Behind Dante,” he said. “Kitchen access. Two exits from there—one to the alley, one to the street. Sal will be in the alley. Eddie on the street.”
“Okay.”
“You tell them what you told us.” His voice shifted—lower, steadier, the register he used when he was giving me something important and needed me to hold it. “Your name. Maria’s name. Ferrara. The recruitment. The money. How you were pointed at me. That’s it. Plain. The way you talk.”
“The way I talk.”
“Flat. Direct. No decorating.” The corner of his mouth moved. Almost a smile. “You’re the most convincing person I’ve ever met when you’re just stating facts. It’s when you try to embellish that you’re full of shit.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
He told me what not to say. Nothing about the contract, the arrangement, the rabbit on the bed or the sippy cup with stars.
Nothing about Caruso operations—not that I knew much, but the boundary was clear.
Nothing about Dante’s strategy or Marco’s intelligence work.
Just my story. Maria’s story. The human link in the chain of evidence that would justify whatever came next.
I looked at the napkin. The oval table. The X marks. The small kingdom of ink and paper where tomorrow’s war would be decided.
“What if they don’t believe me?”
Santo set the pen down. His eyes found mine—dark, steady, the particular quality of attention that I’d stopped being able to look away from somewhere around day three.
“They will.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I know you.” Simple. Absolute. The voice of a man who had decided something and was not interested in revisiting the decision.
“You walk into that room and you tell them what happened to your sister, and every man at that table will know it’s the truth.
Because it is. And because you don’t know how to be anything else. ”
The words settled in my chest. Warm. Heavy. The specific weight of being seen clearly by someone who liked what he saw.
“What if Enzo is there?”
The pause was physical. I felt it in the air — the temperature dropping a fraction, the kitchen contracting around us. Santo‘s jaw did the thing. The compression. The muscle along the hinge working, the body processing threat in real time.
“He won‘t be at the table,” Santo said. “It’s a sit-down about him, not with him. But his people might be watching. Outside. Down the street.”
“And if he shows up anyway?”
Three seconds. His eyes didn’t leave mine.
“I’ll be there.”
Three words. No volume behind them. No bravado, no chest-puffing, no performance of danger.
Just the fact of him—two hundred and ten pounds of scar tissue and loyalty and the particular violence of a man who had already put his fist through his own brother’s face for suggesting I be put in harm’s way.
I knew he would protect me.
The kitchen went quiet. The napkin battle plan sat between us with its Xs and its oval and its pen-drawn exits. Midge yawned—the wide, theatrical yawn that showed every tooth she had, which wasn’t many—and collapsed sideways on the chair.
“Bed,” Santo said.
Not a question. The Daddy voice, arriving the way it always arrived — without announcement, without transition, simply present, the register shifting the way weather shifted, the atmosphere changing around us.
I went.
The dress was black.
Simple. The kind of simple that cost money. No embellishment. No lace, no detail, nothing that tried. Just fabric that moved the way good fabric moved, like it had been poured rather than sewn.
I put it on.
The zipper was on the side. I reached behind me and pulled it up and the dress closed around my body like an answer to a question I hadn’t asked. It fit. Precisely. Like someone had looked at me and understood the shape of what I was and built something to hold it.
The mirror in the bathroom was fogged from the shower. I wiped it with my palm—one stroke, the condensation clearing in a smear, my reflection assembling itself from the steam like a photograph developing.
I did my hair.
I looked in the mirror.
The woman who looked back was someone I didn’t know.
Not the girl from North Kedzie. Not the kid who’d slept in a closet during the bad foster homes because closets were small enough to defend. Not the thief who’d climbed through a window in Oak Brook with a bobby pin and a lie and a four-pound chihuahua in her jacket.
Someone else.
Cora Flores. Maria’s sister. Here to speak.
The bathroom door opened. I didn’t turn.
I watched him appear in the mirror—the reflection of a man in a charcoal suit, the fabric sitting on his shoulders the way authority sat on his brother’s, but different.
Dante in a suit was a man who belonged in one.
Santo in a suit was exactly what Dante’s wife had said—a wolf in a costume.
The tattoos visible at his wrists where the sleeves ended.
The crooked nose. The jaw that belonged on a wanted poster.
Everything about him said I will hurt you for her, and the suit was just the frame around the statement.
He looked at me in the mirror. I looked at him looking at me.
He left. Came back. A mug in each hand—coffee, black for him, mine with the cream and sugar he’d stopped asking about and started adding automatically. He held mine out.
I took it. Our fingers touched on the ceramic. The warmth of the coffee and the warmth of his hand and the roughness of his healing knuckles against my fingers. The contact lasted a second longer than the transfer required. Neither of us pulled away.
“You’re brave,” he said.
“I’m terrified,” I said.
He looked at me. The dark eyes. The severity that ran in this family like a genetic trait, but his version of it—hotter, closer to the surface, always threatening to become something else.
“Same thing,” he said.
I drank my coffee. He drank his.
“You’re sure I can bring Midge?”
“Of course. It’s non-negotiable. I’ve informed the staff—they have chicken ready for her.”
I smiled then picked Midge up. She went into the jacket—the leather one, Santo’s, the one that smelled like him and was two sizes too big and had become the transport vessel for her.
I was bringing a dog to a mafia sit-down. The absurdity of it should have been funny. Instead it was the most comforting thing I could think of — four pounds of fury and loyalty pressed against my heart, the one creature on earth who had chosen me first and never revised the decision.
Santo held the door.
The Eisenhower was quiet for a Tuesday.
Not empty—Chicago expressways were never empty. But thin. The traffic spread out and unhurried, the cars spaced at intervals that felt generous, the city in one of its rare cooperative moods. Through the windshield, the skyline assembled itself in the distance.
Sal’s hands were steady on the wheel. Santo was beside me. His hand on my knee. He was monitoring. Always monitoring. The constant, involuntary surveillance of a man who’d been raised to treat every environment as a potential threat.
I rehearsed.
The words moved through my mind the way water moved through a familiar channel—worn smooth by repetition, following the grooves I‘d carved over three days of practice.
My name is Cora Flores. My sister was Maria Flores.
She was sixteen years old when she was killed in the summer of 2003.
The sentences had the quality of stones I‘d been turning in my hands — polished now, the edges gone, each word selected and tested and confirmed.
I was approached by a man named Antonio Ferrara. He told me the Caruso family was responsible for Maria’s death. He gave me money and an address. He told me to break in.
The truth. Plain. No decorating. The way I talked.
Ferrara recruited me to infiltrate the Caruso family. When I failed to deliver, the same network sent Bratva operatives to eliminate me. The recruitment, the attempted abduction, and the community center firebombing all trace back to the same source: Enzo Valenti.
The words sat in my chest like ammunition. Loaded. Ready.
I counted mile markers. Watched the city grow. Felt Santo’s hand warm and heavy on my knee and tried to memorize the feeling in case I needed it later—the specific pressure of his palm, the weight of his fingers, the grounding fact of contact.