Chapter 18
Santo
Weight on my chest woke me.
Not Cora’s head—I knew the weight of that, had memorized it over nights I’d stopped counting. This was smaller. Warmer. Trembling.
Midge.
My hand found her in the dark. The small body—four pounds of bone and loyalty. She was curled tight against my sternum, her stub tail pressed flat, her good ear rotating toward my fingers when they touched her back. The trembling didn’t stop. It intensified.
Midge slept at the foot of the bed. Every night.
The ritual was non-negotiable—she circled, she nosed the pillow, she collapsed with theatrical finality, and she stayed.
She didn‘t move to my chest. She didn’t move anywhere.
She held her position like a soldier at a post because Cora was beside her and Cora was the mission and the mission didn’t change.
She was on my chest because Cora had put her there.
My hand reached left. The sheets. Still warm—the residual heat of a body that had been there recently, the thermal ghost of a woman who had lain beside me and then hadn’t. My fingers found the shape of where she’d been. The impression in the mattress. The pillow still dented from her head.
Gone.
I sat up. Midge slid from my chest to my lap, her claws catching on the sheet, a small sound leaving her—not a bark, not a whine. Something between. The sound of a creature who had things to report and no language to report them in.
The room assembled itself in the dark. The nightstand.
The sippy cup with silver stars, untouched.
The chair where the moon pajamas should have been folded—empty.
She’d put them on. She’d dressed. The rabbit was on the floor beside the bed, face-down on the carpet, knocked from the pillow or set aside.
The coloring books still stacked. The lamp still off.
I listened.
No water running. No footsteps on the hardwood. No soft breathing from the bathroom, no rustle of pages, no small sounds of a woman existing in the dark.
She was gone.
My body was already moving. The stitches at my ribs pulled—the fresh ones, sewn last night with my own hands at the kitchen table while she held the gauze.
The wound complained. I didn’t care. Bathroom.
Empty. The steam from last night’s bath long dissipated, the mirror clear, the towels hanging where I‘d hung them after drying her.
Hallway. Empty. The gap in the guest room door—four inches, the gap I always left—showing nothing but dark.
Back to the bedroom. Back to the nightstand.
Her phone.
The cheap phone sat where it always sat—beside the sippy cup, beside the lamp, in the small constellation of objects that made up the nightstand geography of her life with me. She’d left it. The woman who carried nothing except a phone and a dog and a dead sister’s memory had left the phone behind.
My hand picked it up. The screen lit at my touch — blue-white in the dark room, the brightness punishing. The notification was still open. She hadn’t closed it. She’d read it and left it and gone.
Five lines. Plain text. No punctuation.
Giardino. 6am. Come alone.
Your sister is alive.
The Carusos are lying to you.
I read it once. The words entered my eyes and traveled to my brain and my brain rejected them—sent them back, returned to sender, the processing center refusing delivery because what was being delivered was impossible.
I read it again.
Your sister is alive.
The Carusos are lying to you.
The rage came.
Not gradually—not the way anger usually built in me, the rising heat, the pressure accumulating behind my eyes.
This was instantaneous. A detonation. The visual field bleaching out, the bedroom disappearing, everything narrowing to five lines of text on a cheap phone screen and the specific, devastating knowledge of what those lines had done to the woman who’d read them.
Ferrara.
The name arrived. Antonio Ferrara. Valenti fixer.
The man who’d given her an envelope and a lie and aimed her at my house like a weapon.
The man who’d used a dead girl’s name to manipulate a living one.
The man who, twenty-four hours after his boss had been stripped of alliances and left alone by every family in Chicago, had reached through a phone screen and pulled the same trigger.
He’d known exactly what to say. Exactly which door to walk through.
The door that was always open — the one grief held ajar, the one that couldn’t be locked or barricaded because it was built into the structure of her.
Maria. The magic word. The only key that had ever worked on Cora Flores, and Ferrara had used it twice now because men like him didn’t retire weapons that worked.
My hands were shaking. The phone trembled in my grip. I set it down before I crushed it—before the anger found the object and destroyed it. I needed the phone. I needed the number.
Midge was in my lap. Still trembling. Still waiting.
Her brown eyes found mine in the dark—wide, liquid, reflecting the faint light from the phone screen.
She knew. The way she always knew. The four-pound barometer who read the weather before the storm arrived and was telling me now, with the sustained vibration of her small body, that the weather was very bad.
I looked at the clock. 5:47 AM. The text said six. Giardino.
I picked up my phone.
Dante answered on the first ring. The man slept like a soldier—light, alert, the phone within reach because in our world the calls that came before dawn were the ones that mattered.
“She’s gone.” Two words. I didn’t dress them up. Didn’t explain. The two words were the whole situation and Dante would understand that because Dante understood everything.
A pause. One second. The sound of a man’s feet hitting the floor.
“When.”
“Minutes. She left the phone. Message on it from Ferrara—told her Maria’s alive, told her we’re lying. Meeting at six. Giardino again.”
The silence on the line had a specific quality. The quality of a brain processing at a speed the mouth couldn’t match. I heard Gemma’s voice in the background—soft, questioning, worried.
“I’m tracking it,” Dante said. “Give me three minutes.”
He hung up.
I was already dressed. The muscle memory was older than conscious thought—the circuit laid down in years of exactly this, of phones ringing in the dark and the body knowing what to do before the brain finished catching up.
Dark jeans. Henley. The shoulder holster—leather against the fresh stitches, the pressure an insult my ribs filed and I ignored.
The Beretta checked, racked, safetied. Jacket over everything.
The movements took ninety seconds. I counted them the way Cora counted mile markers. Something to hold.
I called Marco.
Marco answered differently than Dante. Not the first ring—the second. But when he spoke, there was no sleep in his voice. The man had been awake. The phone face-down on the armrest was a meeting posture. At three in the morning on a Tuesday, Marco was working.
“Ferrara sent her a message,” I said. “Burner number, probably. Told her Maria Flores is alive and we’re lying. Set a meet for six AM. Giardino.”
“Giardino.” Marco repeated the name. I heard keys. A keyboard. The sound of someone who kept databases the way other people kept journals — meticulously, obsessively, because information was his currency and he never let a coin drop.
“I’m going,” I said.
“Santo —“
“I’m going, Marco.”
The pause was brief. Marco was smart enough to know when a thing was decided and arguing cost time.
“I’ll have people there in fifteen,” he said. “Don’t kill Ferrara before we can debrief him.”
I hung up.
Midge was at the bedroom door.
She stood on the threshold—the fawn body rigid, the good ear straight up, the flopped ear straining forward like it was trying for once in its life to match the other one.
Her brown eyes tracked me as I moved through the room.
The stub tail was still. No trembling now.
Something had shifted in her—the distress of abandonment converting into the focused attention of a creature who had identified the rescue mission and was reporting for duty.
I picked her up.
She went inside the jacket. Against my ribs—the left side, away from the stitches, the small body settling into the leather the way she settled into Cora’s jacket.
The same position. The same warmth. The zipper came up to hold her.
Her head poked out above it—one ear up, one flopped, the brown eyes scanning.
I didn’t think about it. I just did it.
The way Cora did it. The way she’d been doing it since before I knew her.
Dante called back as I hit the driveway.
“Ferrara’s got three known locations. The Brassante club—Albany Park. A rental in Lincoln Square under an alias. And a restaurant on Grand called Giardino, which Marco’s already confirmed. If they’re not there, we hit the others.”
“Marco confirmed. I’m driving.”
“Santo.” The don voice. The voice that stopped rooms. “She walked into this knowing what it was. She’s not stupid.”
He was right. The rational part of me knew it—the part that had watched Cora operate for weeks, had seen the way her mind worked, the thief’s calculus that ran underneath everything. She would’ve read that message and known.
But all that was academic. She was with him, right now, in the wolf’s jaws.
The city was dark. Pre-dawn dark—the streetlights still burning, the sky that particular shade of blue-black that meant the sun was coming but hadn’t committed yet. I drove fast. Not reckless—fast. The distinction mattered. Reckless was emotion. Fast was decision.
Grand and Oakley. Eight minutes from my house if I ran the lights. I ran the lights.