Chapter 3
VALENTINA
Iwake up under a ceiling I don't know, in a bed the size of my old bedroom, and for three merciful seconds I don't remember.
Then I do.
Mikey is starfished beside me, one foot on my ribs, the hippo blanket wound around him like he fought it in the night and lost. I didn't put him in the crib they set up in the corner. I needed to feel him breathing.
The room is absurd. Silk drapes. A chandelier, an actual chandelier, throwing little coins of morning light across a rug my whole security deposit couldn't have touched. The Michelangelo Room. A cell with a name.
I slide out of bed without waking him and go to the window, and there it is: proof.
Gardens. A stone wall with wrought iron riding the top of it.
Lake Michigan beyond, gray-blue and endless, glittering like it has no idea what kind of house it belongs to.
A man in a dark jacket stands at the gate.
Another crosses the terrace below me with the unhurried walk of someone doing a loop he's done ten thousand times.
I count the cameras I can see from this one window.
Three. Then I stop counting, because my hands have started to shake.
I know this neighborhood. Gold Coast. As a girl I was driven through streets like this in the back of Mauro's cars, and I'd press my face to the glass and think the people in these houses must be safe.
Now I'm inside one, and I have never been less safe in my life.
Last night comes back in pieces, out of order. The porch light. The cracker Mikey gave him. The suppressor. I came to your door tonight with the suppressor already threaded. Don't make me remember why.
He came to kill me. I keep arriving at that fact and bouncing off it, like a bird hitting a window. He stood on my porch with the gun already quiet, and the only reason I am standing at this beautiful window is that somewhere between my door and his ultimatum, Luca Petrucci changed his mind.
And I agreed to marry him.
I press my forehead to the cold glass. It wasn't a choice. I know it wasn't a choice; a choice has two ends you can live with. This had one. A ring for a shield. My name welded to his so that Mauro can't touch us without touching the Petrucci machine.
Stefano was right about one thing. His brother is the last man a woman like me should ever want standing at her door.
He never told me what to do once the man is standing inside the house.
Behind me, Mikey stirs and announces, to the ceiling, with total confidence: "Pancake?"
Despite everything, or because of everything, I laugh.
Breakfast is served in a morning room with windows on two sides, by a round, gray-haired woman who introduces herself as Marta and falls in love with my son in under a minute.
The pancakes have a crust of caramelized sugar at the edges and Mikey eats them with both hands and his whole soul, syrup to the eyebrows, and I drink coffee that costs more than my old rent and hate how good it is.
I'm memorizing the room while I sip. Two doors. The windows don't open past six inches; I checked the latches while Marta's back was turned. The terrace guard passes the south windows every eleven minutes.
"You counted the cameras yet?"
I nearly drop the cup.
Luca stands in the doorway, sleeves rolled to the forearm, no jacket, no holster.
Dressed down the way a knife is dressed down when it's still a knife.
In daylight he's worse than he was in the dark.
The silver at his temples. The lines at his eyes that could be from laughing, on some other man.
I catalog all of it against my will, and the wanting under my fear makes me so angry I could spit.
"Three from my window," I say, because lying seems pointless. "I assume there are more."
"Fourteen on the grounds." He comes in, pours his own coffee, and sits across from me like we do this every morning. "You'll waste less time if you know that."
"UNCA!" Mikey bellows, delighted, and holds up a fistful of destroyed pancake as tribute.
I watch Luca Petrucci, the devil of Chicago, the man from the newspapers, the man with the suppressor, go completely still, the way he did last night over the cracker. Something crosses his face and is gone before I can name it.
"Eat it yourself, piccolo," he says, low. "You've earned it."
I look away. I refuse to find that anything. I refuse.
"Marta," Luca says, "would you take Michael to see the fountain? He'll like the fish."
It's smooth, and it's kind, and it's a clearing of the room, and I clock all three at once. Marta scoops up my sticky, thrilled son, who bellows "FISH!" at the ceiling, and I make myself let him go, watching through the window until they appear on the terrace, her hand swallowing his.
Then it's just us and the coffee going cold.
"Ask your questions," I say.
He does. Who runs Mauro's crews now. Whether the men from the old days are still standing or been replaced.
Whether Caroline still manages her father or only manages his image.
I answer what I can, which is little and two years stale, and I watch him bank every word like ammunition.
When he says Caroline, something in my chest pulls.
My stepsister. The only one who ever stood between me and Mauro's moods.
He sees it, because he sees everything, and he mercifully lets it go.
"You really have had no contact," he says at last. It's not quite an apology for the interrogation. It's an audit result.
"That's what I've been telling you."
"Mm." He turns his cup a quarter turn. "Then you should hear this from me before you hear it wrong.
I sent men back to your house at dawn. To clean it, close it up.
" A beat. "They found sign along your back fence line.
Cigarette ends, fresh, two nights of them at least. A flattened spot in the grass with a view of your kitchen window. "
The room tips.
"Not my men," he says. "Mine arrived with me."
Two nights. Two nights someone stood in the dark behind my house, smoking, watching me do dishes. Watching me carry my son past the window. While I changed the porch bulb. While I slept. While Mikey slept, twenty feet from the fence, behind a lock I bought at a hardware store.
"Valentina."
I can't get a full breath. The edges of the windows are going white and my heart is a fist beating on a door and I'm standing, apparently, my chair scraped back, my hands cold, and the room is enormous and airless all at once.
He was already there. Luca didn't lead him to us.
He was already there, days behind, hours, a fence away from my baby.
"Valentina. Eyes on me."
I can't. The white is everywhere.
A hand closes around the back of my neck. Warm. Enormous. Absolute. He turns my face to his like it's not up for discussion, and there is nothing gentle in it and nothing cruel either. Just command, the kind that leaves no room in the air for panic to live in.
"Michael is at the fountain," he says, low and even. "There is a wall, fourteen cameras, and thirty men between him and Mauro Mancuso. No one gets through my gates. Breathe."
My lungs drag in half a breath.
"Again."
A whole one this time. His hand doesn't move. His eyes don't either.
"Again."
We stand like that, his hand at my neck, my heartbeat slamming against his palm, until the white recedes from the windows and the room reassembles itself around the fact of him.
"He was there," I whisper.
"He was close," Luca says. "He is no longer close to anything. Every man on this property would take a bullet before one reaches you or Michael. That is not a promise. It's a payroll."
A laugh cracks out of me, wet and unhinged. His mouth tugs. Almost a smile, gone instantly, like it surprised him too.
And then I notice the rest of it. How enormous he is this close.
The heat coming off him, cedar and smoke and clean cotton.
His other hand has settled at my waist, steadying me, fingers spread over the fullness of me.
And he doesn't skim past it the way men sometimes do, apologetic, in a hurry to get somewhere narrower.
He holds on. Like the softness is the point.
His gaze drops to my mouth.
One second. Two. Long enough that I stop breathing again, and this time it has nothing to do with panic. Long enough that he knows I noticed, and I know he knows.
Then his hands leave me, neck and waist both at once, deliberate as a man setting down a loaded gun, and he steps back, and the morning air rushes in cold where he was.
"Eat something," he says, unreadable again, the closed door where a man should be.
"The wedding will be soon," he adds at the doorway, voice level like nothing happened, because to him maybe nothing did. "Small. You'll want for nothing."
Except a life that's mine.
He leaves. Through the window, out on the terrace, Mikey is shrieking at the fountain fish, and Marta is laughing, and the guard passes on his eleven-minute loop, and Lake Michigan glitters like it has no idea.
I wrap both hands around the cold coffee and make myself a promise instead of a vow.
The vow, I've already given him. I built a life out of nothing once.
Every shift, every deadbolt, every dollar.
I can do it again if I have to. But first I'm going to learn this beautiful cage the way I learned my old neighborhood: every door, every camera, every eleven-minute loop.
Until the day the walls need me to know them.
And in the meantime, I'll survive the more dangerous thing, which was never the man with the gun.
It's the man who ordered me to breathe. And the way my body obeyed him.
Marta comes back in with Mikey syrup-sticky on her hip and a cordless phone in her other hand, and her face is doing something uncertain that I already don't like.
"Signora. It's for you."
Nobody knows I'm here. The thought arrives first, cold and complete. Nobody on this earth knows I'm here except the men on Luca Petrucci's payroll. My stomach drops second.
I take the phone, because not knowing is worse.
"Hello?"
A woman's voice. Warm, smooth, polished. A voice I haven't heard in almost three years and would know in a hundred.
"Hello, Tina," Caroline says. "I hear my sister has come home."