Chapter Fourteen #2
“I can get her to come to me. She will not come to you. She doesn’t know you. She might run from you,” Morena insisted.
“And Dario will put a bullet in you the second he sees your face, because you are the only thing he has left to punish.” I shook my head once. “You stay here. Doors locked. Men in the hall. You can write I hate you as many times as you want. When I come back, Camilla comes with me.”
“You don’t know that,” Rena muttered.
“I do.”
She searched my face like she was looking for the man who had bought her, and finding the one who had decided the child on the dresser was no longer optional.
“If you don’t come back…”
“I will.”
“Matteo.” My name in her mouth still landed like a claim she had not meant to give me. “Please don’t make me wait for another photograph.”
That one reached the crack I kept refusing to name. I took the diary out of her hands, set it on the desk, and tipped her chin up with two fingers.
“I am going to bring her home,” I said. “Not to make you grateful. Because I am done letting that man write this story.”
Her eyes were wet. She nodded once, sharp, as if nodding harder might make it true. I dropped my hand. “Go finish writing. I bought you some coloring books too. If I call the landline, you answer on the first ring. If anyone who is not me or Santino comes to that door, you do not open it.”
“And if it’s her?” she whispered.
I looked at the photograph one more time. Small hands. Soft eyes. The same mouth as the woman in front of me.
“Then you open it,” I said. “And you do not let go of her until I am in the room.”
She left with the diary. I closed the laptop, checked the pistol I would not fire unless I had to, and took the photograph off the desk and slid it into the inside pocket of my jacket as a reminder of the only outcome tonight that counted.
Camilla Caruso was coming out of that house. Dario Rizzo could come out of it in pieces.
The building was the kind of place that had already given up. Ground floor. Rear alley with a dead camera. Two men on the front stoop who smoked like they were being paid to look bored. Santino’s team took them without a shot.
I went in through the kitchen because kitchens were where men like Dario kept the things they did not want seen from the street.
The apartment smelled like old grease and cheap cleaner. A cartoon played on a muted television. A plastic bowl sat on the table with a few pieces of cut apple turning brown. Then I saw her.
Camilla sat on the carpet in the red shirt from the photograph, a stub of purple crayon in one fist, a page covered in lopsided suns in front of her. Her hair was in a crooked braid someone had given up on halfway through. She was smaller than the picture had made her look.
She looked up. Four years old. Same eyes as Morena. Softer. Already too careful. I stopped in the doorway and went down on one knee so I was not a shadow standing over her.
“Hi,” I said. Quiet. No sudden hands. “My name is Matteo.”
She studied my face the way she had probably learned to study every new man who walked into a room. Then she looked at the watch on my wrist, the ink on my hands, the open doorway behind me.
“Hi. I’m Camilla. Are you one of Dad’s friends?” she asked.
“No.”
She considered that. The crayon rolled between her fingers. “He said nobody nice was coming.”
“He lies a lot.”
A tiny frown. “Rena says lying is for scared people.”
Something in my chest pulled tight.
“Rena is very smart,” I said. “She’s your sister, right?”
Camilla’s whole face changed. It was like watching a light get turned on in a room that had been dark too long. “You know Rena?”
“Yes.”
“Is she mad at me?” The words came out small and fast, like she had been saving them. “I tried to be good. Dario said if I cried she wouldn’t come.”
I shook my head once. “She’s not mad. She’s been looking for you the whole time. She sent me.”
Camilla’s mouth opened. Then she stood up, walked over on bare feet, and put one small hand on the front of my jacket, exactly over the pocket where I had put her photograph. She patted it twice, solemn, as if checking that I was real.
“You’re very tall,” she whispered.
“I know.”
“Do you have snacks?”
A breath left me that was almost a laugh. “Not on me. But I can get you some. And your sister, of course. Both. Tonight.”
She looked at the door, then back at me. “Is Dad coming too?”
“No.” I held her eyes. “You don’t have to see him again.”
Camilla nodded, once, like we had signed a contract. Then she bent, picked up her drawing, and held it out with both hands.
“This is the sun,” she said. “It’s for Rena. I made it extra purple. I wanted it to look different, so she can find me. Easy peasy.”
I took the page like it was worth more than the seat. “She’ll love it.”
I was reaching for her when the front door exploded inward. Dario came through it already shooting.
The first round punched plaster over my shoulder. The second hit the wall where my head had been a second before. Camilla screamed. I turned my body into the line of fire and shoved her behind me, one arm braced back so she stayed against my coat.
“Stay behind me. Do not run.”
Dario did not try to win the room. He tried to win the child. He lunged along the wall, grabbed for her, and ripped her sideways out from behind me before I could turn all the way around. She made a sound I would hear later in every quiet room.
The purple crayon hit the floor. The sun drawing tore in my hand.
“Matteo!” she screamed. My name. After four minutes of knowing it.
Dario dragged her against his chest and backed toward the rear door, gun held where I could not take the shot.
“You don’t get to take my leverage,” he panted. “Follow me and she disappears for good.”
I fired at the man coming in behind him. I did not fire at Dario. He was already gone. Kitchen. Alley. A sedan lurching from the curb with Camilla a small red shape in the passenger side. I hit the car running.
“Aim for the tires,” I said into the comm. “Not the cabin.”
The first shot missed wide. The second kissed the rear bumper and did nothing useful. Dario ran lights like a man who had rehearsed this exact escape. We stayed on him through two turns and lost him on the third when a delivery truck slid between us and the access road.
By the time we cleared it, the sedan was gone.
No taillights. No dust. Just wet street and the torn purple sun still in my fist.
I stood in the road with the engine idling behind me and understood, with perfect, useless clarity, that I had been close enough to pick her up. Close enough to promise her snacks. Close enough that she had said my name.
And Dario Rizzo had taken her anyway.
I got back in the car.
“Find the sedan,” I said. My voice did not sound like mine. “Every camera. Every fucking street. Every man who has ever taken money from him. I want a location for the kid before sunrise.”
Nobody argued. I looked down at the ruined drawing. Extra purple . Torn through the middle.
Morena was waiting behind a locked door for the version of tonight where I came home with her sister in my arms. I was going home with a piece of ripped paper and the knowledge that I had already failed her. I put the drawing in my jacket next to the photograph. Then I told the driver to move it.