Page 136 of The Mafia's Christmas Baby
I smile despite the weight in my chest.
“You’re planning a trap.”
He shrugs.
“You can’t win with fists when someone fights with ink. You have to outwrite him.”
I flip my notebook to a clean page and draw two columns.
One for money. One for motive. “You talk, I write.”
He gives me names.
I give them arrows.
By the time the coffee cools, the page looks like a nervous system.
Every route leads to Marco’s signature somewhere he shouldn’t be touching.
When he finally sits, the edge in his shoulders eases. “This could work.”
“It will,” I say. “You just have to let me help pull the string.” He studies me for a second. Not suspicion, not approval. Something closer to respect. “Alright,” he says.
He calls Rafe and Tino with a single sentence.
“Eyes on the route, feed every change.” He gives them a block.
The men answer with small words that mean larger things.
He hands me a jacket that is not mine and a paper bag with a scone in it.
It feels ridiculous and perfect.
We leave the apartment the way clean burglars do.
No clatter, no goodbyes.
The door clicks and the city takes on a low, indifferent sound.
Nico drives.
I ride shotgun, the jacket pulled up at my neck.
He does not ask me to be anything except a woman buying bread and paper, which I can be.
He keeps his hands light on the wheel.
We cross the bridge and the blocks stitch themselves into patterns I know from other lives.
I look at the driver in the black sedan two cars back.
He looks like any man who has nothing better to do in the morning and a paycheck for being suspicious. Good.
“Where are we going?” I ask quietly.
“To the courier lot on Grand,” he says. “Geno’s ghost has a stop there.”
The courier lot is a strip between a tire shop and a church building with an anonymous door and a buzzing intercom.
