Page 73 of The Mafia's Christmas Baby
He nods once.
Not surprise.
Confirmation.
“They questioned St. Adrian’s vendors,” he says. “They hit the florist and the maintenance crew. Flour supplier is next. They are closing angles. Soft first. Then hard.”
The kettle rumbles but I don't flick it on.
He looks at me like he looks at a street before he crosses it.
I want tea.
I don’t want tea.
I want the world to be clean lines and neat boxes, and it's not.
The silence stretches until it says something on its own.
“I hate this,” I say. “I'm trained to tell the truth cleanly and keep people alive. Your rules build walls around harm. My hands know how to clean a wound. They don't know how to hold this without breaking.”
“My rules contain harm so it doesn’t turn into a flood,” he says. “That doesn’t make them kind. It makes them necessary.”
It lands in the place between my shoulder blades and my stomach.
I breathe through it.
He does not move closer.
He leaves air between us because he understands that pressure is not the answer.
I step into him anyway, because I need to feel that he is warm and real and not just a problem to solve.
His hand comes up and cups my jaw.
Mine rests on his shoulder.
We stand like that until my breathing evens out.
He kisses me once, steady and plain, not to erase what we are saying but to hold the line we have drawn.
“Tell me what happens next,” I say.
“For the next few days, we disappear,” he says. “No routine. No bakery. No ER. We wait and see who moves before the Council dinner. We don't give them a door through you.”
“I have a team,” I say. “If I vanish, they carry the weight. My patients trust me to be where I said I’d be at seven in the morning. If I don’t show, that isn’t just a hole in a schedule. It's a hole in a person’s day.”
“I know,” he says.
He looks away for a second, then back. “You also have a life that is now on a list. If you stay here and pretend nothing has changed, they will come with better photos and polite voices and paperwork that looks harmless. They will put you in a chair and call it a conversation. They will ask you to be a good citizen and a helpful neighbor. They will bring up your mother’s bakery and your uncle’s friends and the way you keep a door open after closing so old men can pick up bread. They will make you feelsmall for protecting that. They will make you doubt yourself. That is how they break people who don't deserve to be broken.”
The kettle clicks off.
I did not remember turning it on.
I pour because my body wants something ordinary and hot.
Steam curls up.
