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I didn’t respond right away. “Yeah,” I said, voice quiet. “That’s true, too.”
“This is the only way out,” she said. “It’s the only way I give my mom a chance without damning the whole city to a bloody war.”
“You don’t owe the city shit,” I said. “Let the Jalisco and the family fight it out. You don’t have to be a part of that.”
“But I am,” she said. “As much as I don’t want to be, I am.”
“Fuck,” I said.
“Yeah.” She looked up at me and smiled. “Fuck.”
“You know I don’t want you to do this.”
“I know.” She kissed my chest. “I understand.”
“But if you do, I’m going to be there.”
“I hope so. I’m not sure I could do it alone.”
“I won’t let you be alone.” I pulled her up toward me, kissed her hair, hugged her tight. “How’d you end up in all this? How’d you find yourself in my life like this?”
“I don’t know,” she said and laughed a little. “I think it was bound to happen sooner or later, you know? It all comes back to my father. I’m a mobster’s daughter, after all.”
“We should leave here, when this is through.”
She shrugged. “Where would we go?”
“Chicago,” I said. “You’ve got the money and the property. We can start something new there.”
“What would you do, if you could? Anything in the world.”
“I’d start a pizza place,” I said. “None of that deep-dish shit.”
She pulled back from me, leaned on an elbow, and stared into my eyes.
“You could do anything in the world, and you’d open a pizza place?”
“I know, sounds stupid,” I said, letting out a breath. “But when I was younger, when I was with that foster family, there was only one place I felt safe.” I closed my eyes for a second and could still smell the garlic, cheese, and oil in that little corner restaurant with its red wood booths and tall red plastic cups. “There was this pizza place owned by a local guy, not known to be a super nice guy, you know? But he’d let me sit in there after school, and so long as I did my homework, he’d give me a slice and a soda on the house. Sometimes I paid him, and sometimes I didn’t. Mostly I didn’t, but he never complained.”
“Must’ve been a good guy,” she said.
“Nah, he was an asshole. I just think he felt sorry for me. Knew I lived with those foster parents, knew they were kind of terrible people.”
“You want to give other kids what you had,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I want to make a place of my own, but also a place for a community, you know? Where people can come and sit and hang around, feel comfortable, eat some decent food.”
“A business, but a home, too.” She smiled at me. “That sounds nice.”
“A pizza place,” I said. “In Chicago. That doesn’t do fucking deep dish.”
She leaned forward and kissed me. “If we make it through, I promise, we’ll do something like that.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I mean, I don’t have any other dreams. And opening a pizza place might be fun.”
“What if it’s not?”
“Then it’ll be your problem. I’m the one with all the money, right?”
She grinned at me and I laughed, pulling her close again.
I felt her body, kissed her shoulder, tasted sweat on her skin, and in that moment I knew I’d do whatever had to be done to make sure she came through this all alive, because the world deserved her, the world needed her.
Fucking hell, I needed her.
If I had any chance, it was with this girl, and I wasn’t about to let that go.25ClairJust after midnight, clouds over the moon. Streetlights glowed orange and buzzed an electric hum. I stood in the middle of an empty parking lot, the little wooden shack where the parking attendant usually sat stood empty and abandoned. Old chip bags littered the ground, a rosary hung from a nail. Grass grew in the cracks in the pavement.
I leaned up against the long metal pylon shoved in the ground next to the shack and crossed my arms.
The city was empty. Not a single drunk couple, homeless guy, insomniac, young idiot, or pack of feral cats walked past. I wanted to scream, wanted to make noise, but I was told not to move, not to do anything but stand and look nonthreatening.
The Jalisco were late. Ten minutes late, exactly, and I was ready to give up and walk away. I would have already if it weren’t for Luca whispering in my ear.
“You hear that, sweetheart?”
I tried not to move my mouth too much when I answered. “Hear what?”
“That’s the sound of a bunch of scared fucking cartel guys,” he said.
I reached up, fidgeted with the little Bluetooth speaker in my ear, then stopped myself. It was tiny and covered by my hair, but I had to be careful. I dropped my hand back to my thigh.
