"Find her something to do," he said to Emilio, and that was that.
Three days later, and the something to do hasn't materialized.
I've walked every corridor in this Godforsaken cement shit-house. I know the guard rotations on the second floor, shiftchange at six a.m. and six p.m. I know which floorboards creak, third and seventh on the left side of the hall outside my room. I know which doors are unlocked, kitchen, common room, laundry, and which ones need keycards I don't have. I know that the kitchen coffee pot gets refilled by a soldier named Dante who looks about nineteen and is scared of me, which is flattering and also kind of sad.
I know that Charlotte Richardson exists in the kitchen at seven a.m. every day with a laptop and a mug of black coffee and enough energy to power a nuclear facility. I met her on day two. She looked at me the way you'd look at a new appliance, not hostile but deciding whether I was going to be useful or take up counter space.
"You're Savannah," she said.
"You're Charlotte."
"Claudio mentioned you."
"What'd he say?"
"That you gave Leone good intel and threw a lamp at his twin’s head." She took a sip of coffee. "I like you already."
"That's the nicest thing anyone's said to me in weeks."
"Don't get used to it. I'm not nice, I’m just real." She pushed the fruit bowl toward me across the counter. “Eat something.”She says with a small smile. The kind of smile one woman gives another in a room full of men, not because they're friends but because they know the same things without needing to explain them.
I took a banana and she went back to her laptop, and we didn't speak again that morning, but the silence was fine with me. I’m not much for mornings anyway. Gigi always said you can tell everything about a woman by how she acts in another woman's kitchen. Charlotte acts like she built it. I respect the shit out of that.
But three days of walking hallways and eating bananas and drinking coffee alone at the counter is making me want to put my fist through something, and when Emilio finds me in the kitchen on the fourth morning with my bottle cap spinning between my fingers fast enough to blur, he takes one look at me and says, "Gym. Now."
"Excuse me?"
"Gym. Downstairs. You're about to vibrate out of your skin and I'd rather you hit a bag than a wall. Come on."
"You can't just tell me to go to the gym. You're not my fucking dad."
"I'm basically your boss. Leone said so. And right now yourbossis telling you to come downstairs and hit things because you've been climbing the walls for three days and everyone on this floor can feel it."
"Everyone?"
"Carmelo asked if you were okay. Carmelo. The man who communicates exclusively through grunts and violence asked about your emotional wellbeing. That's how obvious it is."
I look at him. He's in gym clothes, basketball shorts and a black tank top that shows every tattoo from shoulder to wrist, dark ink on olive skin, designs I can't read from across the kitchen but that cover enough real estate to count as a wardrobe choice. His hair is pushed back, and his arms are crossed and he's got that look on his face, the one where the grin is trying to form but he's holding it until he knows which way this is going to go.
"Fine," I say, and pocket the bottle cap. "But if you try to go easy on me, I’m out."
"Wouldn't dream of it, vixen."
"Stop calling me that. My name is Savannah. Sav. Ann. Uhhhhh."
"Stop being one."
The gym is in the basement. Concrete floor, heavy bag in the corner, speed bag on a mount, a rack of free weights along the wall, a bench press that's seen better decades. The ceiling is low, the ventilation is barely adequate, and the whole space smells like rubber mats and sweaty ball sacks.
It's the best room in this building.
Not because it's nice. It's a concrete box with bad lighting, but I can do something useful here. I've needed this room for three days and the second I walk in my shoulders drop and my breathing changes and something in my chest loosens a half inch.
Emilio notices. I see him notice. He doesn't say anything about it, which is the right call. If he'd said something encouraging I would have walked back upstairs and never come down again.
He moves to the heavy bag and starts wrapping his hands with tape from a roll on the shelf. I find wraps in a bin by the door, pull out a set, and start winding them around my knuckles. The muscle memory is still there from Gigi's lessons fifteen years ago. Under, over, between the fingers, around the wrist, pull tight. The compression on my knuckles feels like coming home.
"You box?" he asks.
