"He is never wrong about you. Only about me."
We sat in it for a moment. The kitchen around me was small and warm, his room around him big and quiet, the lit screen the only bright thing between us.
"I miss you," he said.
"It's been one day."
"I have noted that already."
A small laugh came up out of me before I knew it was coming, quiet so I wouldn't wake my grandma in the next room. His mouth pulled at the corner. We sat with it.
"Goodnight, Chloe."
"Goodnight."
I tapped the screen. The call ended. I set the phone down on the napkins and just sat there for a minute, looking at the dark glass where his face had been.
The radiator clanked twice in the wall behind me. My grandma made a small sleepy sound from the couch and turned her face toward the back cushion. The Korean drama played quietly through the doorway, the snow still falling in the little park on the screen.
I had not known, until tonight, what it felt like to be missed by a man who was bad at admitting it and good at showing it anyway.
I sat in my grandma's kitchen, in the warm yellow lamplight, and let myself feel it.
25
DANIIL
The war room smelled like coffee gone bitter on the burner and gun oil that had not. I stood at the head of the long table with my hands flat on the maps and my brothers on either side, and for the first time in my life I felt the room turning around me instead of around Alek.
Brighton. Manhattan Beach. Gerritsen. Coney Island Creek. Each circled in red, each pinned with photographs I had stared at long enough that the faces were starting to look back when I shut my eyes.
I did not shut them much anymore.
"Primary route in," I said, and laid a finger on the line Ivan had drawn from the compound through the south side of the parkway. "Secondary if a unit gets eyes on the convoy here." My finger slid east. "Mikhail's crew breaks off at this light. Alek goes the other way at this one. My piece stays straight on through to the water."
Ivan nodded once. He had a pen behind his ear and a folder under his elbow with Lucia Marchetti's habits sorted by hour. The woman walked three blocks to a bakery every morning on the dot. She kept the calendar in her head and then she kept itagain on paper in the kitchen drawer because she did not trust her own memory, which was the smartest thing about her.
Days bled together at that table. Photographs went up and stayed up. Cesare Marchetti, gray at the temples. Nicolo, the money, with his Brighton brownstone and the woman who thought his name was Nico Romano. Dario, the nephew, the one who had been at the wheel on the road in late autumn. Tomasz Krol beside him, the Polish hire, the trigger himself. Lucia under all of them, the one we kept underestimating until Ivan put her calendar on the wall.
Russo and DeLuca went up too. Detective and detective. Sixtieth Precinct. On the take. Then Hartigan, the one the rest of the precinct talked around, the one we suspected was wearing two badges at once.
"Cops," Ivan said on the third night. He tapped Russo's photo. Then DeLuca's. "These two we do not kill. I have a man inside their bank. We move the leverage and the leash. They will know by morning that they belong to us now instead of to Cesare, and they will keep their mouths so tight you could not get a pin between their teeth."
"Hartigan?" Mikhail asked.
"We do not touch him," Alek said from across the table. His blue eye traveled the photos and settled on Hartigan's. The eyepatch on the other side caught the lamp. "Federal until proven otherwise. We do not light a fire under a man who has a hose."
Mikhail grinned at that, briefly, the way he grinned at everything. Then his eyes came back to me and the grin softened off his face.
"You look ruthless, brother," he said.
I did not look up from the map. "I am. I miss Chloe, and the men who put me in that ditch are going to pay for the time I lostwith her. We round up every last one and we put them in the chamber."
The room got a little quieter.
"Then what?" Ivan asked. Tactical. Dry. Like he was asking after a shipment.
"Kill them all."
