WhatwasIdoing?
Katerina was turned into me, one arm thrown across my chest, her face slack with a trust that put a fist in my throat. Asleep, she was just a woman—dark hair loose across my pillow, mouth soft, the burn scars on her forearm pale in the half-light, her breath coming slow and even against my ribs. Last night she’d come apart over my lap, and then she’d slept against my chest like she’d been doing it her whole life. I’d lain awake under her for two hours, afraid to breathe wrong.
I didn’t want to do it anymore.
That was the truth. Didn’t want to keep any fucking secrets from her any more.
I’m not a thinker, not like Pietro, not like Sal who weighs a thing for a decade before he touches it—but I made myself sit with it in the dark, because she deserved that much.
Every reason to keep the secret: the op. Sal’s case, the one he’d been building so patiently, the shipping manifests and theoffshore structures, the spine of the whole thing, and Filoxenia the keystone—pull it and the block came apart and so did Gianni’s footprint. You don’t put that in a civilian’s hands. The danger—God, the danger. The second she knew, she’d be a person who knew, and people who know get leaned on, and I’d seen what leaning looked like. A broken window was the gentle version.
And the last reason, the one I’d been hiding behind all the others: she didn’t know what I was. She thought I was a loud Italian who bought too much bread and threw a man through her glass because she was being bothered. She didn’t know I was a made man. A soldier. That the same hands that carried her flour and checked her binding twice had done things that didn’t wash off. That I could be brutal as easy as I could be kind, that I’d hurt people, killed people, that there was a version of me she’d never met and would not want to.
The mafioso in me had a verdict, and it was simple. Don’t tell her. Keep her in the warm, keep her in the dark, handle it, protect her, let her never know the cost of standing where she stood. The mafioso would be savage about it. The mafioso would lie to her face for the rest of both our lives and call it love and sleep fine.
So many reasons not to tell her. And only one to tell her.
I loved her.
That was the one reason against all the reasons, but it was heavier than all of them stacked.
I’d said it to her and I’d meant it. I was still waiting for her to say it back to me. And if I lied to her, if I kept this from her, she never would. I couldn’t be her Daddy and also be the man who kept this from her.
That was the thing the mafioso couldn’t understand and the Daddy couldn’t get past.
She’d told me the worst of her fear: everyone who ever took care of her did it by deciding things for her. Help with strings. A leash in a nicer coat. And here I was, deciding the biggest thing for her, keeping it from her for her own good. It was bullshit.
I was scared. I’ll say it. I was scared that when she knew what I was, the soft would go out of her face and never come back. That she’d see the killer under the baker’s hands and there’d be no unseeing him. That I’d watch the door come down for good, the way it had started to come down the night I pulled back from the kiss, except this time there’d be no key.
I was scared, but I knew what my decision was.
Not a mafioso’s decision—a Daddy’s.
I eased my arm out from under her, slow, swapping my chest for the pillow the way you ease a sleeping child off your shoulder, and she frowned and hunted the warmth and found the pillow and accepted it.
I sat on the edge of the bed and put my palm into the loose hair at the back of her head, no hurry, no fuss. “Katerina,” I said, low. “Kat.”
She surfaced from somewhere far down, mumbling something about the ovens, about cannoli.
“No,” I said, before she could say it. “Not the ovens. Not yet.”
“Tonio—what time—”
“Listen to me.” I kept the hand in her hair, kept my voice even. “There’s something I should have told you. Days ago. Weeks ago.” My pulse was up in my throat. “I’m not going to dress it up and I’m not going to handle you with it. I’m just going to say it, and you can do whatever you want with it after.”
She’d gone still. The working part of her clicking on, watchful, the sleep draining out of her eyes.
“Okay,” she said, a little tremor in her voice.
“Sit up,” I said. Not an order. A request, almost gentle. “Sit up, honey. Let me talk.”
She sat up against the headboard and pulled the blanket to her chest and looked at me. I made my hands be still in my lap, keeping still, keeping calm.
“You asked me what I was doing on your block,” I said. “And I said I couldn’t tell you. That I wouldn’t. That was true and it was also a coward’s answer, so here’s the real one. Maybe you know some of it. Maybe you’ve guessed the rest.” I breathed. “There’s a company buying up your street. Building by building. The block’s a target—a logistics target, near the freight line, near the river. They want a clean run of storefronts, legitimate-looking places to move money through, and they’ve been getting them, one tired owner at a time. Most people sell when they’re leaned on. Most people take what they’re giving.”
“And I won’t,” she said. Quiet.
“And you won’t.” I held her eyes. “You won’t sell because it’s your father’s. You won’t pay because you’d sooner die than be handled. And your one stubborn storefront, Katerina—it breaks the line they need. The whole contiguous run. They can’t have the block without Filoxenia, and they can’t have Filoxenia, because you won’t fold.” I let it land. “You’re not a random victim of some street crime. You’re the keystone. Pull you, and their whole thing on this corner comes apart. That’s why it’s been escalating. The window, the scorch on the wall. That wasn’t kids. That was a message that kept not working.”
