Page 61 of Daddies of the Underworld

Matteo made a ragged sound, and Luca sounded like he’d swallowed a carousel ride with how his voice rose and fell. Matteo shushed him before speaking to me again. “Do not lose them.”

“Fuck you, Matteo. That’s like telling a lemon not to be sour.”

“Sorry.”

That one word stopped the heat in my chest. I’d never, not once in our entire lives, heard Matteo apologize.

“I’ll keep an eye on them until you get here.” Because there was absolutely no way they were not making immediate plans to join me. We had no idea if anyone else was looking for Nina. We’d heard whispers from the alliance that they wanted someone to pay. Nina’s name had been bandied about that first year, especially after her disappearance, but no one had been able to track down her or her brother.

“We’re on our way.” Matteo ended the call, and I settled in to wait, prepared to sit on the ground all fucking night if I had to.

Nina was not leaving my sight.

19

NINA

Something was wrong. I’d felt it for days, and I never had any proof, which was deeply unfair since proof meant I was in danger. I’d been acting on these feelings for years without proof. The two times I’d tried to stay after the nagging sensation crawled up the back of my neck, I’d gotten shocked into motion by things moved around inside my apartment and scratches around the keyhole.

This time, it was minute things. A strange car sat too long outside the apartment. I couldn’t stand at the window and watch to see if anyone ever got in or climbed out. That would have Sofia asking too many questions. The prickle that started between my shoulderblades when walking home yesterday had persisted through the night. It was why I’d taken Sofia through a fire drill even though we’d had one two weeks ago.

By morning, she’d turned the drill into a very dramatic drawing. Our apartment was a crooked square with flames coming out of the windows, though she had been nice enough to color the flames pink and purple. A stick-figure version of me stood at the bottom of the fire escape with my arms stretched wide, while Sofia climbed down the metal steps wearing a cape. I tapped the cape. “Is there a reason you’re dressed like a superhero?”

She didn’t look up from what appeared to be a glitter bomb going off on the bottom of the page. “It’s a memory cape. It helps me remember to step on the holey parts.”

“The grates.”

“Holey parts.” She dumped glitter into a pile on the center of the paper, then added a clump of glue to her cape and pushed the glitter into it with one finger. “It helps me remember, and holey is more fun to say than grate.”

Of course it was.

I set her oatmeal on the table and tried to smile like last night’s drill had been normal. It was normal for us, which said more than I cared to admit about my parenting. “What do you do once you reach the bottom of the fire escape if I’m not with you?” This was the hardest part of our drilling.

“That’s never going to happen.” She sounded so confident. That, too, made all of this more difficult. She sounded too old for her age, which I hated. “But if it does, I go to Mrs. Whitaker’s apartment. If she’s not there, I go see Mara at the laundromat.”

The drills were only partly because of the fire risk that came with living in a building with wiring old enough that the lights flickered if someone on the same floor ran the microwave and the hairdryer at the same time. I needed her to know how to get out of the building if the front door became inaccessible.

Sofia pushed the drawing across the table. “Do we have to move again?”

The spoon slipped from my hand and landed in my oatmeal with a wet plop. “What makes you ask that?”

“You did the fire escape twice.” She ticked off each point on her fingers. “You checked the window sticks twice, then you put extra money in your sock drawer. I saw because you forgot to close it all the way.”

Damn it. “Those are just safety things.” I sat across from her and pulled my bowl of oatmeal closer before it grew too cold to eat. “We’re not moving today.”

Her shoulders lowered, and her feet began kicking back and forth. We finished up and headed out a little early. Sofia didn’t question me when I took the long way around, though she looked up a couple times.

The walk to school always made my skin itch, but it was worse today. I changed our route twice, pausing at the bakery to make sure the man behind us crossed the street away from us before I continued. A delivery van idled one shop down, and I didn’t dare walk past while they had the van door open. All it would take was a couple men jumping out and dragging us inside.

The overactive imagination I’d passed on to my daughter worked harder than ever with every step. At the school doors, Sofia held tight to my hand instead of racing inside. “You’ll be here after school?”

“Always.”

“Sometimes Mara picks me up,” Sofia pointed out without a hint of remorse.

I sighed. “When I’m working late, yes. But not today.”

She studied my face with Matteo’s eyes and Dante’s stubborn frown. How did she have so many of their traits? God help me when she became a teenager. I refused to let myself think of it as an if we made it. We would.