Page 62 of Daddies of the Underworld

“Promise?”

I crouched and fixed her hat even though it was fine. “Promise.”

Her arms went around my neck, quick and fierce, then she darted inside before I made a fool of myself in front of thirty other parents with normal lives and fewer fake names. I waited until the doors closed, counted to thirty, and couldn’t make my feet move.

The prickle intensified. Someone was watching me. I tilted my head slightly to the left, trying to look past the parents and to the other side of the street without being obvious. Nothing out of the ordinary. Same on the right.

I had to get out of here. Sofia was safe in school. Her teachers knew to never, ever let her leave unless they saw me or Mara outside.

I had to get to work. I forced my feet to move, making the long but familiar trek to the cafe. I stopped in the alley outside the back door to gather myself, leaning against the wall and letting the cold biting through my thin sweater ground me.

A dark car rolled past the mouth of the alley so slowly whoever drove had to be looking for something. Or someone. I turned my face into my shoulder, breathing in the smell of my laundry detergent and the pungent aroma of wet cardboard from the alley. The car kept going. No one shouted my name or came after me.

But the lingering sensation refused to leave me alone. It kept me jittery enough that I made three coffees wrong and dropped an entire tray of clean mugs before my shift ended and I could pick up Sofia from school.

Things were worse at home. Sofia left school cranky, which never happened and almost always meant she was about to come down with either a stomach virus or a cold.

I made grilled cheese for supper because it was cheap, filling, and one of Sofia’s favorite comfort foods. She ate it, along with her soup, and didn’t complain about an early bath or bed time as long as I promised to read her four favorite books even if she fell asleep during the first one. After braiding her hair and tying it off with a purple elastic, I tucked her into bed, read her four required books, and left her snoozing on her side with her hands beneath her cheek.

I wished I could give her everything she’d ever asked for. A room of her own. A backyard to play in. A father who came to school on the right day and existed as more than half-answers. A life where fire escape drills were only about fire.

Instead, once I knew she was out, I pulled the go bag from the closet. It was terrifyingly light. Two changes of clothes for Sofia, one that needed to be swapped out because she’d outgrown it last month. One set of clothes for me. Cash in the envelope side pocket. Documents. I ran my hand over my pocket, where the knife Matteo had given me lived. I couldn’t bear to put it in the bag. What good would it do me there? I added a picture of Sofia I’d gotten when she started preschool and tucked it into the layers. Then, I added bags of granola bars, socks, and the extra copies of her favorite books I’d snagged from a neighbor’s trash.

I zipped the bag and closed my eyes, listening to the world around us. The radiator clanked, and my neighbor turned up her TV to hear her favorite game show. Wind whistled around the window, and a car door shut outside. I tensed. It was nothing. Probably.

I pushed to my feet and crossed to the window, pulling the blind back with one finger. Did I have enough money to start over? Didn’t matter. I’d figure it out. I always did. The street below me looked ordinary. A couple argued near the corner, next to the empty bus stop.

Still, the feeling remained. I scratched my neck. I had survived this long by trusting that feeling. I went to the kitchen and pulled all the money from every hiding spot I’d carved out in our tiny apartment and added it to the bag. Tomorrow. Tomorrow I’d call the landlord and cancel our lease. He wouldn’t care. He was one of the few I’d found who let us pay month to month without requiring a bunch of deposits. Because I paid cash and I was always on time.

Maybe I was panicking and should think it through, for Sofia’s sake.

No. I was leaving for Sofia’s sake, because nothing mattered more than keeping her safe.

20

LUCA

By the time Matteo and I landed in Chicago, I had looked at the picture Dante sent so many times the image should have been burned into my phone screen. It had not, unfortunately, so I’d saved it as both my wallpaper and lock screen.

Matteo sat across from me on the plane, his phone screen black and a stack of files in front of him. He hadn’t turned a page in ten minutes. Dante’s picture held him the same way it did me, though he didn’t keep turning his phone on to look at it. He’d printed a copy instead, and he stared at it like he could force the past to give up answers if he looked hard enough.

“That screen is going to crack if you keep staring at it like that.” He didn’t even look up as he said it.

My head lifted, and I smirked. “That was almost funny.”

Almost. We were coming to terms with the idea that Nina was alive and well. Our hopes were being fulfilled one by one. The girl was an unexpected bonus that I couldn’t get out of my head. She had to be ours. The door lowered, and the captain stepped back for us. “Mr. Moretti.”

With that, we stood and made our way into the blustering Chicago wind. A car waited at the private terminal, along with the kind of driver who didn’t ask questions because he’d been paid enough to have memory issues.

Chicago greeted us with wind sharp enough to slice through my coat and a gray sky that had looked pleasant from the sky but caused a bone-deep ache as it settled.

“Delightful city.” I pulled my collar up. “Very cheerful. I can see why people choose to live here instead of, oh, I don’t know, the Bahamas.”

Matteo walked ahead of me without slowing. “Focus.”

“I am focused.” I’d never been more focused. Didn’t mean I would stop making jokes when I had finally found my funny bone again. “I’m mostly focused on frostbite, but it counts.”

He kept quiet, which was for the best. I could keep this up for hours now that we’d arrived. In the same city as Nina.