Page 58 of Savage Daddy
I watched her take it in. The working part of her, fast, fitting it together, the boarded window and the men with the offer and the patience of it suddenly making a shape.
“Why not try somewhere else?”
“It’s the sunk cost fallacy,” I said. “They’ve put so much effort into your block, so much money, they don’t want to pull out. Plus, they’re proud. Want to feel like they’re in control.”
“Hmmm,” she said, thinking.
“The people doing it,” I said, and this was where I went careful, this was where I held the thread back even now, “they run up a chain. And the top of that chain is a man I’m bound to. By blood. He’s family—a cousin. Like Dona says, it’s complicated, but he’s family.” I made myself say the rest. “My people has been hunting him for a while. Quietly. He’s gone bad in a way that’s hurting his own, and there are people working to take him apart, and your block is part of how he moves and cleans what he moves. So your bakery isn’t just your father’s dream and your loaf I can’t make. It’s also a wedge. Pull the thread out of your corner and it runs all the way up to him.”
She didn’t say anything. Her knuckles had gone white on the blanket.
“The night the man came,” I said. “The collector. The one I put through your glass.” I’d never told her it was on purpose, never told her I’d been there waiting, near enough. “That wasn’t me happening by. I was already on your block. I’d been on it for weeks—the family put eyes here because of the corner, and I drew the duty, and then I walked into your shop one morning and bought too much bread and that was supposed to be cover and it stopped being cover about an hour in.” The corner of my mouth tried for the grin and didn’t make it. “But when I put that man through your window, I showed my hand. A big new man at the holdout, throwing collectors through glass, telling the block it’s spoken for. They noticed. The machine noticed.”
“The call,” she said. “Last night. In Sicilian.”
“Was word that they’re asking around.” I kept it level. “Quiet. Careful. Asking who the new man at the bakery is. They want a name. Somebody clocked me and now they’re pulling the thread back the other way, toward me, which means toward you, and that’s why I went cold in the dark, and that’s why I read the curb and stepped in front of it, because there might be eyes on it and I didn’t want you in the line of them.” I breathed. “And I told younothing was there. I lied to you an hour after you signed your name beside mine. That’s the part I can’t forgive myself for. Not the secret. The lie.”
She was very still. And I’d got to the edge of the safe part now, the part that explained the curb and the cold and the call, and a coward would have stopped there, would have let her think I was just a man with a dangerous family and an honest job to do, a watcher, a guard.
But that wasn’t the whole truth, and I’d decided on the whole truth, or as much of it as wouldn’t get her killed.
“There’s more,” I said. “About me. Not the op. Me.”
“Tonio.” Her voice had gone small. Not the boss. Something underneath it, braced.
“I’m not a man who watches a block,” I said. “I mean—I am, today, that’s the job they gave me. But that’s not what I am.” I held her eyes because I owed her that, because looking away would have been one more lie. “I’m a made man, Katerina. A soldier. In the family. You understand? Mafia. A criminal. The Scordatos—it’s not a name and a wedding and Tella with her spreadsheets, or it’s that too, but underneath it’s—” I reached for the word and didn’t soften it. “It’s the life. The thing in the movies, except real, except boring most of the time and ugly the rest. I do what they need doing. I’m good with my hands and I’m good in a fight and I’m the one you want next to you when it goes physical, and I’ve been that since I was a kid, since my father got killed and my brothers raised me into it.”
Her eyes had gone wide. Shock—I’d expected the shock. I’d braced for it. But there was something else under it I couldn’t read, the same something I’d seen the morning she told me she knew what a Daddy was, that watchful settling, and I couldn’t tell if it was the thing turning toward me or away.
“I’ve hurt people,” I said. “I’m not going to pretty that up either. The same hands that carry your flour and gently tiedthat towel around your wrists—they’ve done things you’d have nightmares about. I’ve killed men, Katerina. More than one. For the family, on orders, and I’d be lying if I told you I lay awake over all of them, because I don’t, because that’s what I am, and pretending otherwise to your face would be the worst lie of all.” My voice had gone rough and I let it. “There’s a man in me you’ve never met. He’s quieter than the one who buys your bread. He’s the one who’d have kept this secret your whole life and called it love and never blinked. I almost let him. This morning I almost let him win.”
The room was so quiet I could hear the dog breathing.
“So that’s it,” I said. “That’s what I should have told you. The block, the cousin, the curb. And what I am. A mafioso. A killer. The opposite of safe to know.” I made myself stop reaching, made my hands lie flat and still on my knees, the way you set down a weapon to show you’ve come unarmed. “I told you because I made you sign that paper. Because I can’t hold you over a lie. And because I’d rather lose you with the truth than keep you on the lie, even though losing you—”
I couldn’t finish it. The big loud man who never runs short of words in three languages, and I sat there in the gray and could not finish the sentence, and waited, with my whole chest open, for her to do whatever she was going to do with it.
I’d seen Katerina angry. I’d watched her tear a buyout offer apart with two words and a look. I’d seen her go cold and clipped and cutting. I’d braced for that now—for the explosion, for get out, for the door coming down so hard the new glass rattled in its frame.
It didn’t come.
She was quiet a long time. Long enough that I stopped breathing somewhere in the middle of it.
“You’ve been so worried about telling me,” she said. “Haven’t you?”
“Katerina—”
“Don’t. Let me get there.” Her voice was low, even, working it out as it came, the way she works out a flour order. “There’s been a machine pointed at my corner for months. Real men, real money, the kind that breaks windows and then breaks more than windows. And you knew. From the first morning. You put yourself between me and the danger before I even knew it was there.” She breathed. “I thought you were the high point of my brutal mornings. You were the only thing keeping the morning from being my last one.”
I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t a thing to say to that.
And then the anger came, but it wasn’t the kind I’d braced for. It was the clean kind, the kind with no poison in it.
“I’m furious with you,” she said, and her eyes had gone bright, and her voice cracked at the edge and held. “Not because you’re—what you are. Give me a minute on that, I’m not there yet. I’m furious because you lied to me. After we were so honest with each other. After I beared everything.” Her chin came up. “You decided I couldn’t handle the truth of my own life, my own danger, and you decided it for my own good, and that is the precise shape of the thing I told you I’d die before I let happen again.”
“I know,” I said. “You’re right. You’re right about all of it.”
“I’m not finished.” She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, hard, annoyed at them. “But here’s the thing I keep running into, and I hate it.” She breathed. “You’re telling me now. Nobody made you. You decided to tell me. And I know how difficult it is. You handed me the one thing you most wanted to keep, knowing it might cost you everything, because—” She stopped. Looked at me. “Why? Say it again. Why now.”
