The garage doesn't have a name. That's the first thing I notice when Dominic unlocks it at 6:40 in the morning, breath fogging in front of both our faces like we're standing in a walk-in freezer instead of a cinderblock unit off Manton Avenue with a bent aluminum door that needs both hands to lift.
It's leased to somebody who's been dead three years. Bruno told me that yesterday, matter-of-fact, the way you'd mention a parking validation. I didn't ask the name. I've stopped asking where things come from — the bundles, the addresses, the men who show up with envelopes and leave without knocking twice. Not asking has become its own kind of survival skill, right up there with holding still and counting to eleven.
I'm on my knees on the concrete, counting banded stacks into an open duffel, and my fingers have gone stupid with cold, clumsy in a way that makes me drop a bundle of twenties twice before I get the rhythm back. There's no heat in here. There's a bare bulb on a pull chain that Dominic switched on when we came in, throwing everything the color of an old photograph, and there's the smell of motor oil baked into concrete for forty years, and there's my own breath, visible, rising and disappearing above the bag like something leaving my body that I can't afford to lose.
I've stopped counting how much is in front of me in dollars. I count it now in duffels. Two, so far. Not full.
Forty million dollars, Teresa said, out loud, in a driveway three days ago, like a grocery list. This is what's left of it fitting into two bags a person could carry up a flight of stairs without help.
Dominic works a legal pad against his knee by flashlight — the overhead bulb throws light but not enough to read fine print by, not with his handwriting, which gets smaller the angrier he is — and I watch him cross out a line with three hard strokes that tear the paper slightly. Nineteen lines crossed out since Saturday. I know because I made myself count them an hour ago and then wished I hadn't, because eighteen million dollars looks exactly the same on a yellow legal pad whether it's real or made up, three days of a man's whole life reduced to a column with strikethroughs.
"Sanitation renewal, Cranston," he says, not really to me, marking through it. "Gone. The car wash in Fall River — deeded to a church this morning, some monsignor Nunzio knows, no money changes hands, it just isn't mine anymore." He doesn't look up. "Two accounts, voluntary disclosure, through a lawyer who won't take my calls after today."
"After today?"
"He wants distance." Dominic says it the way you'd report weather. "Can't blame him. I wouldn't want my name near mine either."
I go back to the duffel. My scar — the two-inch line on my left forearm, cold-numb this early, cold before anything else on me — has gone tight and strange under my sleeve, and I flex my hand once just to feel something that isn't the paper.
I lean, once, trying to read the margin of his pad upside down — an address, something with Rue in it, a box number, six digits, and under that two names in ink small and careful in a way his other writing isn't — and he turns the page before I get past the box number. Doesn't say anything. Just turns it, flat palm, like closing a door.
I don't ask. I've stopped asking.
---
Bruno comes in at seven with a grocery bag folded at the top and the smell of frying peppers riding out of it into a room that otherwise smells like a garage where nobody's cooked anything in decades. He's got sandwiches wrapped in foil, still warm enough to fog their own wrapping, and he holds them out like an offering nobody's going to refuse.
Nobody eats.
I take one because it seems rude not to and hold it in both hands for the heat more than the food. Dominic doesn't take one at all. Bruno eats his own standing up, back against the cinderblock wall, and when I ask why he doesn't sit on one of the overturned milk crates by the duffels, he looks at the bags like they're something with a pulse.
"Don't feel right," he says. "Sitting on it."
Fair. I don't feel right sitting near it either, and I'm already on the floor.
Bruno chews for a while before he says the rest, the way he always does — feeds you the soft part first. "Word's moving," he says. "Capos talking. Some of them saying you've gone" — he hesitates, glances at me, decides to say it anyway — "soft in the head. Over a woman."
"They can say what they want," Dominic says.
"They are." Bruno wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. "Nunzio's been on the phone to Florida every night this week. Every night, same time, eleven o'clock, Teresa's driver clocked it parked outside his place twice." He pauses. "And Rocco's calling a sit-down. Thursday. Word's already out to half the capos — I heard about it from a guy who heard about it from a guy, which means everybody knows before you do, which is—"
"New," Dominic says. "Yeah."
"Dean Street club," Bruno adds. "Same place as the Christmas thing."
Dominic writes nothing down. He doesn't need to. I watch him take the information the way he takes everything lately — flat, filed, no visible cost — and something in that flatness scares me worse than if he'd slammed something. A man who breaks a table when he's angry is still a man who can be reached. A man who just writes it into the account is somewhere I can't follow him to.
---
"The Canadian paper's bought," he says, once Bruno's gone back out to sit in the Lincoln with the engine running for warmth, once it's just the two of us and the duffels and the bulb swinging faintly on its chain from some draft I can't locate.
"Bought," I repeat.
"Delivered." He says it like a shipping confirmation. "Broker in Montreal. Two sets. Safe-deposit box, already sitting there." A beat. "Anna and Michel Bouchard."
The names land strange in the cold air, foreign in his mouth, careful the way the handwriting on the legal pad was careful.
"Don't say them again," he says. "Not here. Not in this city. Not until you're standing in front of the person you're saying them to."
"Okay," I say, and something about agreeing to erase a name I haven't even worn yet makes my stomach do the elevator-drop thing, cable cut, floor gone. I press my palm flat against the cold concrete beside me, checking that the floor is still there. It is. It's just very cold.
I watch him zip the second duffel most of the way and stop, hand resting on the pull, and I ask the thing I've been circling since the ninth of February, since a kitchen full of broken glass, since every single day since then has been another brick on the same foundation and nobody's said the word out loud.
"After Florida," I say. "Do you plan on being alive?"
He doesn't answer right away. That's an answer in itself, and I hate that I already know it is.
"A sitting boss doesn't get killed without the Commission answering it," he says finally. Flat. Even. The same register he used telling three men to carry a broken wrist to a car. "That's not opinion. That's just how it works. It's worked that way longer than either of us has been alive."
"That's not a no."
"No," he agrees. "It's not a no."
I make him say the rest of it, because somebody in this relationship has to be willing to do the arithmetic out loud, and it's clearly never going to be him unless I force the numbers into his mouth.
"So killing him is also a sentence," I say. "On you. Say it. Actually say it, don't just let me imply it and nod."
He looks at me for a long time, the flashlight beam gone still in his hand, throwing a flat coin of light on the concrete between us.
"Killing him," he says slowly, like each word costs something separate, "is also a sentence. On me."
"Okay," I say, and my voice comes out steadier than I expect, which keeps happening lately, this strange calm arriving exactly when it shouldn't. "Then I'll still be in the doorway."
He doesn't say anything to that. He reaches over instead and puts his hand flat over mine where it's resting on the duffel's half-closed zipper, and I feel it before I feel the words — his palm is warm, actually warm, the one part of this whole freezing morning that isn't fighting me for heat, the burn-scarred ridge of it pressing into my knuckles — and neither of us moves for a four count that I don't say out loud, just hold, breath fogging above both our hands like something we're keeping alive between us on purpose.
---
I check my phone because my hands need something to do that isn't shaking.
Four texts from Simone, unanswered since yesterday. call me. Actually call me. I saw the news about the carting contract, providence journal biz section, are you okay. MAYA. All caps on the last one, which from Simone means she's actually scared, not just annoyed.
A voicemail from my mother that I don't open. I know without listening that it's going to be some version of worried and needling at the same time, some question about whether I'm eating, some mention of Trevor's Christmas manners that I do not have room in my chest for this morning.
My ear rings in the quiet the way it always does now, the note that's been there for eighty days, a small constant hum under everything, and in a garage this cold and this silent it's almost the loudest thing in the room.
I put the phone away without answering anyone.
---
"Thursday," Dominic says, standing, brushing concrete dust off his knees, "I go alone."
"No."
"Unarmed," he says, like that's the part I was objecting to. "Neutral rules. It's the last thing left that still means something, and I'm not the one who's going to be the reason it stops meaning it."
"That's not — " I stand up too, fast enough that my knees complain, cold-stiff. "You're not hearing me. I said no."
"You'll be at the house. Doors locked."
"I'll be sitting alone in a house that got raided four days ago while you walk into a room with men who broke a table over paper. No."
We go back and forth on it longer than either of us wants to admit, my voice getting sharper, his getting flatter, the particular argument shape we've built over five months where I push until I find the actual wall and he lets me push until I do. I lose. Of course I lose — I always lose the version where he goes somewhere dangerous alone, because there's no version of "come with me" that doesn't put me directly in whatever room Rocco Malandra decides to fill with consequences.
What I get instead is a compromise, and I take it because it's the only door left open.
"Simone's," I say. "Her studio. Nobody from this life goes to Wickenden Street."
He considers it the way he considers everything, weighing it against some ledger only he can see, and then he nods, once, and something in my chest that's been clenched since 6:40 loosens by maybe ten percent.
---
Bruno's back at the garage door, headlights already running behind him, engine idling to keep the Lincoln warm, when his phone goes off in his coat pocket — the specific double-buzz he only gets for people he actually answers.
He checks the screen. I watch his face do something I've never seen it do before — Bruno, who cooks for six people and takes broken wrists in stride and has driven this family's business through worse mornings than this one — go grey, actually grey, the color leaving his face the way it leaves a countertop when you wipe flour off it.
"It's Rocco," he says, and answers, and listens, and says almost nothing back — a "yeah," a "I hear you," a long silence where his jaw works once, twice, exactly the way Dominic's does when he's holding something down by force.
Then he lowers the phone from his ear, slow, like it's heavier now than it was a minute ago, and looks at me instead of at Dominic, which is somehow the worst part.
"Thursday," Bruno says. "Dean Street. Same time as always." His eyes don't leave mine. "He said — " He stops. Swallows. Starts again. "He said bring the girl."
