Chapter 13 - COMMITMENT
They took Frankie out through the door at the back of the war room, and the door closed behind them, and the sound of his voice did not come back through the steel.
Norah stood at the end of the table and did not sit down.
The remaining men did not look at her. That was worse than the staring had been. The staring had at least been a form of attention. Now there was only the careful, deliberate practice of a group of dangerous men pretending, very hard, that a maid was not standing in their war room having just ended a capo’s career with sixty pages of arithmetic.
Daniel gestured at the tablet on the table.
Carmine understood. He picked it up and went out after the others.
The door closed.
Norah and Daniel were alone in the windowless room, under the lights that never turned off, with the smell of stale coffee and the silence of a space built to keep sound in.
Daniel looked at her.
She looked back at him.
He picked up the notepad, and for once he did not write a question or an order. He wrote for a long time, and turned the page, and wrote again, and then he turned the pad around and pushed it across the steel table toward her, and did not let go of the corner.
You should have told me first.
Norah read it.
“I know,” she said.
Why didn’t you.
“Because if I told you, you would have gone to Frankie, and Frankie would have denied it, and it would have been your word against his in front of six men who have known him for a decade and have known me for three months.” She kept her voice level. “Your word is worth more than mine. But his word is worth more than mine, too. So I made it not about words.”
Daniel pulled the pad back.
That is what I would have done.
“Yes,” Norah said.
He looked at her for a long moment.
I am trying to decide whether that terrifies me or pleases me.
“Both,” she said. “That’s usually how it goes.”
For the first time since she had known him, Daniel Russo — a man with his mouth wired shut, incapable of speech for another two weeks — came as close to laughing as a man in his condition could. It was a huff of air through his nose and a wince at the end, and it was gone almost before it started, but Norah saw it, and she filed it away the way she filed away everything, in the place where she kept the things about people that mattered.
He wrote again.
Frankie was lying at the end.
“He was.”
He was protecting a name.
“Yes.”
Did you see whose.
“No. But it wasn’t Volkov’s office manager.” Norah looked at the pad, and then at him. “It was someone still in this house. Or someone in this city who has a reason to want Frankie alive and quiet. Either way—”
She stopped.
“Either way, this isn’t finished,” she said. “I only ended the part of it that had a signature I could read. Whoever owns the account above Frankie’s is still out there, and now they know that someone in this house can read invoices.”
Daniel wrote one word.
You.
“Yes,” Norah said. “Me.”
He did not type I’m sorry. He did not write I’ll protect you. He did not make her any promise at all, and she found that she was grateful for it, because she had spent her whole life being promised things by people who could not deliver them.
He wrote instead:
Then we will have to be faster than them.
And that was, she would realize much later, the moment she stopped being a maid in a black blazer she was borrowing and started being something else — not a soldier, not a killer, not a member of the family. Something with no name yet. Something that had never existed in the Russo estate before: a person whose job it was to see the laser before the bullet fired, and who had just proven, in a steel room with a tap of a gold ring, exactly what that was worth.
Carmine knocked at the door.
Daniel tapped the table with two fingers. The door opened.
“Volkov’s office manager,” Carmine said. “You want him?”
Daniel wrote a single word and slid it across.
Carmine read it, and grunted, and left.
May you like
Norah did not ask what the word had been.
She was learning, at last, which questions were worth the price.
