Chapter 4 - THE NEW PROBLEM
Norah gripped her ruined hand and looked at him.
“What problem?”
“You have better situational awareness than men I pay thousands a week.” Daniel’s eyes did not leave her. “You moved faster under pressure than combat veterans. You’re ruthless enough to strike a man you knew could kill you, purely to achieve the objective. There is no version of you that is not useful to me.”
He tilted his head, studying her like a piece of abstract art he was trying to decipher and mostly resented.
“I need people who see the laser before the bullet fires.”
“I’m a maid,” Norah whispered. The horror in her voice was real; she could hear it herself.
“You were a maid,” Daniel corrected.
He stood, and even bruised and silenced he towered over her.
“Starting tomorrow, you belong to me. You move into the main wing. You shadow Carmine. You learn the business. You watch my back.”
“No.” The word came out before she could stop it, and once it was out she kept going, because the alternative was swallowing it. “No. I don’t want any part of this. I don’t want to be in the mafia. I just want to be normal. I want a normal job and a normal apartment and—”
Daniel laughed. It was a harsh, bitter sound that ended in a sharp wince of pain, and he pressed the ice harder against his face.
“Normal?” He leaned down until his face was inches from hers. She could smell peppermint and copper blood on his breath. “Norah. You shattered a mob boss’s jaw and lived to see the basement. Normal died the second you threw that punch. You’re in the game now. The only choice you have left is whether you play to win, or you become collateral damage.”
He straightened and walked toward the steel door.
“Get your hand taped up,” he said over his shoulder, not looking back. “We start at six. Don’t be late.”
The door clanged shut. The lock engaged once more.
Norah sat alone in the dim light, cradling her broken hand. The damp cold of the concrete seeped into her skin, and it was nothing — nothing at all — compared to the ice that had settled in her chest.
She had punched her way out of debt, only to sell her soul to the devil whose life she’d saved.
The doctor’s name was Evans, and he smelled of rubbing alcohol and expensive mints.
He did not ask questions. He was a man paid handsomely to stitch gunshot wounds and reconstruct shattered kneecaps in the dead of night, so a housekeeper with a fractured metacarpal barely registered on his moral radar. He taped Norah’s right hand with practiced, mechanical efficiency, binding the middle and ring fingers together to splint the break, and the pain settled into a dull constant throb that radiated all the way to her elbow.
“Keep it elevated. Ice it twenty minutes every hour. Don’t punch any more concrete walls,” Dr. Evans said dryly, snapping his bag shut. He did not look at Norah when he spoke. He looked at Carmine, who was leaning against the doorframe of the plush guest bedroom they had shoved her into three hours earlier.
“She won’t,” Carmine grunted from the doorway. “She’s right-handed. She’s useless to me like this.”
“I can hear you,” Norah said. Her voice was scratchy, but it had an edge now that it hadn’t had that morning, a thin wire of defiance she was not sure she had earned.
She was sitting on the edge of a king-sized mattress that had cost more than her mother’s entire medical debt. She was wearing clothes that were not hers: black slacks, a simple white blouse, a tailored black blazer, all of it delivered while she was being x-rayed. The fabric was soft and breathable and completely foreign against her skin. It felt like a costume. It felt like the beginning of a part she had not auditioned for.
Dr. Evans slipped out, leaving a bottle of heavy-duty painkillers on the nightstand, and the heavy oak door clicked shut, leaving Norah alone with Carmine.
Carmine pushed off the doorframe and walked slowly toward her.
He was a fireplug of a man — built thick and low to the ground, with a nose broken so many times it had become a crushed stairstep. He hated her. It came off him in waves, sour cologne and hostile posture, the way heat comes off an engine.
“The boss thinks you’re some kind of savant,” Carmine said, stopping just outside arm’s reach. “He thinks because you got lucky and swatted a fly, you belong in the room.”
“I don’t want to be in the room,” Norah said flatly. “I want to be in my apartment in Logan Square.”
“Then you should have let his head get blown off. But you didn’t.” Carmine tossed a thick leather-bound tablet onto the mattress beside her good hand. “So now you’re my problem.”
She looked down at it.
“Security schedules. Supply-line manifests. Roster of every soldier, associate, and contractor on the Russo payroll. Memorize the faces. Memorize the routes.”
Norah stared at the tablet. “I don’t know anything about logistics.”
“You know how to clean,” Carmine spat. “So clean. You’re my new set of eyes. You stand in the corner. You keep your mouth shut. You watch.” He leaned in, close enough that she could see the poor repair in his nose. “You see a rat. You see a wire. You see a guy sweating when he shouldn’t be. You tell me. You miss something and someone dies.”
He straightened.
“And if you miss something that gets Daniel hurt again”—his voice dropped to a register that was almost gentle, which somehow made it worse—”the sniper won’t be the one you have to worry about.”
He turned and walked out. The door closed behind him.
Norah did not touch the tablet.
She stood up and walked to the window. It was thick, bulletproof glass, the kind they put in banks and embassies, and she pressed her shredded hand against it and looked out.
The snow was falling heavier now, blanketing the courtyard she had crossed with her eyes an hour before her life ended. Below, in the floodlights, a crew of men in heavy parkas were systematically cutting down the ancient oak tree where the sniper had hidden. Chainsaws roared, a brutal tearing sound that came through the glass as a distant drone.
They were erasing the place the bullet had come from, the way you erase a stain from a floor.
May you like
Norah let her forehead rest against the cold glass.
She was a prisoner in a gilded cage, promoted from scrubbing the blood out of the marble to standing in the room while the blood was spilled.
