Page 13 of The Mafia's Christmas Baby

2

NICO

Ihave been shot before.

It teaches you what kind of pain deserves your breath and what kind you file away for later.

Tonight’s wound pulls when I climb stairs, but it behaves as long as I keep my stride measured and my pride out of it.

The nurse from the ER walks a half-step ahead of me, keys already in her hand, shoulders set like someone who has carried much heavier nights.

She smells faintly of night jasmine and lemon verbena.

Her name lives easily in my mouth.

Elisa.

She unlocks the side door off the narrow alley and we step into a corridor where the air still remembers yeast.

Old tiles, old paint, scuff marks where crates used to catch the wall.

The building greets me like a street corner from childhood.

I know this place before she turns on the lamp.

Sal’s Bakery wore its welcome as a uniform.

Men in my world liked to sit where the coffee didn’t ask questions.

Sundays after mass, you came here to decide whether an apology was worth more than a bullet, and Sal knew how to keep two kinds of customers alive—saints with a sweet tooth and sinners with a conscience.

“Elisa,” I say quietly, more to feel how it lands in the room than because she needs to hear me.

She glances back, a quick sweep of hazel that takes my measure again and does not find anything that surprises her.

She leads us through a second door, into the closed wing where the ovens sleep with their mouths open.

Dust has settled everywhere it can.

The steel deck where the hearth once roared is cold, but the marble counter still holds a ghost of heat from a thousand loaves.

The espresso machine is gone.

In its place sits a scar on the counter where a man used to park his elbows and solve a neighborhood for the price of a demitasse.

“Storage room’s this way,” she says, and her voice is brisk, not because she is nervous, but because she has already put me on a list labeledTasks, and men who get put on her lists tend to live.

The room she chooses is narrow, dense with the kind of objects you keep because they taught your hands something—bannetons stacked on a high shelf, a wooden peel worn thin at the edges, a flour sack turned soft as linen.

There is a cot folded against the wall under an electrical panel.

She kicks the cot open with a boot that has seen three winters and none of them gentle.

The sheet she throws over it is clean and smells like sun even in this lightless space.

She gestures to the cot and waits for me to sit without fuss.

I do, because I'm not an idiot and because the way she moves tells me she has patched worse men in worse rooms with fewer tools.