Page 136 of The Mafia's Christmas Baby

I smile despite the weight in my chest.

“You’re planning a trap.”

He shrugs.

“You can’t win with fists when someone fights with ink. You have to outwrite him.”

I flip my notebook to a clean page and draw two columns.

One for money. One for motive. “You talk, I write.”

He gives me names.

I give them arrows.

By the time the coffee cools, the page looks like a nervous system.

Every route leads to Marco’s signature somewhere he shouldn’t be touching.

When he finally sits, the edge in his shoulders eases. “This could work.”

“It will,” I say. “You just have to let me help pull the string.” He studies me for a second. Not suspicion, not approval. Something closer to respect. “Alright,” he says.

He calls Rafe and Tino with a single sentence.

“Eyes on the route, feed every change.” He gives them a block.

The men answer with small words that mean larger things.

He hands me a jacket that is not mine and a paper bag with a scone in it.

It feels ridiculous and perfect.

We leave the apartment the way clean burglars do.

No clatter, no goodbyes.

The door clicks and the city takes on a low, indifferent sound.

Nico drives.

I ride shotgun, the jacket pulled up at my neck.

He does not ask me to be anything except a woman buying bread and paper, which I can be.

He keeps his hands light on the wheel.

We cross the bridge and the blocks stitch themselves into patterns I know from other lives.

I look at the driver in the black sedan two cars back.

He looks like any man who has nothing better to do in the morning and a paycheck for being suspicious. Good.

“Where are we going?” I ask quietly.

“To the courier lot on Grand,” he says. “Geno’s ghost has a stop there.”

The courier lot is a strip between a tire shop and a church building with an anonymous door and a buzzing intercom.