Page 50 of The Mafia's Christmas Baby

He nods at Nico without looking up.

In this neighborhood, a nod can be a whole conversation.

We take the narrow side street that shaves a minute off Mulberry and adds two new escape routes.

Nico’s steps never falter but his attention is a net he keeps throwing and pulling back.

“Why would Marco name me?” I ask. “I’m a nurse who does her job and goes home. I have a basil plant that refuses to die. I don’t know anything.”

“You know me,” he says. “You know I bled in your bakery. That is enough for men who build cases out of threads and phone pings. The Feds don’t need you to know anything, Elisa. They need you to be someone I will do something foolish to protect.”

“They aren’t wrong,” I say before my better sense can trip me.

For a second his mouth softens.

Then his face smooths into that calm I want to hate and can’t.

“I won’t let them use you,” he says. “But I need you to understand what the play looks like. If they come to the hospital, you say you want counsel. If they ask you to sign, you don’t. If they suggest you’re safer with them, you tell them you’re already safe.”

“Am I?” I say, looking up at him, because I want to hear him say the thing I know he doesn’t say unless he means it.

“Yes,” he says. “As long as I can make it so.”

We cut across a courtyard where laundry lines zigzag high above like flags from another century.

An old woman smokes in a window and watches us like we’re a soap opera with better lighting.

At the next turn, I glimpse our ghost in a dark storefront’s glass—two shapes moving close, a third shape a half-block back.

My spine goes tight even as my face stays uninteresting.

I remember the envelope that waited under the bakery door, the grainy picture of me leaving the hospital, the block letters telling me to stay out of business I didn’t know I was in until I was already inside it.

I hear my mother’s voice telling me that even the innocent get punished if they stand too near the wrong story.

I see Uncle Sal rolling out dough while men with heavy coats drop their voices and easy jokes.

I see my cousin Tony, always laughing, counting folded cash like it’s a game with clear rules.

I'm not naive.

I just never expected my name to be on a list that lives in a government building.

“How long?” I ask. “How long has Marco been feeding them?”

“Months,” Nico says. “Maybe longer. He’s clever when he wants to be. He used to be loyal. That was the problem. Don Vincent raised him like a son, and Marco believed loyalty meant inheritance. When he realized the old man was still choosing strategy over blood, he started looking for a different father.”

“Who found him?” I ask. “Did the Feds go to him, or did he go to them?”

He glances at me.

Quick. Approving.

“You ask the right questions. A man like Marco doesn’t get found by accident. He leaves crumbs. Lawyers appear who never send bills. Phone numbers change. He starts to insist on meeting in places with clean acoustics.”

We pass the church side door and I think about Christmas Eve and the way my mother used to light candles for men she disliked because it was the right thing to do.

The bells are silent at this hour.