Page 51 of The Mafia's Christmas Baby

If they rang, they would sound like alarms.

“What happens to people like me in those files?” I ask.

I keep my voice level. My hands are steady because they have to be.

“Do the Feds actually protect them, or do they just write their names in black and hope the paper is enough?”

“Sometimes, they protect,” Nico says. “Mostly, they leverage. They will use your work. They will ask if you have ever seen a man from our world wounded off the books. They will say you could save lives by telling them where our bodies go. They will try to make ‘help’ mean ‘talk’.”

“And if I don’t?” I say.

“They make your job harder,” he says. “They show up more often. They stand outside the bakery and remind you they can. They hope you will get tired.”

I stop for a step and then keep going, because stopping on a street like this gives the night time to make decisions without you.

“I have watched mothers pull tubes because their sons made the wrong promise,” I say. “I have watched men with good hands go into the ground over someone else’s ego. I'm not trying to be a hero, Nico. I just want to go to work and come home without finding a note under my door.”

“I know,” he says. “I'm trying to give you the boring ending. Boring is the goal.”

We turn down my block.

The bakery sign is dark, but the letters still hold a shine that doesn’t belong to this year.

Nico’s attention hooks the rooftop line, the alley mouth, the parked cars, a pair of teenagers sharing a cigarette behind a mailbox like the mailbox hides sin.

His body tightens in small degrees, the way a muscle prepares before a lift.

I think of Uncle Sal again.

I think of Tony with his quick smile and quick deliveries and the way he believes he can outrun every consequence because he has so far.

I think about the quiet funerals we went to when I was a kid, the ones where men stood outside with their hands in their pockets and looked at the ground while the priest did his work.

In those rooms, no one said the word Mafia.

They said accident.

They said complication.

They said winter came early this year.

Everyone understood.

“Tell me the worst version,” I say, because sometimes, naming the monster makes it smaller. “If Marco has my name and decides to do something about it.”

“The worst version is the Feds show up at your job and ask you to come with them in front of your colleagues,” he says quietly. “They ask questions until you trip over a sentence and then they try to call it perjury. They offer you safety in exchange for a story that harms my side of the table. The other worst version is a boy who still thinks Marco wears a halo tries to scare you into leaving town. He fails, and then it gets bloodier.”

We cross the last intersection.

The bakery is close enough to smell the old flour deep in the walls even from the street.

I feel the air change a fraction, the way the ER changes when a code gets called in another room.

Nico’s hand is on me again, just a touch at my back.

His head tips like he caught something I missed.

“What?” I murmur, eyes forward.