Page 52 of The Mafia's Christmas Baby

We step past a row of shuttered windows.

The glass in the final panel shows us to ourselves again.

My face is pale and set.

Nico looks like a man who has been here before and does not like it any better with practice.

Behind us, far enough to pretend plausible deniability, a shadow detaches from a doorway and fixes its pace to ours.

“Left at the deli,” Nico says, voice almost nothing. He doesn’t look at me. He doesn’t have to. “Don’t speed up. Don’t look back.”

“Nico—”

He stops on a dime.

My momentum carries me one step farther and his hand catches my forearm and keeps me moving.

In the same breath, his other hand is under his coat and the gun is out, low and close to his hip where it reads as nothing to anyone who isn’t supposed to see it.

“Keep walking,” he says, tone gone flat in a way that makes the night itself straighten. “Someone’s been on us since we left the club.”

10

NICO

Ipeel off at the deli like I'm checking a window display.

Elisa keeps moving the way I asked, chin high, pace steady, the building side of the sidewalk staying under her hand as if the brick itself is company.

I let two dog walkers pass and slip into the cut behind the dumpster.

The alley is narrow and wet in spots, the brick slick where the day never touches it.

I move fast enough to keep the thread, slow enough to hear the second set of steps behind us try to adjust.

He turns the corner expecting a pair.

He gets me.

He is young, which I never count as a weakness until a man proves it, jacket too long, the cheap kind with a zip pocket where boys think cash belongs.

He smells like a bar sink and peppermint.

His eyes go wide and then flat, training fighting instinct.

His right hand dips toward his pocket with the confidence of someone who has rehearsed one move too many times with no one correcting him.

“Don’t,” I tell him, voice low.

I let the steel sit quiet at my hip.

I don't want a shot to call attention to the block.

He grins anyway because men still believe in knives when they shouldn’t.

“The girl’s a liability,” he says.

The grin tightens at the corners.