My hand tightened on his collar. The gun pressed harder.
“Maria Flores,” he said.
It wasn‘t enough. It would never be enough. But it was something.
Then, because cornered men bargain—because men like Ferrara had survived this long by having something to trade when the walls closed in — I asked him something.
“Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you.”
“There’s a lock-up.” The words came fast. Wet with blood, slurred through the broken nose. “South Side. Ashland and Forty-Seventh. Possessions. Of the Flores family. Personal.”
I went still.
“Enzo took them, when she died, in case he could use it as leverage,” Ferrara continued. “It’s locked - just a padlock. You could break it.”
“Marco’s people will be here in five minutes,” I said. “Sit there and bleed.”
Midge shifted inside my jacket. A small movement—the body readjusting, the stub tail twitching once against my ribs. She’d been silent through all of it. Through the gunfire and the headbutts and the interrogation. Four pounds of creature, pressed against my heart, waiting it out the way she waited out everything she couldn’t control—still, silent, trusting the person carrying her to bring them through.
I turned my back on Ferrara and walked inside to get Cora.
Thediningroomsmelledlike cordite and overturned chairs.
The first man was still on the floor where he’d fallen. I stepped around him. The second was against the wall—conscious now, but barely, his hand pressed to his face where my forehead had rearranged things. He saw me and went still. The calculation visible—the same math, the same answer. Stay down.
Cora was at the table.
She hadn’t moved. Same chair. Same position—hands flat on the surface, fingers spread, the posture she’d learned from Dante.
But her eyes were wet.
I sat across from her.
The chair scraped against the floor. I set the gun on the table between us. The metal clicked against the wood. A declaration of something—of having arrived, of it being over, of the weapon being put down because the part that required weapons was done.
Midge’s head emerged from my jacket. The good ear first, then the flopped one, then the brown eyes—wide, scanning, finding Cora across the table and locking on with the intensity of a creature who had been separated from her person for an unacceptable duration and was filing a complaint.
Cora’s face cracked. Just a fraction—the mask slipping, the composure shifting, the sight of her dog in my jacket doing what no amount of gunfire or interrogation had managed. I unzipped. Lifted Midge out. Set her on the table.
The dog crossed the surface like it was a bridge. Four pounds moving fast—past the gun, past the overturned water glass—straight to Cora’s hands. Cora gathered her. Pressed her face against the small body. The sound she made was muffled by fur and was not a word.
I waited.
The room settled around us. The flickering fluorescents from the kitchen casting uneven light through the open door. The November air coming through from the alley. The distant sound of a siren — not for us, not yet, just the city being the city, emergency as ambient noise.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Her voice. The flat delivery, but different now — thinner, worn through, the voice of a woman who had been running on courageand adrenaline and the particular fuel of a twenty-year-old hope and had finally run out of all three.
“I know,” I said.
“I had to.”
“I know that too.”
The words were enough.
She asked.