"We have enough."
Leone parks at the corner of Ninth. The restaurant is closed. Grace's apartment windows are lit. She's in my apartment with Renzo, and the lights in my apartment are on too, and from the street I can see the glow through both sets of windows and the distance between them is thirty feet and for the first time the two apartments feel like they belong to the same person.
"The Ferrara girl," Leone says, turning to face me. "What's the plan?"
"She stays with me."
"In Philadelphia?"
"For now."
"And then?"
"Then she decides. She just met her father. She just lost her best friend. She just remembered being trafficked for five years. She gets to decide what happens next. If she wants to stay, I’ll kill every agent they send, each more painfully than the last. If she wants to go, we go. I’ll build her a new life. One where she’s safe."
Leone studies me. "You love her.”
"Yes."
"Good." He puts the SUV in park. "Then we finish this and we go home and you go home to her.”
Claudio grips my shoulder from the front seat. Matteo nods without looking up from the laptop. Leone holds my gaze for three seconds, then looks forward and puts his hands on the wheel and waits.
I get out and walk across the street and go up the stairs. I open the door to the apartment and Grace is sitting on the bed with Renzo and they're both holding cups of coffee from the kitchen I never use and they're speaking Italian.
Grace is speaking Italian.
Slow, halting, the words coming back to her one at a time from wherever the pills hid them, and Renzo is patient, filling in the gaps, and his face is the face of a man who is hearing his daughter's voice in his language for the first time in sixteen years and is trying not to fall apart.
She sees me in the doorway and looks at the blood on my hands.
"It's done?" she asks.
"It's done."
"They're dead."
"Yes."
“Good.” She nods. One nod. Then she turns back to Renzo and says something in Italian that I don't catch because her voice is quiet and the word is for him, not for me, and her finger taps his wrist twice and he smiles through his tears and answers her, and they keep talking.
I sit in the kitchen. I put the knife on the counter. The blade is clean. I cleaned it in the motel bathroom with paper towels and cold water, the same routine, the same hands, the same automatic process I've used my entire career. But this time the cleaning felt different. This time the blood on the blade belonged to men who killed Javi and were going to take Grace and put her back in the machine, and the cleaning felt like closing a door.
A text from Danila comes through.Heard it's done. You good?
I text back:Yes.
The brothers?
Here. Handled.
Good. I'll be in Philly next week. Buy me pizza.
I put the phone down and just sit. Blood drying on my hands and my girl reuniting with her father. Everything in the world is right again… until the next time I need to keep her safe.
The nail curls on the windowsill catch the morning light. I count them without meaning to. Twenty-three. Twenty-three nights of standing at this window watching a woman through glass. Twenty-three nights of cleaning my nails while her lights went on and off and watching her tapping.
The watching is over. She's not across the street anymore. She's in the next room, mine. My girl.