“How Can I Get Muscles Like Yours?” — The Mafia Boss Froze When the Maid’s Little Girl Walked Into His Private Gym

The silence in Dominic Moretti’s private gym was not empty. It had density. It was the kind of quiet that gathered in the corners of ancient stone cathedrals after the priest put the candles out—thick with beeswax, old sins, and the temperature of things that refused to rot.

He did not flinch when he turned and saw me.

A man like that did not flinch; flinching was an admission that the world had surprised you, and Dominic lived as if he had already read the coroner’s report on his own life and found it uninteresting.

He stood six feet and three inches off the floor. His ribs were outlined not by hunger, but by bands of muscle that looked like the wickerwork on the underside of a heavy wicker chair. Sweat ran from his temples, down the thick ridge of his collarbones, pooling in the dip between his pectoral muscles before tracking down the dark line of hair that disappeared into his black sweatpants.

I was four years old. I came up to the middle of his shins.

My socks were purple, with small rubber grips on the soles shaped like strawberries. One of them had twisted around so the strawberries were on top of my foot.

"How can I get muscles like yours?" I asked again. My voice was very small, but the glass and the mirrors caught it and threw it against the kettlebells.

Dominic stared at me. He had a white hand towel slung over his right shoulder. His hands were wrapped in gray tape from the wrists to the middle knuckles, the edges frayed where he had beaten a canvas heavy bag until the seams groaned.

He didn't move toward me. He didn't drop down on one knee the way the men at the corner bodega did when they gave me lemon drops. He stayed towering, a monolith of scarred olive flesh and breathing iron.

"You’re Delgado’s kid," he said.

His voice was a gravel driveway under the tires of a heavy car. Low. Deep enough to rattle the bones behind my ears.

"I’m Lucy," I said. "This is Benny."

I held the rabbit up by its lone ear. Benny was gray, though my mother said he had once been blue before three winters of Chicago radiator heat and several cycles in the laundromat washing machines on 22nd Street had boiled the sky out of him.

Dominic looked at Benny. His gray eyes were the color of the river in November—flat, pale, and entirely devoid of sunlight.

"The rabbit’s missing an ear," he observed.

"A terrier got it," I explained. "His name was Buster. Buster was bad. Benny didn't cry, though. He’s tough."

"Is that right?"

"Yes. That’s why I need muscles. So if Buster comes back, I can lift him up and put him in the garbage."

Something shifted in Dominic’s jaw. A small, dry muscle near his hinge clicked. He slowly took the towel from his shoulder, wiped the salt from his forehead, and looked past me toward the open doorway.

The house had three distinct sounds when it was functioning properly: the hum of the industrial refrigerator in the pantry, the click of the guards' leather soles on the parquet floors in the gallery, and the distant, polite murmur of classical radio coming from the study where the bookkeepers sat with their ledgers.

Now, there was a fourth sound.

A sharp, ragged gasp.

My mother stood in the threshold. Her hands were still wet from washing down the banisters upstairs; she carried a yellow microfiber cloth in her left hand, and her apron was crooked. Her face was not merely pale; it had turned the color of lard left too close to the burner.

"Lucy," she whispered. The word barely had air behind it. It died on her lips.

She looked at Dominic. Her knees actually trembled—I saw the blue cotton of her uniform shake against her shins. In the eleven months she had worked for the Moretti estate, her greatest triumph had been invisibility. She was the ghost who left lavender-scented towels in the guest suites and removed the water rings left by scotch glasses on mahogany tables before they could sink into the grain.

Now her ghost had spawned a four-year-old intruder in purple socks who had cornered the owner of the house while he was half-naked and holding six yards of boxing tape.

"Mr. Moretti," Alina Delgado said, her voice dropping into that rhythmic, desperate cadence of an employee who knows the difference between being fired and being made to disappear. "Please. I am so sorry. I told her—she was in the pantry, she was coloring—the delivery driver came with the oil, and I turned my back—"

"Delgado," Dominic said.

The word cut through her stammering like a cleaver through suet.

My mother stopped. She pressed the yellow cloth against her breast as if it were a scapular that might turn away bullets.

Dominic didn't look at her. His gaze remained pinned to me. He crouched down, slowly, his knees making no sound at all. Even on his haunches, his head was level with mine. He smelled like winter air, leather, and something metallic—like the taste you get in your mouth when you bite your tongue.

"You want muscles?" he asked me.

"Yes," I said.

"Why?"

"I told you. The dog."

"Muscles don't stop dogs," Dominic said. His face was entirely expressionless, but his eyes were wide and steady. "Discipline stops dogs. Distance stops dogs. A heavy boot stops dogs."

"I don't have a heavy boot," I told him, looking down at my purple strawberry socks. "I have these."

"Then you run," he said.

"I don't want to run."

"Why not?"

"My knees get green from the park."

For three seconds, the room existed in suspended animation. I could hear the rain tapping on the garden glass—thousands of little fingers wanting to come inside out of the Illinois cold.

Dominic Moretti reached out. His hand was immense; the fingers were blunt, the skin over the knuckles thickened into calluses that looked like dried horn. He touched Benny’s remaining ear with the tip of his taped forefinger.

"The rabbit needs sewing," he said.

"My mama doesn't have the blue string," I told him.

He stood back up. The transition from crouching to vertical was as effortless as oil rising to the surface of water. He turned his back on us, walking toward the rack where the dumbbells sat like rows of black skulls.

"Delgado," he said over his broad, scarred shoulder.

"Yes, sir," my mother squeaked.

"Take the child."

"Yes, Mr. Moretti. Right now. I am so sorry, sir—"

"And Delgado?"

My mother froze, her hand already wrapped around my upper arm with the desperate tightness of a woman pulling a drowning infant from a well. "Yes, Mr. Moretti?"