Chapter 2 - FIRE AND GROCERIES
The chain came off with a dry rattle that felt like an admission of guilt.
I didn't step aside completely. I made Dante Moretti brush against my shoulder as he entered, ensuring he felt the solid, stubborn mass of me. I am not a small woman; I have never been an ornamental one. My aunt used to say I was built like a coastal lighthouse—thick-walled, blunt, and designed to take the spray without crumbling. Dante didn't flinch at the contact, but his gray eyes dipped down, assessing the width of my shoulders, the stance of my feet, and the white-knuckle grip I still kept on the edge of the door.
"Leave the boots on the rubber mat," I told him. "I don't care who you killed this week; you don't track road slush onto my hardwood."
Behind him, two of his men—one built like a fire hydrant with a broken nose, the other younger, with slick hair and ears that had been cauliflowered from boxing—froze on the threshold, their eyebrows twitching toward their hairlines. Nobody spoke to Dante Moretti that way. You could see the muscle memory in their shoulders, the twitch toward their lapels.
Dante didn't look back at them. He simply looked down at the frayed rubber mat, then bent his tall frame and unlaced his leather boots without a single word of protest. He set them neatly side-by-side against the baseboard.
"Heaters first," Dante said, his voice quiet in the dim hallway. "The large one goes in the center hall on the second floor. Don't crowd the curtains. If any of the children are awake, keep them in their rooms until the wiring is set."
The two men moved immediately. They didn't stomp; they carried sixty-pound industrial ceramic units up the narrow, curving staircase with the rhythmic balance of movers who worked under silence orders.
"Kitchen," I said, nodding toward the back. "If you're going to corner me in my own house, you do it where the knives are."
"I have no intention of cornering you, Marisol," Dante said, following me down the narrow corridor.
The kitchen was small, dominated by a scarred laminate table that had six mismatched wooden chairs and three folding metal ones crowded around it. The air was thin and bit at the nostrils. On the counter, my small saucepan of water had long since stopped steaming; the blue flame of the single burner flickered weak and yellow against the draft coming up through the floorboards.
Dante stepped into the room and seemed to take up all the available volume. The ceiling was eight feet high, but under his presence, it felt like six. He unbuttoned his overcoat, revealing a charcoal-gray three-piece suit cut from heavy wool, perfectly tailored, without a speck of dust on the lapels. At his hip, hidden beneath the drape of the vest, was the unmistakable flat bulge of a leather holster.
He pulled out one of the rickety wooden chairs. It creaked under his weight, but he didn't check the legs. He sat down, leaned his forearms against the table, and looked at the pile of overdue notices spread between us.
"You owe thirty-four hundred to the gas company," he observed, his eyes scanning the pink and white slips upside down. "Eighteen hundred on the water. The mortgage has been transferred twice in four months, which means Julian Vance bought the debt from the regional credit union."
"I know who bought it," I said, leaning back against the sink with my arms crossed over my chest. I kept my chin up. "Vance wants the whole block for the new transit development. He’s been squeezing the landlords from here to the canal."
"Vance is an amateur with a developer's license," Dante said, his tone utterly dismissive. "He thinks because he went to Harvard Business School and gives campaign contributions to the district attorney, he can play landlord in a neighborhood that used to bury men like him under the pier."
"He’s doing a pretty good job of it," I pointed out. "The sheriff’s office already signed the eviction writ. We have until the twenty-eighth."
"You had until the twenty-eighth," Dante corrected.
The front door opened again, and more men entered. They didn't bring weapons; they brought cardboard boxes stamped with the logos of high-end Italian grocers from the North End. Real butter. Whole wheels of parmesan. Thick paper parcels from the butcher wrapped in butcher’s twine, smelling of fresh beef and cured pork. Crates of oranges, dark green spinach, sacks of potatoes, and loaves of sourdough bread still warm enough that the brown paper bags were translucent with steam.
They stacked them on the counters, on the spare folding chairs, and against the pantry door until the kitchen smelled less like an abandoned icebox and more like an Italian wedding banquet.
"What is this?" I asked, my voice tightening. "A bribe? A down payment?"
"It’s breakfast," Dante said. "And lunch. And dinner for the next three weeks."
A sound came from the doorway behind him.
I looked over Dante’s shoulder. Bibi was standing there. She had her thumb in her mouth, her hair a wild, dark nest of curls that stuck out horizontally from her head. She was dragging her favorite flannel blanket—the one with the frayed satin edges—and her eyes were huge, reflecting the yellow light of the stove flame.
"Mari?" she mumbled around her thumb. "The wall is humming."
Dante didn't spin around. He didn't make any sudden movements that might startle a feral child. He turned his head slowly, his profile silhouetted against the dark hallway.
Bibi took her thumb out of her mouth. She looked at Dante’s size, his dark coat, his scarred face, and then she looked at the enormous crate of red apples sitting on the floor three inches from his stockinged feet.
"Are those the sweet ones?" she asked.
I held my breath. Bibi had bitten two different social workers and kicked a guardian ad litem in the shin so hard the woman had limped out of the house.
Dante looked down at the five-year-old girl. His face didn't soften into that patronizing, baby-talk expression adults usually put on when they wanted something from a kid. He looked at her with the same serious, assessing gravity he had used on me.
"Honeycrisp," Dante said, his deep voice dropping an octave so it vibrated against the floorboards. "They’re crisp. If you drop them, they don't turn into brown mush."
Bibi walked right past me. She walked straight up to the most dangerous man in Greater Boston, reached into the open crate, and hauled out an apple the size of her two fists put together. She didn't say thank you. She just took a massive, wet bite that crunched loud enough to echo in the small room.
"It’s cold," she told Dante, chewing furiously.
"The room will be warm in twenty minutes," Dante told her. "Go back upstairs to your sister."
Bibi looked at him for another two seconds, decided he was acceptable, turned on her heel, and marched back into the dark with her apple and her blanket.
I let out the breath I hadn't realized I was holding.
"You still haven't answered my question, Dante," I said, stepping closer to the table, my shadow falling over his hands. "Why are you here? You don't do charity. My aunt used to say the Morettis don't cross the Charles River unless there’s money to collect or a body to hide."
Dante looked up at me. The harsh light of the bare kitchen bulb caught the line of his scar, turning it a dull, chalky white.
"Your aunt was right about most things," he said quietly. "She was wrong about this."
He reached into his inner pocket, pulled out a thick, leather-bound dossier tied with black ribbon, and set it flat on the table between the unpaid electric bills and the jar of peanut butter.
May you like
"Open it," he said.
***
