Chapter 1: Jade
The city had never been quiet before.
Tonight, New York was too quiet. Even the sirens sounded distant—like they’d given up. I hated it. The silence pressed in, thick and unnatural, like the world was holding its breath. Even Dante moved differently: not like a man, but a shadow that had finally stopped pretending. He dragged a suitcase behind him, the other hand curled tight around something heavy and metallic. I didn’t want to look too close. Every time he passed me, he carried the scent of winter: cold, sharp, impersonal.
He was scared. I’d never seen him scared before.
Not like this.
I sat on the edge of the bed—his, mine, ours, who knew anymore—clutching the mug of peppermint tea he’d made for me. He set it down like I was a guest, like I might break if he got too close. The only thing keeping me anchored was the heat of the mug,the way it scalded my palms and left a damp ring on the glass end-table. My fingertips throbbed, nerves shot, but I held on anyway.
Dante didn’t speak until he’d zipped the bag up and tossed a wool sweater over my shoulders. “We leave before it gets light.” No question, no room for debate. Just a fact.
I stared through him, past the penthouse lobby, and imagined what was in front of us. I thought I could see past the doorman who waved extra-slow when I stumbled by with my tubes of sample vials, past the river and the neat city blocks between here and BioHQ. I tried to picture where we’d go. I tried to picture a future that didn’t end at sunrise.
If Dante Moretti was afraid, was I an idiot for not being terrified? Or was that just too much faith in him?
“Drink,” Dante said, voice flat as an empty bottle. I took a sip, just to keep from saying anything that might snap the thin thread holding him together. Peppermint stung my tongue. Two sugars, just like I liked. He lowered himself onto the ottoman, not the bed—he never could just sit on the bed—with that one-dimpled half-smile that used to mean everything was funny. Now it looked like a scar. “They’ll watch the trains first. Tunnels. Then bridges. Caruso has friends in the transit commission.”
“So how do we leave?”
He set the gun on the glass table with a clink that made me flinch, then fished a battered MetroCard from his pocket and laid it beside the gun. Odds on the table.
“We walk to Jersey. Across the river.”
I tilted my head, refusing to let him see me daunted. “You mean the George Washington Bridge. At four in the morning.”
His eyes flicked up, wary, admiring, angry. “What, you don’t like long walks on the beach?”
“I’m pregnant. Visibly, obviously pregnant.” I looked down at my stomach, as if he couldn’t see it. “I’m giving birth in like, four months?”
He nodded, grim affection in the set of his jaw. “All the more reason to go quietly.”
I set the mug down, licking the last of the sugar from the rim, and watched him repack my life into a dry-cleaner’s duffel. The process was methodical, almost meditative: less master criminal, more nurse on a graveyard shift, tending the terminally fucked. Every snap, every fold, was one less anchor to the city. I hated every piece of it.
“Is the suitcase for me?” I tried to smile. The joke didn’t land, but he nodded anyway, generous in that blank way that said he was already somewhere else.
Cars passed below, twin beams diffusing in the cold mist that hung over the city like a low-grade fever. I’d learn to hate this penthouse: too exposed and too insulated at once, like you could watch the world you’d ruined but never really touch it again.
“For what it’s worth,” Dante said, voice dry and exhausted, “I always pictured getting out of New York on a yacht. Somewhere tropical. Or at least with more cash.” He glanced over, like he was confessing a stupid fantasy.
“Did you ever think,” I pulled the sweater tighter, “that maybe you’re not built for running away?”
He looked at me, really looked, and for the first time all night the mask slipped. There was my Dante—or some version of him—smiling like the end of the world was a private joke. “Sweetheart,” he said, “nobody is built for this. We’re all improvising. Even Caruso.”
He picked up the gun, thumbed the magazine out and checked it with the unthinking grace of a pianist counting keys. It was supposed to make me feel safe, but all it did was remind me he’d never taught me how to use it. In the Moretti house, protection wasn’t a skill you learned. It was a tide that swept over you. Or smothered you, depending. That was a lesson I had just started to learn.
“What about Marco?” I asked. I expected him to dodge, to change the subject.
“He’ll meet us on the Jersey side. If he’s not followed. He can track my location on his phone.”
“And what if he is spotted? What if we don’t see him?”
He shrugged. “We run anyway. The two of you are my priority.”
I admired that: the simplicity, the surrender. Like he’d already rehearsed the possibility where we would end up oceans away, or dead, but wasn’t going to let it mean more than it did. Another contingency. Always another card up his sleeve. But I also hated it. I didn’t want to run. I wanted to go back to work. I wanted to go back to my normal life.
I pressed my palm to my face, bone-tired. There was a time I would have screamed at him for getting us into this mess. But now, after so many rewinds and reruns of the same nightmare, blame felt irrelevant—like arguing with the weather, or gravity.
