I pictured it. Dante, not much more than a boy, already jacked up on the engine oil of revenge and responsibility.
“Seems like he’s always been like that,” I said.
“Yeah.” Marco cracked a knuckle against the remote, then looked me dead in the eyes. “Which means if you die—if something happens to the kid—it’ll ruin him. So don’t die, okay?”
I gave a salute, two fingers to the forehead. “I’ll do my best.”
Marco nodded, satisfied. He closed his eyes again, this time for good, his chest rising and falling with the deep, even rhythm of someone whose body is finally allowed to rest.
I took his warning back to the kitchen and tried to be useful. But the very concept of use had gone slippery—everything I did felt smaller than the world-sized problem looming beyond the frosted windows. I finished stacking groceries, realigned the vitamin bottles, swept a finger across the counter to chase away crumbs that had only just landed. My mind wandered to BioHQ, to the lab in Dante’s penthouse, to the rows of pipettes and gene markers and every experiment I’d left half-finished. The scientist in me wanted a protocol for this, a checklist, a fail-safe, or at least a hazard pay line item. Instead, all I had was instinct, and the growing certainty that survival required more than intelligence or even luck. It required adaptation.
I looked at the note again: Don’t freak out. Love you.
It was the last bit that stuck. The most threatening.
A memory surfaced, sudden and jagged—a late night in grad school, hunched over a microscope with U2 blaring in the background and my lab partner, a tiny woman who always slicked back her curly red hair, making dark jokes about how we’d never escape the fluorescent hell of academia. What would she think of this? Of me, hunched in a rented kitchen, plotting how to keep a mob family alive through guile and protein bars?
I was fighting a war in my own head, two instincts wrestling for control. Was I a weapon, or a liability? Was I protecting the baby, or was I becoming the thing the Morettis needed to keep their own myth alive?
The front door squeaked, and with it, my heart. I wiped my palms on my pants, grabbed a kitchen knife and tucked it behind my back before forcing myself to the threshold. The cold hit first, then Dante, shaking off his jacket and stamping ice from hisboots. He noticed the knife instantly—his eyes flicked to it, then to my face, and he smiled that tiny smile again.
"Nice form," he said. "I approve."
I realized, with mild horror, that I'd left the blade sticking awkwardly from my waistband, handle up like a half-assed samurai. I was about to laugh it off, but Dante closed the distance and took my hand, lowering both knife and nerves. "You don't need that," he said. "Not inside."
He kissed my temple, casual but practiced, his hand lingering at my jaw, thumb stroking the hinge where my teeth met. "Everything good?"
"Everything's... static," I said. "Marco's watching cartoons. He wants to know why no one lets the rabbit have the cereal.”
He rolled his eyes, but I felt the tension leak from his shoulders. "That rabbit's a degenerate. Never learns."
"And you're better?" I said, smiling finally, letting the knife fall to the counter with a clatter.
He shrugged, but there was a new tightness in the way he moved. The walk hadn’t done anything to relax him; if anything, he seemed deeper in the grip of whatever gears were turning in his head.
He poured himself more coffee and leaned against the kitchen island, hands flat on the surface, body radiating a coiled energy that had nothing to do with caffeine. He was trying to look casual, but the way he stared out the window—with his jaw locked and eyes narrowed—killed any pretense.
"I should teach you to shoot," he said. No warning, just a declaration, tossed into the silence between us.
I looked at the knife beside my hand, tried to imagine trading it for the pistol he’d brought. The idea was both absurd and inevitable. "Can you even do that here? Aren't there laws? I thought Canada was supposed to be—"
He snorted. "You can shoot a gun at any number of sketchy ranges within driving distance of a border town. And we'd use a fake ID.”
"What, you want me to show up at a gun range five months pregnant, with a man with a head wound recovering on the bench beside me?"
He grinned, and for a half-second he was almost the old Dante again: reckless, beautiful, in love with chaos. "No. I want you to be able to hit what you’re aiming for when it matters."
I tried to picture it—my hands on the grip, the recoil, the accidental discharge, the giddy horror that even a scientist couldn't parse. But Dante was right. There was no logic in pretending I could white-knuckle this with kitchen implements alone.
"When?" I said.
He looked at me then, really looked, and there was pride and fear and something more than both. "Tomorrow. If the snowfall doesn't bury us. We'll go early, while the world’s still asleep. I'll wake you."
"You just want an excuse to drag me out of bed."
"I have many excuses to drag you out of bed." He leaned in, kissed my forehead. The bristle of his beard, the warmth of his mouth, all of it was a reminder of the world we were running toward as much as the one we were running from. "But I want you to be ready. I want you to have a weapon that isn't just me."
“Dante,” I said, throwing my arms around his neck. “You’re not just a weapon. You’re the father of my child.”
