I didn’t want Dante to get hurt again. And if we had to get out of here, we had to get out of here. That was that.
“I’ll need to get in touch with my family,” I said.
“I know. Don’t worry,” he replied. “I’ve taken that into account.”
The next hour was a ballet of packing and pacing. I moved from room to room, ferrying half-dead houseplants from window sills to the kitchen, wiping fingerprints from the fridge, deleting text threads, unsyncing calendars. Rituals for the end-times, as practiced by exhausted PhD candidates and mobbed-up fugitives alike.
Dante floated through it, watching but never interfering. When I left the outline of a DNA double helix on the whiteboard in the guest bedroom, he didn’t say a word. Just paused, looked, then erased it with his palm.
“Are you ready to go?” he asked, voice as thin as the hour.
I nodded. “What if I say no?”
“We go anyway,” he said, then softened: “But if you need ten minutes, you get ten minutes.”
I needed all ten. And all the minutes after. There was nothing in this world slower than the countdown to an escape you didn’t believe in. To an escape you desperately didn’t want.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go.”
I insisted on walking beside Dante when we left, even though his entire body vibrated with the need to shield me—sometimes with his own body, sometimes with the literal shield of his open jacket arm, forcing me onto the inside of the curb like we were in some vintage sitcom about a very tall, very tense man trying to date a broken umbrella. But on the street—at the hour the city was emptiest—Dante’s posture shifted, like any part of himself that remembered sunlight was now bracing for a shot aimed at his back.
We walked, duffel bag between us, the gun tucked where I couldn’t see it. I didn’t ask if he brought extra ammunition. I didn’t want to know.
“Where are we going? After Jersey?”
“We’re renting a car,” he said.
“Renting a car?” I echoed.
“We’re acquiring a car,” he clarified.
I raised my brows at him.
He pulled a sheet of paper from his back pocket—folded to hell, illegible except to the man who’d written it half-drunk in the shower at midnight. “We ditch the rental upstate. Burner phones on the next leg, then switch cars again in Buffalo. Cross at the border on foot and get to the train station in Fort Erie. From there, it’s all Canada.”
“All Canada?” I repeated, hoisting the duffel higher. “That’s a big country, Dante.”
“Exactly why I picked it.” He grinned, no humor. “Big as the mess we’re in. I’ve heard Montreal is nice. Do you speak French?”
“No!”
His smile turned real, for a split second. “You’ll pick it up.”
The wind cut sharper the closer we got to the water, slicing through even the thick Moretti-grade wool. We walked in silence; I rationed my strength, focusing on the way the world blinked past—sidewalk cracks, sodium lamps, the spray of slush from a garbage truck’s heavy wheels.
By the time we reached the first ramp to the bridge, I was shivering so hard my teeth clicked.. “If no one’s watching the trains, does that mean we’re expecting company here?” I asked.
“Caruso has three guys who owe him by the river. I used to have six. Turns out murder is a tough way to die of old age.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I hope we don’t have to worry.”
A loaded answer. But then, everything was loaded with Dante. Especially the actual gun he handed me, wrapped in the lining of a hat like a bad holiday gift. “Where had you hidden this?”
“I didn’t hide anything,” he said. “This was in my pocket all this time. You just didn’t look.”
I shook my head, too overwhelmed to answer. It was cold, and I was worried.
