“Only if you narrate it like a wrestling promo.” Dante was threading us through traffic, voice brittle but alive. Better than nothing. At least it meant we weren’t dead yet.
He parked in the far corner of the lot, up against a crusted snowbank. Killed the engine. For a second, none of us moved. The world outside was sharp and cold and too bright.
Dante glanced at me, a hundred questions in his eyes. Then he looked at Marco—sweating through his coat, jaw locked, eyes glassy. That was all it took. The questions vanished. Dante slid out, wrapped Marco’s arm over his shoulder, and hauled him into the brittle night.
I grabbed the backpack—fake paperwork, burner phones, the usual—and followed, boots crunching on black ice. For once, my hands were steady. My body buzzed with a weird clarity. No fear. Just muscle memory: move, keep moving, don’t stop. Survival wasn’t luck or hope. It was repetition. You outlasted the world by refusing to let it pin you down.
The ER doors slid open and swallowed us whole. Inside, the lobby was overlit and over-warm, thick with the chemical tang of disinfectant and the drone of exhausted humanity. Nobody looked twice. We could have been any Americans, running froma monster bill. I led the way to the desk, story ready: car accident, pain, no insurance, visiting relatives. The triage nurse—pale, bored, pink scrunchie—took one look at Marco’s half-green face and waved us through like she’d seen it a thousand times.
The ER proper was a holding pen. Plastic chairs, old magazines, TVs blaring hockey and bad news: American politics, local stabbings, disaster crawling across the ticker. Marco leaned back, eyes closed, palms pressed to his stomach. If he was in pain, he hid it. More likely, he was just running on empty.
I sat between the Moretti brothers, triangulated by silence. The only soundtrack was the TV, French and English bleeding together, and the shuffle of patients in wheelchairs or paper-thin blankets. Dante tracked the intake hallway like a wolf, eyes on every orderly, every pair of cops, every detective-shaped shadow. We all did the math: tails, Caruso’s name on the news, the split-second between “just another family” and “headline.” I tried not to dwell on it.
A nurse called Marco’s fake name from behind the glass. Dante half-carried him down the corridor, shooting me a look: Stay. Maybe it was comfort. Maybe control. Either way, the second they disappeared, the room shrank, the lights got harsher, and my lungs felt too small for the job.
I checked the burner: two missed calls, one from my sister. My thumb hovered, but I had nothing to say that wasn’t just another defeat. I scrolled the news. Nothing from New York but weather and subway rats. The Carusos were ghosts. That was either the best or worst news possible.
I fidgeted. The ER saw me: tired, unwashed, belly tight under three layers of synthetic fabric. Nobody cared. Did I look like a future mother? Did I look like a million miles from a mob war? I hated that I blended in, but I couldn’t blame them. Here, the only stories that mattered were the ones with blood on them.
A doctor in navy scrubs materialized, face all business. “You’re with—” he checked the clipboard— “Jameson Sutherland?” Our fake last name. I nodded. “He’s being prepped for surgery. Minor procedure to close the wound, check for infection or internal damage. Shouldn’t be long.” He watched my face for a crack, but I kept it stone. He gave a thin, professional smile and vanished.
Behind me, Dante reappeared—hands scrubbed, eyes hollow, lips a bloodless line. “They’ll keep him for a night,” he muttered, dropping into the seat beside me. He didn’t ask if I was okay, and I didn’t ask him. Our hands found each other on the plastic between us; the contact was enough. “He’s already been shot and almost died, Jade. If anything happens to him, it will be my fault.”
“None of this will be your fault, Dante,” I said.
He let out a ragged breath. “You keep saying that.”
“It’s true.” I squeezed his hand. “You can’t control the world. Just yourself.” I wanted to tell him it wasn’t like him to be this scared, but that was a lie. It was exactly like him—to be afraid for everyone but himself. He carried the weight for all of us: me, Marco, the kid I carried like a secret under my ribs.
We sat there, side by side in the sickly light, and for once I let the silence do the work. There wasn’t an algorithm for waiting. Just endurance. Maybe hope, if you believed in that sort of thing.
We waited three hours. Marco was in and out of post-op before the nurse called us back. He was awake, ashen but lucid, a fresh row of tape across his stomach and the grin of an idiot who’d survived one more bad bet.
“See?” he said, holding up the IV like a trophy. “Canadian healthcare. They even gave me pudding.”
Dante rolled his eyes, but the relief in his posture looked like it might snap him in half. He leaned against the wall, boots splayed, laughing under his breath.
“Do you need to stay the night?” I asked, running through the checklist in my head. Marco shrugged.
“They said they’d like me to, but…” The look he gave Dante said it all. Waiting here might be safer, but laying low mattered more. Hospitals were never neutral ground, not for them.
Fuck, not for us.
Dante’s jaw worked, pure muscle memory. “We’ll take you home after visiting hours. You can sleep it off in the back seat.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Marco said. “Hey, Jade, give your boy a taste of this pudding. It’s not half bad.”
I tried not to look at the IV as I took the cup, but I did. He was so pale. Just a few days ago, he’d been cracking jokes through deathlike it was a game show. Now he was here, the last Moretti who could still make Dante smile.
I didn’t know if I wanted him to live, or if I was just afraid to grieve him too.
I passed the pudding back. “The baby’s staying out of this one, thanks.”
He gave me a thin smile. “Smart kid.”
“Is he? If he was really smart, he wouldn’t be a Moretti,” Dante muttered.
Marco laughed, but it was a weak sound. “Not even born and already making bad choices. That's our boy.”
