“We rent a house for the month, wherever we land. Somewhere with good hospitals. I want someone to follow your pregnancy. I want you to be okay.”
He said it so matter-of-factly I almost missed the fear underneath. The same fear that had turned this trip from exile into…whatever this was. Exile with health insurance? Even the old Dante—the one who called me to his penthouse with biohacking and cold calculation—felt quaint compared to this.
This new Dante was all instinct and muscle and sleeplessness. The kind of man who combed rental listings at three a.m., cross-checked Yelp reviews for local hospitals, and still plotted the next six hours of our escape.
He wanted a house, not a hotel. Something defensible but boring. Not so rural we’d stick out, not so urban we’d get caught on every camera at every intersection. He wanted a doctor who wouldn’t ask questions. He wanted me horizontal, Marco alive, and a world without Caruso or feds or the slow collapse of the Moretti family.
At the border, we got lucky. No line, just a bored Canadian agent who glanced at us, glanced at the fake passports I didn’t know Dante had, and didn’t even roll the window down all the way.Marco was awake, snarking in the back, and when the agent asked our purpose, I said “family vacation” and almost meant it.
The sky was a pale, endless gray. A flock of crows split the clouds as we crossed into Fort Erie; for a second, I felt weightless. Was this freedom? Was this emptiness?
But then the moment passed, and errands took over. We found a grocery with a pharmacy, bought water, protein bars, and enough bandages to keep Marco together until at least the next county. Marco limped through the aisles like a zombie, telling strangers it was a “sports injury, don’t worry, I’ll live.” Which was mostly true.
Dante checked the security cameras in the lot, then made me walk every aisle twice, like maybe repetition could scrub the tension from our skin. “You’re eating for two,” he said, and loaded the cart with shelf-stable stew, vitamins, and enough Gatorade to drown Niagara Falls.
At checkout, the clerk eyed our haul and Marco’s battered face, but nobody in Canada seemed interested in other people’s business. For the first half hour, I felt almost invisible.
It was nice. Like New York, but with more sky.
The Airbnb was a single-story brick just off the water in a suburb that smelled like river mud and old furniture. There was a maple leaf flag on the porch, and you could see the lake from the living room. A family of ducks paddled past the window as we arrived, mocking every last drop of tension in me. I wanted to resent it, but I was too tired.
Inside, the house was overheated, reeking of fake lemon cleaner and dust. Family photos on every surface—smiling strangers, birthday cakes, a Christmas tree jammed against a window with plaid drapes. I wondered if the owner had any idea who we were, or what it was like to scrub blood from a Civic at 3 a.m. The baby kicked again, and I tried to take it as a good sign.
Marco collapsed on the couch with a satisfied groan. He sprawled shirtless, half-mummified in pharmacy tape, and started flipping through cartoons on a kid-locked Roku. “If anyone asks,” he said, “I’m your cousin from Montreal and these stitches are from a hockey brawl.”
“No one’s going to ask. And you don’t sound Canadian,” Dante said. “Just like an asshole.”
“Perfect, then.” Marco threw an arm over his eyes and was asleep in five minutes, TV blaring in garbled French.
I let Dante do his thing. He checked every exit, every window. Circled the house twice, dug a burner phone out of the potting soil by the back shed. I guess he really had every contingency accounted for. I watched him for a while, then watched the ducks. If I squinted, they could have been our little family—mine, even—paddling through cold water toward the next shore.
“Hey,” Dante said, coming in and brushing sleet from his jacket. “Everything’s clear.”
He looked more peaceful than I’d seen him since the penthouse, though still impossibly tired, like a runner who’d won only to realize the finish line was a lie. “You trust this place?” I asked.
He shrugged, perching on the armrest beside me. “I did the research. Owner’s a retired nurse, mostly rents to Americans in town for the casinos. She’s never home. Mailbox is stuffed with hotel flyers.”
I sipped the last of my tea. “What if Caruso’s people reach out here?”
“They won’t,” Dante said. “Caruso hates leaving the city. He’s got no cops here. Marco’s the only one who checked this rental; I used a dead-end email, different phone, prepaid through a shell.” He took my mug, finished the last inch, and set it beside a fake potted tulip. “Jade. I know this isn’t—”
“I know,” I said. “None of it was the plan.”
But for a second, it almost felt like it could be. The radiator’s thud and whistle filled the quiet.
“There’s a part of me that doesn’t hate this,” I said. “It’s like…domestic.”
I hated myself for saying it, but it was true. I felt safer here, in exile with Dante and Marco, than I had in the penthouse or BioHQ or even my own skin these past months. Maybe safety was just the absence of anyone telling you how to feel. Maybe it was a good lock on the back door, or the way Dante didn’t ask questions when I needed to pace from window to window, counting the ducks—three adults, five juveniles, all noisy and alive.
For the first time since the Moretti spiral started, I could let the tension unspool, even just a little. Maybe it was the baby, or the exhaustion, or just the fact that I was half a continent away fromeverything that used to matter. I loosened the grip I kept on my own mind. “Do you think it’s possible to just…hide? For good?”
Dante looked at me, that sideways glance he used when he didn’t want to be caught caring. “You want the real answer?”
“I guess it depends on what the real answer is.”
Under his stare, I could almost believe in another version of myself. The version who never went to that first mafia gala, who stayed safe and predictable and just a PhD doing important research. But every time I tried to imagine another timeline, I ended up here: this couch, this bruised smile, this battered man babysitting a soft-footed criminal and the world’s smallest future Moretti.
Dante ran a hand through my hair and I leaned into his shoulder, letting the rise and fall of his breath ground me. “If you want truth: There’s always someone who finds us. That’s the deal with being who I am. But if we stay boring enough, if we act like we belong, it won’t matter. Not for a while. Surveillance is for sharks. Little fish survive.”
