Cellie's POV
The address Silvana Cruz had given me was on the other side of the city.
A cab the whole way would eat into money I didn't have yet, so I calculated it the way I always did, walk as far as makes sense, then cab the last stretch to arrive looking like someone who hadn't just crossed half of Chicago on foot. I changed into the best version of professional I owned, a clean blazer, good trousers, the heels I saved for occasions that mattered, and I set out with my notebook in my bag and the address memorized and a feeling in my chest that was the first genuinely good thing that had happened since this morning.
I was so occupied with planning, running through what I knew about tutoring high school level English literature, mentally organizing what questions to ask about the student's specific weaknesses, that I didn't pay much attention to the neighborhood the cab dropped me at the edge of. I just noted the address on my phone, confirmed the street name, and started walking.
I had been walking for maybe four minutes when the feeling came back.
Not the morning dread, something different. A sharpening of the air, a quality of attention from the people on the street that was subtle but present, the way people in certain neighborhoods moved with a particular awareness of their surroundings that you learned to read if you had grown up around it. The businesses here had their shutters down even though it was midday. The men standing outside a restaurant two doors up stopped talking when I walked past and watched me go.
I kept walking. Eyes forward, pace steady, because hesitating was worse than continuing.
I was half a block from the address when a hand closed around my arm.
I didn't have time to react. I was lifted clean off my feet, a grip that was completely matter-of-fact about its own strength, and I was moving before I had processed what was happening, kicking and grabbing for anything I could reach and finding only air. I screamed, a real one, and heard my cab driver's door slam in the distance and his engine turn over as he apparently decided that whatever this was, it was not his problem.
The man carrying me was built like a wall with neck tattoos and the expression of someone completing a task on a checklist. He opened the door of a car that was idling at the curb, a sleek black Ferrari, and put me inside with the efficiency of someone who had done this before, and the door closed behind me, and I heard the locks engage.
I straightened up, breathing hard, and turned to face whoever was in the car with me.
Demetrio was sitting in the other corner of the back seat in an all-black suit, one elbow resting on the door, looking out the window at the street with the expression of a man who was very displeased about something and had been displeased about it for a while.
The car pulled away from the curb.
I stared at the side of his face for a full three seconds.
"Are you serious right now," I said.
His jaw ticked. He didn't look at me. "What were you doing in this part of the city?"
"I had a job," I said, and my voice came out harder than I intended because I could already feel the shape of what had just happened, the tutoring job, the address, the neighborhood I had not recognized, and the way all of those things were connecting in a way I was not going to like. "A tutoring job, one that pays a thousand dollars a session, which I was walking to when your guy picked me up like luggage."
That made him look at me.
"Say that again," he said.
"A tutoring job," I repeated, slowly and clearly. "Silvana Cruz. Her son needs English literature help. She called me from the university posting this morning and I was ten minutes away from the address when I got grabbed off the street." I held his gaze. "So whatever the reason is for this, it had better be a very good one."
Something moved through his expression, complicated and quick, and then his face closed back into that controlled blankness he wore like a second suit. He looked away.
"You can't go back there," he said.
"Why not?"
"Because that is Cruz territory." He said it flatly, like it was obvious, like I was supposed to already know the geography of Chicago's organized crime landscape the way other people knew their commute routes. "The Mexicans run the south and west quadrant of this city and that neighborhood sits square in the middle of it. A DeLeon walking into Cruz territory without an arrangement in place is not a tutoring session, it is a provocation."
I stared at him.
"She called me from a university posting," I said. "How was I supposed to know whose territory that neighborhood was?"
"You weren't," he said, and something in his voice shifted almost imperceptibly, less hard. "That's the point. You don't know the map yet and that makes you a liability to yourself."
"So your solution was to have me kidnapped."
"My solution was to get you out before anyone who recognized the Bianchi name decided to make a statement about it."
I sat with that for a moment. The car was moving smoothly through the city, putting distance between us and that street, and outside the window Chicago was doing its normal Tuesday afternoon thing, foot traffic and sun and the particular noise of a city that never fully quieted, and inside this car I was sitting next to a man who had just told me that my own name was enough to make me a target in certain parts of my own city.
That was a new and unwelcome piece of information.
I turned back to face him. "The job is gone, isn't it. She's not going to reschedule after I didn't show."
He didn't answer, which was its own answer.
The quiet fury that moved through me was different from the anger I usually felt around him. This was quieter and more specific, the kind that hurt because it had nowhere to go. I had needed that job. I had needed it badly enough that I had spent an hour planning and another two hours walking across the city for it, and it was gone now because of a geography I hadn't been given the map for.
He reached into his jacket and pulled out a roll of cash and set it on the seat between us.
I looked at it. I looked at him.
"No," I said.
"It's not charity," he said, in the tone of someone managing a negotiation. "It's compensation for the disruption."
"I said no." I pushed the cash back toward him across the leather seat. "I don't want your money, Demetrio. I didn't ask for it and I'm not taking it."
"You're being unreasonable."
"I'm being honest," I said, and I turned to the window because I didn't trust my face to hold the line if I kept looking at him. "There's a difference."
The car slowed and I realized we were already in front of my building, which meant he knew my address with enough familiarity to give his driver directions without consulting me. I filed that away.
The locks clicked open.
I grabbed my bag and got out and didn't look back, moving fast toward the building entrance because I needed walls around me and I needed him on the other side of them before I said something that could not be unsaid. I could hear the car door behind me and I moved faster.
His hand caught my wrist just inside the entrance hallway, pulling me around, and I turned and there he was, too close, the way he always managed to be too close, his jacket slightly displaced from moving fast, and he was looking at me with that grey-eyed intensity that I had not found a way to be immune to no matter how much I wanted to be.
"The job was real," he said quietly, and something in his voice was different, lower and less guarded than usual. "She probably didn't know what she was doing when she called you. I'll look into it."
I stared at him. "You'll look into my tutoring job."
"I'll make sure it doesn't happen again. That someone from Cruz's people doesn't try to use you to get to us."
"I don't need you to manage my employment," I said, and my voice was not entirely steady.
"No," he agreed. "But you do need to know the map." He hadn't let go of my wrist and I hadn't pulled it away and we were both aware of both of those things and neither of us was addressing them. "Come to Manuel's function on Friday."
I blinked. "What?"
"Your mother called you about it. Come. I'll make sure you know enough about the people there to keep yourself out of situations like this one."
I searched his face, looking for the angle, the calculation, the version of this that was about controlling me the way everything he did seemed to circle back to. But his expression was doing that rare, unguarded thing it occasionally did when he forgot to armor it back up fast enough, and what I found there was not manipulation. It was something that looked, uncomfortably, like concern.
I looked down at his hand around my wrist. He followed my gaze and released me.
"Friday," I said slowly.
"Friday," he confirmed.
We stood in the narrow entrance hallway of my building, the late afternoon light coming through the glass door behind him, and the space between us was loud with everything that had been accumulating since the first morning I had walked out of his room and tried to pretend it had never happened.
He stepped closer. Not much. Just enough.
"Cellie," he said, and that was it, just my name in that accent, and I had told myself a hundred times in the past weeks that I was not going to keep falling for exactly this, for the way he looked at me like I was the most inconvenient thing that had ever happened to him and somehow that translated into want.
He said something under his breath in Italian and then his hand came up to my jaw, tilting my face toward him, and I had one full second to make the rational choice.
I didn't make the rational choice.
When his mouth found mine it was not gentle and it was not tentative. It was the kiss of two people who had been arguing with themselves about this for weeks and had simultaneously, in the same moment, run out of arguments. I kissed him back with the same frustration I had been carrying since that morning, since the eviction notice, since Penelope's voice on the phone, since the tutoring job that was gone now, since every single way this day had tried to break me, and he kissed me back like he understood exactly what was in it and didn't flinch from any of it.
When I finally pulled back we were both breathing harder than was dignified and his hand was still at my jaw and mine had found his lapel at some point without my authorization.
I looked at him.
He looked at me.
"This," I said, very carefully, "is a terrible idea."
"Yes," he agreed, and his voice was rough in a way that did absolutely nothing for my resolve.
Neither of us moved.