Neither of my father’s children will be there, and I’m sick of asking questions. I need to set the terms.

“After that. Two o’clock. At that bar,” I say.

“Sure. Bring the loser if you haven’t put a bunch of holes in him by then. We can check the place out together.”

There’s no together. I’m alone here. How many hours do I have before Massimo dies in the back seat? Should I go to the hospital? I didn’t plan for this.

“We’ll be there.”

“You got it all, babypop? B and 7th. You need to write it down?”

Cradling the phone at waist level, I tap the red dot, cutting the call before I agree to anything else.

That’s done, and I don’t know what I just did.

A crack like a gunshot shocks me out of my paralysis. It’s Junior, and behind him, his father, Tommy, aims a gun at my head.

CHAPTER 3

DARIO

Stay away.

Don’t come. Stay away.

When I say these words to her, they mean something different to me.

I will never see you again.

Dr. Palmeri sits on a wheeled stool, prodding at the gunshot wound in my side. There’s blood everywhere. He’s not acting like a doctor. He’s acting like a guy who’d hollow a woman and still sleep at night.

It takes so much energy to tell Sarah to stay away from this nightmare that after I say it, I slump on the wooden rack they’ve tied me to. It’s a bed when it’s one way, and on its side, it’s a way to keep a body exposed. Clever bastards.

When they unstrapped me from the hospital bed, I gave one guy a concussion and another one sore balls, but there were four of them and one of me. Eventually, they paralyzed me again and put me to sleep. I woke up here, in this new place, with free hands, no beeping, and no IV, wearing some kind of scrubs. The shirt got shredded when they wrestled me down again. The pocket ripped off. I don’t know what they think I’d keep in there anyway.

I have a white toilet, a dirty sink, and a sheetless cot with a shitty mattress. The floor has a drain in the center. The door has a tiny window and a thumb pad to open it, like the ones in that happy house in Yonkers.

“Why’d you tell her to stay away?” Sergio asks.

“Because fuck you.”

The four guys who wrestled me in here stand in the corners. They’re all thinking about killing me.

“You’re too old for spite, bro. You should have said, ‘Hey, baby, come home,’ like you meant it.”

The doctor’s been threading a needle so he can sew me up for the second time. No numbing, of course. Just for spite.

“This may hurt a little,” Dr. Palmeri mutters.

“Why do you care?” I can barely finish. Every time I speak, the doctor increases the pain with a hm.