Saving The Capo's Heir

Seven

Thomas

The vent hisses like an old man breathing. It’s the only way I can track time—twenty-count inhale, twenty-count exhale, the sigh of cold air that never changes temperature or smell. No windows. No sunrise. Just cinderblock walls painted the color of cheap milk, a camera with a red blink in the corner, and a single metal door that sings when the bolt throws.

Aaliyah is pressed against my chest, tiny palm fisted in my T-shirt. She snuffles, then settles, breath painting a warm patch under my jaw. Whoever took us understands at least one thing: if you keep the child with the man who’d die for her, she’ll be quiet. The first two days she cried like a siren. After that, she learned me. Now a hand on her back, a hum pitched low in my throat, and she softens like a small sun dimming to sleep.

We’ve been here a week. Maybe longer. My wrists and ankles say a week from the stages of the bruising—blue to yellow, yellow to green. The rest of my body says longer. Sleep happens in fragments, broken by noises in the hall or the skitter of roaches that never quite reach the cot. I don’t sleep when I can help it. Sleeping is when the old nightmares kick in, teeth and black water and the last gunshot I couldn’t stop.

I use the time to count. I count how many seconds between the vent’s hiss and the bolt’s click. I count the steps of the guards outside—heavy, two sets, male, their weight distributed heel-to-toe like men who have stood watch before. I count the white tiles on the floor (thirty-two by twenty-one, one cracked near the drain). I count breaths when Aaliyah startles awake and I whisper, you’re safe, little one, knowing we’re not safe but telling her anyway.

They feed us when they think I’m asleep. It took me two nights to figure the pattern. The camera’s red dot brightens by a hair right before the bolt turns. The door opens five inches, the first man slides in a tray, the second holds the baton. If I’m upright, the baton taps the tile twice—warning. If I’m on the cot with my back turned, they leave the food and the formula and slip out like smoke.

Whoever runs this prefers order. They want the child alive, not screaming. They want me intact—useful as a caretaker, useless as a fighter.

I was trained for worse. Not military. Private. A retired Army sergeant who took one look at me at eighteen—angry, broke, mean to myself—and decided I might be good at keeping people alive if I learned how to aim my anger outward. He hired me to guard his daughter after his wife was shot in a grocery-store parking lot. We built a routine out of caution. I memorized routes and plates; he taught me how to think like a threat. It worked, until it didn’t. Men with dead eyes and perfect timing put holes in both of them in front of me. I passed every test with fists and failed the only one that mattered.

The nightmares started then. Waves swallowing a child’s scream. Blood in the grout. The smell of copper and cordite. I tried drinking the images down the drain. They floated.

Years later, I saw Esmé.

She was walking down 104th like a bullet dressed as a woman—blood on her sleeve, a look in her eyes I recognized from my own mirror. The world had tried to kill her; she’d killed it back. I didn’t deserve a second chance, but the universe shoved me into one. I fell into pace beside her and never stepped away.

I don’t give speeches. I don’t promise. But I made a vow that night, quiet, the kind that welds itself on the inside of your ribs: if she ever had a child, and the world tried it again, I would be between the child and the bullet. And if I failed, I’d make the failure so expensive the world regretted charging me for it.

So here I am. Between Aaliyah and everything else. Failing and refusing to be done failing.

I hum old songs. I count footsteps. I put my palm over the camera sometimes and smile. The one time I flipped it off, the food didn’t come. Lesson learned: keep the temper inside. Rage is leverage if you can hold it.

The door doesn’t open for two days. When it does, I’m at the sink washing the bottle, back to the room, Aaliyah on the cot with pillows braced so she can’t roll. I would never leave her like that if the camera weren’t watching—somebody in a dark room is making a checkmark on a list: caretaker demonstrates appropriate infant safety protocol. They’re taking notes. They think this is inventory.

The bolt slides. The metal sings. I turn. Two men and a woman fill the doorway, all in black—no insignia, no casual tells, just ski masks and gloves. The leader is tall with a wrestler’s neck; the second is compact, knife already in his hand; the woman stands the way you stand at the edge of a cliff, feet planted, hands loose, waiting.

“Hand her over,” the tall one says. Accent—Stateside Spanish, Miami edge, could fake either. The voice is trained flat.

“For what?” I ask, already moving, already lifting Aaliyah against my chest with one arm, already stepping to put the cot between them and me. I won’t give her height to fall from.

“Hand. Her. Over.” He touches the baton at his belt like a promise.

“No.” I straighten. There are words for men who negotiate here. I’m not that.

He nods to the compact man. They move fast—good footwork, good angles—enough that I clock the woman’s role in an instant.

She’s the hands that take the child once the men break me. She breathes in, breathes out, eyes flicking to Aaliyah’s face and away, like it burns to look too long.

“Are you sure about that?” the leader asks, as if the script requires a voluntary compliance option before escalation.

“Yes.” My voice is calm. It’s the calm that comes before something breaks.

The baton arcs. I try to pivot my knee away, but they anticipated that—he turns his wrist and brings it low, side-on, slamming into the outside of my knee in a move designed for riot control. Pain flares white, my leg collapses, and I’m on my knees with Aaliyah crying against my throat, the sound tearing something I didn’t know I had left.

The second man’s knife finds my jugular and kisses it. Warmth beads where the tip bites. The blade’s at least five inches, practical, not show. I remember the sergeant’s voice: knives are conversations; guns are endings. I don’t intend to converse.

“Are you going to give her up now?” the leader asks.

I shake my head. The knife digs deeper. I ignore the heat on my neck and focus on keeping Aaliyah’s face turned into me so the blade is nowhere near her.

“Don’t damage the merchandise,” a voice crackles overhead, fed through a speaker near the corner. The audio is flattened—like the voice is being filtered through two different programs and a cigarette. Male, middle-aged, theatrical.

Merchandise. The word scrapes me raw.

“Bring the child,” the voice says. “He stays. If he resists, break something he needs to walk. Nothing vital.”

The baton eases back a fraction. The knife does not.

The woman steps forward. Her eyes—brown, I think; it’s hard to tell with the shadows—hold steady on mine for a fraction of a second. I watch for a flinch, a human edge. She gives me none. She extends her arms.

“You won’t risk her,” she says, and the softness in her voice isn’t compassion; it’s the kind of pity you give a man about to lose a hand for stealing bread.

“Try me,” I say.

And then the blade bites hard and quick into the meat above my collarbone. The shock is more heat than pain for a second, and that second is enough for the woman to wrench Aaliyah from my arms.

Aaliyah screams. The sound is high and furious and confused, and it vibrates the bones behind my ears. I reach for her and the baton snaps across my forearm. Something in my wrist sings—tendons, not bone, but it steals grip strength, and my fingers won’t close.

“Please,” I say, because there are only two words left that matter when nothing else works. “She’s a baby.”

The woman doesn’t answer. She holds Aaliyah wrong—not dangerous-wrong, but wrong like someone who practiced with a doll.

She does adjust her hand when Aaliyah’s head rolls, and that little adjustment is a mercy that hurts worse than the cut.

They move like a drill. Out. The door swings. The lock hammers home. Aaliyah’s cries bounce once, twice, thinner, then swallowed by the hall.

I press my forehead to the cot. The sheet still holds her warmth. It disappears under my skin like breath in winter.

I don’t cry. My eyes water because that’s what eyes do when you refuse to blink. I breathe on a ten-count until the shaking in my wrist turns into pain I can stack neatly on top of the cut. I tear a strip from the bottom hem of my shirt and make a bandage. It isn’t pretty, but it’s not supposed to be.

I touch the camera with two fingers and speak to it like a priest giving a benediction before a war.

“Listen,” I say, voice low, steady, and meant for whoever is at the other end of that red blink. “You’ll think I’m a problem for the woman who runs me. I’m not. I’m a problem for men like you. If you hurt that child, there isn’t a bone in your body I won’t learn the name of.”

The light doesn’t change. It never does. But I see myself in the reflection on the lens—blood at the neck, grim mouth I don’t recognize, eyes that look like the sergeant’s used to when we both thought we were done being surprised by how cheap life is.

I wash the blood down the tiny sink. I clean the cut with water and the single alcohol pad they left last time as “medical care.” It stings enough to make my vision white. I welcome it. Pain is proof I’m still here.

They don’t come back that day. Or the next.

The routine changes. The food still arrives, but not the formula. They want the rhythm of her hunger to reset, maybe. Or they want to see how long before I pound on the door and beg. I don’t pound. I sing to the empty cot so that my throat remembers lullabies and not threats.

I sleep for minutes at a time, crouched near the drain where the floor is coolest. The nightmares that find me are not about the sergeant’s daughter or the man at the grocery store. They’re about a hallway where sound disappears, and a baby’s cry getting smaller instead of closer.

The bolt sings again on what I count as the third day. I’m stuck between wanting to be upright and wanting to be a scorpion pressed flat to the floor. I choose upright. If they’re bringing her back, I want to be human. If they’re not, I want to look like a man.

The door opens four inches. The compact man slides a small item across the threshold—plastic, crinkled. A pacifier, clear shield, cheap. It bumps my bare foot and stops.

A test. A taunt. Or a communication from someone outside this room trying to tell me there’s a gap.

The woman isn’t with them. It registers and sticks. I file it under variables.

“Where is she?” I ask.

No answer. The tall one’s head tilts just slightly, like he’s listening to the voice above. The door closes. The bolt seats.

I pick up the pacifier and wash it. I put it on the cot where Aaliyah’s head would rest. I stare at it until the air turns to glass.

You can only hold poison in your mouth for so long before it finds your blood.

Fine.

I inventory my options like a grocery list.

The camera’s angle misses the far corner by the sink—half a foot of shadow where I can stage things I don’t want watched.

The bolt is manual; there’s a key. Keys require pockets, belts, habits.

The compact one favors his left ankle—he’s guarding an old injury. His pivot is cautious.

The tall one brings the baton up high before he takes it low. He’s trained for crowds, not a single man at close-quarters.

The woman adjusted the baby’s head. Something in her training made room for that. People with training can be reached.

Sometimes. Not with speeches. With a hitch in their routine at the right moment.

I begin to move things the way you move pieces on a board only you can see. I loosen the leg of the metal cot—just a quarter turn, then another—enough that if weight falls on it wrong, the whole frame will tilt. I strip a screw from the baseboard grate using the corner of the food tray and hide it in the shadow by the sink. I clean the blood the guards never notice because men who bring batons to arguments rarely notice blood unless it’s on their shoes.

I build a trap for my own fear. It’s small and mean and made of patience.

And I wait.

Hours stretch until they go taut. Feet scuff outside. A new voice, low and gravelly, says something in a language I don’t recognize—maybe Russian, maybe Croat; vowels chewed, consonants clean. The bolt clicks. The door opens wider this time. The woman is back. She steps in first. Her head is bare now, no mask. She’s younger than I expected. Twenty-two, twenty-three. Pretty, in the way of someone who keeps her face still so it won’t betray her. Her mouth is the kind you can’t read. Her eyes do the reading for both of them.

In her arms—Aaliyah.

I don’t breathe. I don’t dare. The surge of relief is a kind of pain.

The tall man lingers behind her. “We’re going to clean the room,” he says. “You will sit. You will not move.”

I sit. Not because he told me. Because the woman is watching my hands, not my eyes, and I want her to see them open, palms up, empty. I am a dog backing away from a bowl, letting the child eat first. I am a soldier who learned an ugly trick: how to look harmless without giving up harm.

She crosses to the cot. Her hold is better this time. Someone showed her how. She places Aaliyah down, and for one second our hands both touch the same corner of the blanket. Her fingers are cold. Mine are shaking.

Aaliyah fusses, then finds the pacifier. Small mercy, big sound—quiet. She blinks and—God—she almost smiles. My throat tries to swallow my own heart.

The compact man crouches by the drain, unscrewing the grate. He pockets the screw without thinking. He’s going to regret that. The tall one starts to strip the sheets. The woman steps back, out of their way, and her eyes—just briefly—flick to the camera. The blink is steady. She swallows.

There it is. The hitch.

“Thank you,” I say, soft, like I’m speaking to the baby, but pitched to land in the space between her collarbone and ear. “For adjusting her head the other night.”

She doesn’t look at me. But the muscles in her jaw tense once. A tell.

The tall one rips the fitted sheet, curses, and leans his weight on the cot to yank it free.

The leg I loosened gives. The metal frame tilts and drops with a clang that makes everyone flinch—all of us except Aaliyah, who is too busy doing the important work of being alive.

The compact man’s instinct yanks him up fast—bad ankle, bad pivot—and his knife hand goes wide. The tall man’s baton is still holstered because he was using both hands on the sheet. The woman’s hands flex as if to catch a falling child who didn’t fall.

Three openings. None clean. One enough.

I don’t move. Not yet. I memorize the shape the chaos made and put it in my pocket.

They reset the cot with grumbling and a new curse. The tall one eyes me like he’s sure I did something, but he can’t prove it and it pisses him off. Good. Anger is a sloppy teacher.

They finish fast. The woman lifts Aaliyah, lays her back down with a small, practiced roll. When she steps away, she takes a breath that she holds for two seconds before letting it out slow. She is telling herself a story about her role that keeps her from drowning.

The door opens. They file out. The lock slams.

I touch the leg of the cot and tighten it back by feel.

“Brave girl,” I whisper to Aaliyah, who is staring up at the vent, eyes tracking the breath of a building that thinks it is a lung. “Your mother is coming.”

I say it because I believe it like I believe gravity. Because I’ve seen Esmé walk into rooms filled with men twice her size and leave with their loyalty or their throats. Because Mason won’t sleep until the world apologizes.

Because the universe owes me a second second chance, and I intend to collect with interest.

I wait for the vent’s hissing to find its long exhale. I close my eyes for three breaths. I open them with a list of names in my head and a plan gripped in my teeth.

Hold on, Aaliyah.

Hold on, Esmé.

You taught me how to end a story with fire.

I am ready to light the first match.