THE DON’S CAPTIVE

12

Chapter 12

The name on the screen was Daniel Marsh.

I knew that name the way you know a scar. By feel, in the dark, without having to look.

Daniel Marsh had been my mother’s boyfriend for three years when I was seventeen. He had moved into our apartment with two bags and a smile that never reached his eyes and a particular talent for making you feel like every problem in the room was somehow your fault. He had left when I was twenty, owing six months of back rent and taking the small amount of cash my mother had saved in the kitchen drawer.

I had not thought about him in two years.

I had not thought about him because I had gotten very good at excising things that could not be fixed and Daniel Marsh was firmly in that category.

“You know this name,” Dante said. He was watching my face with the focused attention he gave to things that mattered.

“Yes,” I said.

“Tell me.”

I told him. All of it, flat and factual, the way I processed things that had too much feeling underneath them to be approached any other way. When I finished Dante was very still in his chair.

“He knew your routine,” he said. “The alley. The bus. The shift times.”

“He visited my mother occasionally. Came to the apartment a handful of times after he left. I was still working at Rosario’s the last time I saw him.” I stopped. “He knew my route. He would have known the alley.”

“He sold the information,” Dante said. “Your movements, your schedule, your connection to Lucia. Someone paid him for a way to find leverage against me and he provided you.”

The word provided sat in my stomach like something cold.

“He did not know what would happen to me,” I said. Not defending him. Just clarifying, the way a diagram needed to be accurate to be useful.

“It would not have changed anything if he had,” Dante said, and his voice had the particular flatness that meant he was certain of it.

I thought about the alley. About the night that changed everything. About the fact that it had not been random at all, that I had been placed in that alley, that someone had pointed a finger at me and said there and Daniel Marsh had been the finger.

Something shifted in my chest. Not grief. Harder than grief. The particular fury of discovering that a violation you thought was accidental was actually chosen.

“I want to talk to him,” I said.

“No.”

“Dante.”

“Absolutely not.”

I looked at him across the desk. He looked back at me with an expression that was protective and immovable and under different circumstances I might have appreciated it more than I did right now.

“He used me,” I said. “He used my sister. He handed us to strangers for money and I have been sitting in this house thinking the night I was taken was a terrible accident of timing and it was not. It was arranged.” I held his gaze. “I want to look at him and I want him to know that I know.”

“And then what,” Dante said quietly.

“And then you do whatever you do.”

Silence.

He studied me for a long moment. Whatever he found in my face made something in his own go very careful.

“You understand what happens to him,” he said.

“I understand what happens to people who betray you,” I said. “I am not asking you to change that. I am asking you to let me have five minutes first.”

Another long silence. His thumb moved across the back of my hand, slow and unconscious.

“Three minutes,” he said finally.

Daniel Marsh was brought to the house that afternoon.

He looked exactly as I remembered. Average height, sandy hair thinning at the temples, the kind of face that was forgettable by design. He was frightened when they walked him into the room where I was waiting, frightened in the animal way of someone who understood fully what kind of house he was standing in.

Then he saw me and the fear shifted into something uglier. Relief, almost. Like I was a familiar landmark in a dangerous place.

“Aria,” he said. “Thank God. You have to tell them I did not know what they were going to”

“Stop,” I said.

He stopped.

I looked at him for a moment. I had been seventeen the first time I understood that adults were capable of a specific kind of cowardice, the kind that dressed itself up as circumstance. Daniel had taught me that. I had thought it was the worst lesson he had for me.

I had been wrong.

“You knew my schedule,” I said. “You knew the alley, the bus, the shift times. You gave that to someone and they put me in front of a man with a gun.”

“I needed money. I did not know they were going to”

“You did not ask,” I said. “That is the same thing.”

He opened his mouth. Closed it.

“You used Lucia,” I said. “A twenty year old girl who has spent most of her adult life in a hospital. You told them where she was and what room and who protected her and they walked in and took her in the night.” I paused. “She is fine. In case you were wondering. She is fine because he went and got her back.”

I did not gesture toward Dante, who was standing behind me and to the left, but Daniel’s eyes moved there anyway and whatever he saw in Dante’s face made the color drain out of his.

“I am not going to ask you why,” I said. “I know why. It is the same reason you took my mother’s money and the same reason you smiled at us while you were doing it. Because we were available and you needed something and the calculation was easy.” I looked at him steadily. “I just wanted you to see me. I wanted to be a person in front of you and not a resource before this is over.”

Daniel looked at me with something moving in his face that might have been shame if he were a different man.

“I am sorry,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “It does not matter.”

I turned and walked to the door and Dante’s hand found the small of my back as I passed him, warm and brief, and I walked out into the hallway and kept walking until I reached the library and closed the door behind me.

I sat in the chair by the window and looked at the grounds and breathed.

It took eight minutes before the shaking in my hands settled.

Not from fear. From the effort of standing in front of the person who had handed me to a stranger and speaking to him like he was worth the words. From the effort of not begging Dante to make it hurt more than it was going to.

From the effort of being the person I needed to be and not the person that room had wanted to make me.

The door opened.

Not Dante. Marco.

He crossed the room and sat in the chair across from me and looked at me with those open honest eyes of his.

“You all right,” he said.

“No,” I said. “But I will be.”

He nodded. He did not offer empty comfort. He just stayed, which was exactly right.

After a while he said, “For what it is worth. What you did in there. The way you spoke to him.” He paused. “Dante has not looked at anyone the way he looks at you. Not in the eleven years I have known him.”

I stared at the window.

“Marco,” I said quietly. “What happened to the woman in the photograph. The girl in the gallery.”

The silence that followed was long enough to tell me everything before he said a single word.

When he finally spoke, what he told me cracked something open that I understood would change the way I saw Dante Romano forever.

And it explained everything about the man that nothing else had.