The Rossi vow

Flour and Fire Camille The oven in the back of Manny's Bakery had been dying for three weeks, and I'd been dying right along with it. I crouched in front of it, wrench in one flour-dusted hand, a headlamp strapped crooked over my curls, muttering at the pilot light like it owed me money. In a way, everything owed me money. The electric bill. The city's back taxes. The landlord who'd started leaving notices under the door instead of calling, because calling meant having to hear me ask for one more week. "Come on," I whispered, thumbing the igniter. "You're older than me. Show some respect." The pilot caught, hissed blue, and held. I sat back on my heels and let myself have exactly three seconds of triumph before my phone buzzed against the tile floor — Bella, for the fourth time that morning. I didn't answer. I loved my sister with the ferocity of someone who had nobody else to love that way, but Bella had a talent for turning worry into hovering, and hovering was the last thing I had energy for at six in the morning with flour in my eyebrows and a business that was one bad week from closing. The bakery had been my father's before it was mine. Manny Ortiz built it with his own hands out of a failing laundromat, taught me to fold dough before I could tie my shoes, filled this little shop with a warmth that no amount of debt seemed able to burn out of the walls, even three years after his death. I could still stand in the kitchen at five in the morning and feel him there — humming off-key, dusting flour on my nose like a joke that never got old. I missed him so much some mornings it felt structural, like a support beam had been pulled out of me and the rest of me was just leaning against the gap where he used to be. The bell over the front door jingled. Too early for customers — I hadn't even flipped the sign. "We're closed," I called, not looking up from the oven. "Not for long, from what I hear." The voice was smooth, unbothered, entirely unfamiliar, and it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up before my brain had caught up to why. I stood, wiped my hands on my apron, headlamp still crooked, and found two men just inside the door like they'd been poured into their suits. Dark, tailored, silent. The kind of quiet that wasn't shy — it was practiced. "Sign says closed," I said, more carefully this time. "There's a reason for that." The taller one smiled like I'd told a joke he'd already heard. "We're not here for cannoli, Ms. Ortiz." My name in his mouth sent a cold thread down my spine. "Then what are you here for?" He set a folder on the display case, careful not to touch the glass, like even that might be beneath him. "Your father took out a loan nine years ago. Two hundred thousand, to save this place from foreclosure." "I know about the loan," I said, though my stomach had already started to sink, because I did know about a loan — I'd found the paperwork after my father died, a small local business loan, mostly paid off, one of a hundred quiet miracles that had kept this place alive. "It's almost paid." "That loan," the man said, "was paid off within the year. This is a different one." He opened the folder and turned it toward me. "Two million dollars. Compounded interest, nine years. Current balance, with penalties, is two point three." I laughed. It came out sharp, disbelieving, one syllable away from a scream. "That's — no. My father didn't have two million dollars. My father made croissants." "Your father," the shorter man said, speaking for the first time, "borrowed from people who don't send friendly reminder emails, Ms. Ortiz. We're the friendly version. Rossi Holdings doesn't usually send a reminder at all." The name landed in the room like a dropped plate. I'd grown up in this city; I didn't need a folder to know what Rossi meant. Everyone in Chicago knew what Rossi meant, the way you knew not to stand too close to the edge of the L platform — an instinct passed down rather than taught. "There's some mistake," I said, and hated how small my voice had gotten. "My father would never—" "Your father," the taller man said, not unkindly, which was somehow worse, "knew exactly who he was borrowing from. We'll be back for payment arrangements. I'd suggest having some idea of what you can offer." They left the folder on the case. The bell jingled again on their way out, obscenely cheerful, and I stood alone in my father's bakery with my hands shaking too hard to hold the paper steady. Two million dollars. I read the loan number twice, the signature at the bottom three times — my father's handwriting, unmistakably his, the same loops and hard-pressed T's he used to sign my school permission slips with. Whatever this was, it was real, and it was his, and now it was mine, sitting on top of a business that couldn't cover payroll past the fifteenth. I thought about calling Bella. I thought about calling the police, a lawyer, anyone. Instead I sat down on the flour-dusted floor of the kitchen my father built with his own two hands, pulled my knees to my chest, and let myself cry for exactly the amount of time I could afford before the ovens needed checking again. Four minutes. I counted them on the clock above the proofing cabinet. Then I stood, wiped my face with the back of my wrist, and went back to work, because the bread wasn't going to bake itself and the world, apparently, was not interested in giving me a single morning off from being afraid. I didn't know yet that this was the smallest fear I'd feel all year. I didn't know that three days from now, a man with storm-grey eyes and a scar through one eyebrow would walk through that same door, order a coffee like he belonged there, and tell me that the debt wasn't the only thing my father had left behind — that somewhere underneath the flour and the grief and the two-million-dollar hole in my life was a secret that had already gotten one Ortiz killed, and was hungry for another. For now, I just baked. Because it was the only thing left I kn ew how to do with shaking hands.