---- with whiskey and a prayer, if you were lucky. She suddenly took my wrist, her finger tracing letters onto my palm: Miss, your hands are trembling. I snatched my hand back. She was right. I was trembling. Because these were the same hands that had held his; the hands of a woman married to the man who burned my parents alive. "Wait here." I pulled the check I'd prepared from my Hermes bag and pressed it into her hand.
"A month from now, I'll have a much better gift for you." Amonth from now, the divorce would be final. Claire shook her head, pushing the check back to me. She signed: ---- "T don't help people for money." Just then, her old phone vibrated. I only needed a glance to recognize the profile picture Vincent Santoro's private account. She answered, holding the phone to her ear, but it was obvious she couldn't hear well. On the screen, his voice was being transcribed into text.
The man's low, cold voice came through: "Where are you hurt?" She looked down at the screen, her lashes fluttering. The tips of her ears turned pink. She typed back fast: "T'm fine, just a scratch, you don't have to come..." But the roar of a sports car engine was already coming through the phone. ---- From the Santoro family's nightclub headquarters to the South Side, his custom-built Maserati would make the trip in twenty minutes, tops. He really does have eyes everywhere.
Claire gets a scratch, and he's on the phone instantly. But it seems his "eyes" only see Claire. Not the wife he's been married to for ten years. A bitter laugh escaped my lips. The last time I was attacked by one of Vincent's rivals, I was in the hospital for three days. All he did was have his underboss send a bouquet of white roses. The card held a single, typed line. "Don't die in the hospital. I don't have the time to claim your body." So, it wasn't that he didn't have time. It was that I wasn't worth it.