Rosa opened it with no more caution than she would have shown a neighbor returning a casserole dish. That lasted exactly one second.
Marco Benedetti filled the doorway in a dark coat with a gun under it and fury in his face.
His eyes swept past Rosa, found Dominic in the bed, and for the first time in twenty years something like open relief cracked through the stone.
“Boss.”
Marco took one step inside.
Dominic lifted a hand.
“Stop.”
The word came out thin, but it landed.
Marco froze because twenty years of obedience overrode everything else.
“They saved me,” Dominic said. “No one touches them. No one scares them. No one even breathes wrong in this house. Understood?”
Marco looked from Dominic to Rosa to the little room with the doll on the blanket and the colored drawings on the wall. His expression shifted through confusion, alarm, and something close to outrage.
“Boss, Vince is already telling people you’re dead. Half the crews are testing lines. We need to move.”
Dominic’s head fell back against the pillow. “I know.”
“You can’t stay here.”
“No,” Rosa cut in from the doorway, “he can’t. Which means you take whatever trouble follows him and keep it away from my street.”
Marco turned slowly toward her.
He was a man who had made grown men cry without raising his voice. Yet Rosa Martinez, five-foot-two, tired, and still wearing a flour-dusted apron, met him with all the fearlessness of an old woman who had buried the people she loved most and no longer found intimidation very impressive.
“No cars outside. No men on my block,” she said. “You want him alive, then keep your shadow out of my neighborhood.”
Marco blinked.
