I stared at it. In the world I'd married into, unknown numbers were never casual. They were tests, threats, or summons. My thumb pressed against the bare skin where my wedding ring used to sit. I'd taken it off two days ago and left it on Dante's nightstand, centered on his pillow like a period at the end of a sentence.
I answered.
It was Cara.
We met at a café downstairs. A Family-owned espresso bar on the ground floor of the building, the kind of place where the barista knew which customers to seat near the window and which ones to put in the back where the security cameras had a convenient blind spot. Neutral ground, technically. Sacred ground, supposedly. Violence was forbidden in Family establishments. That was the rule.
Rules, I was learning, were only as strong as the men who enforced them.
Cara arrived with an air of confidence, walking through the door like she owned the lease. She sat across from me with a smug smile, a supermarket shopping bag resting against the leg of her chair. Three months pregnant and balancing on thin high heels that clicked against the tile floor with deliberate precision. Every step calculated. Every angle of her body arranged for maximum effect. She looked at me as if she had already won.
I watched her settle into the chair. Watched her fingers drift to the hollow of her throat, pressing there lightly, two fingertips against skin. A gesture that looked like feminine vulnerability. I knew better now. I'd seen her do it outside the hospital, in the rain, the night she stood under Dante's umbrella and smiled at me like I was something to be pitied.
"I thought you wouldn't come," she said, a smug lilt in her voice. "After all, you never replied to my messages."
The café was quiet. Two old men at the counter nursing espressos. The barista wiping glasses with studied disinterest. The hum of a refrigerator. The faint smell of roasted beans and something sweeter underneath, vanilla, maybe, or almond. A normal place. A place where normal things were supposed to happen.
I smiled calmly. My heart was steady, not a flicker of emotion breaking through. I had rehearsed this stillness. I had learned it from watching the men in Dante's world, the ones who could order terrible things without raising their voices, who understood that the person who speaks first from anger has already lost.