Chapter 1 - The Girl Behind the Bakery
The dog showed me his teeth before I saw the child.
It was six in the morning, cold enough that the steam from the bakery vents looked like smoke. I had taken the long way to my car because I needed ten minutes without my men, my phone, or another person asking what I intended to do about my uncle. Baltimore was waking up around me. Delivery vans rattled over the cobblestones. Somewhere beyond the rooftops, a church bell struck six.
Then something growled behind a pile of flattened cardboard.
I stopped.
The dog was small, brown and white, with a torn ear and a body so thin I could count the ribs beneath his wet fur. He stood over a bundle of gray blankets beside a black garbage bag. His legs trembled. He still managed to look at me as though he would fight me to the death.
“Easy,” I said.
He bared his teeth again.
I took one careful step sideways, enough to see what he was guarding. A girl lay curled against the brick wall, her head resting on the dog's flank. She could not have been older than eight. Her brown hair had escaped a loose braid. One boot was missing a lace. She wore a mustard-colored sweater beneath a coat much too thin for the morning.
I had seen men bleed out without flinching. I had ordered other men out of rooms with one look. But a child sleeping on cardboard in a neighborhood my family had claimed to protect made my stomach tighten in a way I did not recognize.
I crouched. The dog's growl lowered, but did not stop.
“I'm not touching her,” I told him.
The girl woke at the sound of my voice. Her eyes opened slowly, then widened. She pulled the dog closer and pressed her other fist against her chest, as though holding something beneath her sweater.
“Please don't take him,” she whispered.
“I wasn't going to.”
“People always say that.”
I had no answer worth giving. Not to a child who already knew that promises could be dangerous.
“My name is Matteo,” I said. “What's yours?”
She looked beyond me, checking the empty alley. “Wren.”
“Are you hurt, Wren?”
She shook her head, then winced when she moved. Her lips were blue with cold.
“Where's your family?”
Her fingers tightened around the dog's fur. “My dad told me to wait where no one would look.”
“How long?”
She shrugged. Children should not be able to shrug at questions like that.
I pulled off my overcoat and placed it on the cardboard between us. The dog sniffed it. Wren watched my hands as I moved, especially the black compass tattoo across the back of my left hand. She looked away so quickly I almost missed it.
“Is he your dog?” I asked.
“His name is Button. He used to belong to everybody on our block. Then the block got emptied, so he's mine.”
“What do you mean, emptied?”
“Yellow notices on the doors. People arguing. Then the fire.”
My pulse changed. The night before, a warehouse near the eastern harbor had burned. The papers were calling it an electrical accident. My uncle Victor had called it an unfortunate delay in our redevelopment schedule.
“What fire, Wren?”
She shook her head. “I'm not supposed to tell strangers.”
“Smart rule.”
“Even if they have nice coats.”
“Especially then.”
For the first time, the corner of her mouth moved.
I took my phone from my pocket, but her face hardened at once.
“No police,” she whispered. “Daddy said the badge man told the bad men where we were.”
That could have been a frightened child's misunderstanding. It could also have been exactly what happened. I had spent too much of my life among dishonest officials to dismiss either possibility.
I sent my driver a message asking him to come alone and bring the heater up in the car. Then I put the phone away where she could see it.
“Your father gave you instructions?”
She nodded.
“Tell me only the part you want to.”
Wren swallowed. “He said if he didn't come back, I should find the man with the compass on his hand.”
My left hand went still.
I had gotten that tattoo at twenty-one. A compass rose with a tiny broken point, copied from a brass trinket my younger sister Ada gave me before she disappeared. Almost nobody outside the family knew what it meant.
“Who told your father about the tattoo?” I asked.
Wren studied me. The dog pressed against her knee.
“My mom.”
“What's her name?”
She looked down. “She's dead.”
A delivery truck passed at the mouth of the alley. Its tires hissed over wet pavement. I waited while the sound faded.
“I'm sorry,” I said.
She seemed surprised I had not asked another question. Then her eyes filled, and she whispered, “She was nice before she got sick. Dad says I have her mouth.”
There it was again, something I had noticed without wanting to: the set of her jaw, the way the left corner of her lips turned down when she was trying not to cry. It reminded me so strongly of Ada at nine years old that I looked away.
My sister had left our family nearly a decade earlier after an argument I still replayed in the dark. I had been told she wanted no contact. When our father's funeral came, she didn't appear. Three years ago, a private investigator hired by Victor claimed she had died under another name. I accepted the report because I was too proud to challenge it.
I was beginning to hate that decision.
My driver, Luis, reached the alley but stopped at my raised hand. He knew better than to approach a frightened child with a dog standing guard.
“Wren,” I said, “there's a warm car around the corner. I can bring you and Button somewhere safe. You can keep him with you the whole time.”
She studied Luis, then me.
“Will you take my dad's thing?”
“No. It's yours until you decide otherwise.”
She lifted the hem of her sweater. A small tin box was tied beneath it with a piece of string. She held it with both hands, not offering it, merely letting me see its dented blue lid.
“My dad said you would know why he was scared.”
“What did he tell you my name was?”
“Matteo Ferraro.”
I felt Luis turn toward me.
Wren looked from the tattoo on my hand to my face. Her voice became barely more than breath.
“Then you really are him.”
“Who told you about me?”
She reached into the tin and took out a faded photograph. In it, a young woman laughed beside a garden fence with a baby in her arms. I knew the woman before I saw her face clearly. I knew the slant of her shoulders, the laugh I could almost hear, the tiny scar at the end of her eyebrow.
Ada.
My sister.
Wren watched me study the picture.
May you like
“My mom’s name was Ada,” she whispered. “She said you were her big brother. She said if anything happened, I should find you.”
And for the first time in twenty years, I could not think of a single command to give.
