A Face From Somewhere

Marco drove with one hand on the wheel, radio low, and it took three quiet minutes before Leo stopped turning the sentence over in his head enough to ask about it.

"What'd you say to my sister back there?"

"Nothing important."

"She looked like you hit her with something."

"Old habit." Marco's jaw worked once.

"See faces sometimes that remind me of other faces. Comes with getting older. Ignore it."

Leo didn't ignore it. Three weeks riding with this man had taught him that pushing past a closed door only bought a longer silence, so he let it sit, watching the streetlights slide past the window in long orange smears against the wet glass, the wipers ticking their slow metronome across the windshield.

Marco reached to adjust the radio. His sleeve rode up — a scar, old, pale, deliberate-looking, along the inside of his forearm, a thin white line that ran nearly to the wrist.

He caught Leo looking and pulled the sleeve back down. Practiced. Automatic. The kind of motion a body does without asking permission from the mind first, the way you'd smooth a jacket over a stain you'd stopped noticing yourself years ago.

"You're quiet tonight," Marco said.

"Thinking about my sister."

"She's got a look. Like she's already decided the worst thing that's gonna happen to you, and she's just waiting to be right."

"That's oddly specific. For somebody who's met her all of twice in his life."

Marco didn't answer that. The silence sat heavier than the question deserved, thick enough that Leo found himself watching the dashboard clock instead of Marco's face, counting the minutes it took to disappear.

"You got kids?" Leo asked, mostly to break it.

"No." A beat, long enough that Leo almost regretted asking. "Had a niece. Long time ago. She'd be about your sister's age now.

If things went differently."

"What happened to her?"

"Wrong place." Flat. Final. "Learn that lesson early, kid. No such thing as an innocent bystander in this business. Only bystanders who haven't been sorted yet."

"Sorted how, exactly."

"You'll know it when you see it. Hope to God you don't, for your own sake." Marco's hands tightened once on the wheel, then relaxed, deliberate, like he'd caught himself doing something he didn't want witnessed.

Leo didn't ask anything else. Something in Marco's face when he said it reminded him, in a way he couldn't quite pin down or explain if pressed, of the look Mira got at three in the morning when she thought no one else in the apartment was awake enough to be watching her.

"You ever think about getting out of this whole life," Leo asked, testing the question carefully, the way you'd test ice before putting your full weight on it.

"Every day." Marco didn't hesitate on the answer, which surprised Leo more than the answer itself. "Every single day since I was younger than you. Doesn't mean I know how."

"What's stopping you."

"Same thing that's about to stop you, probably."

The light turned green. Marco pulled through it slow, unhurried, a man who'd made peace with never being in a hurry again.

"You get in deep enough, the getting out costs more than the staying in ever did. Nobody explains that part up front. Wouldn't be good for recruitment."

They pulled up to the warehouse, its corrugated siding streaked dark with old rust, one security light buzzing over the loading door, throwing a cone of sickly yellow onto cracked asphalt below it.

Marco cut the engine and sat a moment before getting out, hands still on the wheel like he needed a second to remember what they'd come here to do.

"Your sister give you a hard time about tonight?"

"She doesn't know specifics. Just that I signed."

"Keep it that way as long as you can." Marco looked at him — something like warning in it, or apology. "Some things, once a person knows them, they don't get to be innocent about the people they love anymore.

Your sister's spent a long time being innocent about you on purpose. Don't take that from her before you have to."

He got out before Leo could ask what he meant. Leo sat alone in the cooling car, the engine ticking as it lost heat, afraid now in a way that had nothing to do with the job and everything to do with the certainty growing in his chest that Marco knew something reaching back further than tonight. Further than Leo. Maybe further than Mira, too.

His phone buzzed.

Mira. Leo, talk to me.

He looked at it a long time. Thumb hovering. Typed back the only thing he could manage.

Fine. Just working. Talk later.

Delivered. Read. No reply came, which somehow felt worse than if she'd argued, and he sat there a moment longer before finally forcing himself out into the cold to catch up with Marco, already halfway to the loading door.

The warehouse door groaned open on a track that needed oil, and the smell hit him before his eyes adjusted to the dark inside — motor grease, cardboard, something else underneath it he didn't have a name for yet and wasn't sure he wanted one. Marco didn't look back to see if he was following.

Just kept walking, the way a man walks when he already knows the answer to whether you're behind him, because turning back has never once helped.

Leo followed anyway. Told himself it was because he'd already signed the paper, because there was no version of tonight where turning around made anything better, and mostly believed it.