The Capo's Feral Widow

I married into the bratva the way other women marry into a mortgage — with paperwork and regret. Then I buried the man and thought I was done. I wasn't. The family sent a capo called Rook, who rides a matte-black bike and orders coffee he never drinks. He wanted a route only my dead husband knew, and I told him I didn't have it. Three days later my aunt's taqueria got shot up, and the only number I had left was his. Two weeks on the back of a motorcycle with a man who doesn't ask questions. A motel room with one bed. His hand on my hip at eighty miles an hour. The route was never my husband's. It was mine, handed down through the stories he wouldn't stop telling. I gave it back to the family, but I kept the bike. I kept the road. And when he asked where I wanted to go, I told him the truth: nowhere you're not.