Recap
The heavy oak doors of the Hanover 24-hour library shut behind Dante with a hollow, echoing thud. At 11:15 PM, the campus is a ghost town, swallowed by a thick, freezing mist rolling off the river. Dante pulls his thin coat tighter over his navy suit, his brain fried from three hours of geopolitical theory. He is running on fumes.
He steps down the granite stairs, his eyes scanning the quad. His brain registers the anomaly instantly.
Parked illegally in the “Authorized Personnel Only” cobblestone circle is a beat-up red sedan.
Leaning against the base of a stone gargoyle near the library steps is a wiry figure. Backward baseball cap. Jittery, high-energy posture. He’s tossing a silver Zippo lighter, catching it, tossing it again.
Dante freezes. His blood runs completely cold.
“Yo! Hogwarts!”
Fernando “El Niño” Alvarez pushes off the gargoyle. He moves with a restless, coiled-spring energy, his blue eyes wide and sharp under the brim of his cap. He’s grinning, but it’s the kind of grin a stray Pitbull gives before it locks its jaw.
“Look at this place, man,” Fernando says, gesturing wildly at the gothic spires. “Coño, it deadass looks like Batman’s gonna swoop down and ask for my license and registration. What up, college boy?”
Dante’s posture stiffens. The Hanover armor locks into place, a desperate, automatic defense mechanism. He walks down the remaining steps, his expression wiped clean of exhaustion, replaced by a cold, ironic mask.
“Fernando,” Dante says, keeping his voice even, though his heart is hammering against his ribs. “You’re a long way from the 7 train. What are you doing here?”
“Takin’ a tour,” Fernando laughs, a sharp, barking sound. An intricate portrait tattoo of a little girl is visible on his forearm—his daughter — Isabel. He taps it twice, a nervous tic. “Gotta look at colleges for my princesa, you know? ‘I’ma do whatever it takes to see you smile’... Em taught me that, bro. Deep shit.”
The mention of Emily’s name is a live wire. Dante’s jaw clenches.
Fernando stops tossing the lighter. The grin vanishes. The jittery energy focuses entirely on Dante, turning terrifyingly still.
“Where is she, D?” Fernando asks, his voice dropping an octave. “She missed her payment. Then she missed her phone calls. Then I send my boy to her apartment, and her mom’s throwin’ empty vodka bottles at his head saying she ran off. Now, I know Em. She don’t run unless you tell her to.”
“She’s gone, Fernando,” Dante says smoothly, slipping his hands into his pockets to hide the fact that they are balling into fists. “She got out. That’s all you need to know.”
“Nah, hermano, that ain’t all I need to know,” Fernando snaps, stepping closer. The smell of cheap cologne and stale weed hits Dante’s nose. “She owes me two G’s. That ain’t pocket change. That’s Isabel’s braces. That’s my rent. NYS don’t care if she ‘got out.’ They care that my books are short. If my books are short, I bleed.”
Dante’s mind races. Anastasia had paid for Silverleaf. She had bought the medical care, the room, the doctors. But the street debt? She wouldn’t even know how to conceptualize a two-thousand-dollar street debt to a Queens dealer. She had solved the symptom, but the disease was standing right in front of him.
“I don’t have it,” Dante says, his voice flat.
“Then you better find it,” Fernando counters, leaning in, his blue eyes flashing. “Because you’re her anchor, right? You’re the one who cleans up her messes. So guess what? You just inherited the mess. You got till Friday, college boy. Or I come back here during the day. Maybe I start askin’ your professors where my money is. Maybe I find that pretty little blonde girl you’ve been seen walking around with—”
Snap.
The Hanover polish shatters. The political science major, the witty observer, the scholarship kid—all of it burns away in a split second.
Dante closes the distance between them so fast Fernando actually flinches. Dante grabs the lapels of Fernando’s jacket, slamming the wiry dealer back against the rough stone of the gargoyle’s pedestal.
“Yo, don’t get it twisted,” Dante snarls, his voice dropping into a raw, profane Queens growl that echoes off the walls. “You push me like this, you’re not gettin’ the polite version. ”
Fernando’s eyes widen, his hands coming up to grip Dante’s wrists.
“You listen to me, Fernando,” Dante hisses, his face inches from the dealer’s. “You do not say her name. You do not look at anyone on this campus. NYS runs the pill traffic in those frat houses over there, right? You think your bosses are gonna be happy if you blow up their Ivy League pipeline over two grand? You think they want campus security and the state cops swarming this quad because you couldn’t keep your mouth shut?”
Fernando swallows hard, Dante is right. NYS would gut him themselves if he jeopardized the Hanover territory.
“I’m done playin’,” Dante continues, his green eyes burning with a desperate, feral fire. “I’m done smilin’. I’ll get you your money. Friday. But if I see your face on this campus again, if you ever breathe a word about the people I care about, I swear to God, Fernando, I will burn your entire operation to the ground. You understand me?”
Fernando stares at the kid he used to see doing homework on the stoop. He realizes, with a cold spike of clarity, that Dante isn’t bluffing. He’s cornered.
Fernando straightens his jacket, his jittery energy returning. He points a finger at Dante. “Two G’s, D. Friday. Cash. Don’t make me come back here.”
He walks to the red sedan and slides into the driver’s seat. The tires squeal against the wet cobblestones as the car tears out of the circle, its taillights disappearing into the mist.
Dante is left standing alone in the damp, freezing night. His chest is heaving. His hands are shaking.
He just promised a syndicate dealer two thousand dollars by Friday. He has twenty dollars to his name.