4. Clem
CLEM
Three days into being Stellan Byrne’s, I’m sitting in the passenger seat of a black SUV at eleven PM in a part of Queens I’ve never been to, watching a dark house with the most dangerous man I’ve ever met, and the thing I keep waiting to feel is fear.
It doesn’t come.
That’s the part I can’t explain to anybody—not to Dani, not to my mother, not to the version of me who taped cardboard over her own window a week ago and cried about it in the walk-in.
I should be terrified. I’m in the dark with a contract killer who is, right now, working.
Instead I feel the way I felt the morning he ate a muffin in five neat bites and asked who threw the brick: like I’ve finally stepped behind the right door and it’s locked safe behind me.
“You can ask me anything you want,” he says. He doesn’t look over. His eyes stay on the house. “You’ve been quiet since the bridge.”
“What is this one?”
“The man in that house is the last of it.” He doesn’t look away from the window.
“Marco didn’t come up with a brick on his own.
He ran errands for people who’ve spent years quietly bleeding this neighborhood dry—landlords leaning on shops to sell, the two storefronts that went dark last spring, the protection nobody’s allowed to call protection.
The man in there is the one who pointed Marco at you. ”
My stomach drops. “At me.”
“At you. Your block was the next square on a map to him.” He glances at me, one second, before his eyes go back to the glass.
“I’ve spent three days making sure I had the right name.
Tonight I confirm who he answers to. Then it goes to Lucas, and by the end of next week there’s no one left in this city with a reason to know your shop exists.
That’s what tonight is. It’s the last of it. Nobody comes for you again.”
I don’t have anything clever for that. I put my hand on his thigh, just to be touching him, and he covers it with his without moving his attention off the house.
We sit like that. The heater ticks. A deli sign buzzes somewhere out on the avenue.
His thumb strokes slow over my knuckles, the only part of him that isn’t perfectly still.
I watch him watch the house, and I get it, finally—I’m seeing the real thing he is.
Not the man at my counter. Not the man in my bed.
The actual one. Lethal and patient and without an ounce of fear in him.
I should be running. Instead I have never wanted anyone in my life the way I want him right now, in the dark, doing the worst job in the world and holding my hand through it.
“There,” he says, soft. “Front light.”
Everything in him sharpens to a point. His thumb goes still on my hand. A square of yellow falls across the sidewalk over there. A man comes out—coat, hat, mid-sized—pulls the door shut, locks it, turns toward the deli.
I don’t move. I barely breathe. I watch the man walk closer, twenty feet, fifteen, until he passes within arm’s reach of the tinted glass without ever knowing we’re here, a cigarette flaring in his hand. Then he’s at the corner. Then he’s gone.
Stellan lifts a small camera I never saw him pick up, takes one frame of the empty doorway where the man stopped to meet someone, and sets it back down.
“That’s it,” he says. “That’s the whole job.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. He’s Lucas’s now.” He breathes out, long, and I watch the work go out of him—the focus draining away, his shoulders dropping a fraction in the dark.
“It’s done, Clementine. The brick, the note, the man who stood on your corner at night, all of it.
It ends in a Stamford office at the end of next week—my name coming off a list, his going on one.
You’re going to wake up and your bakery is going to be the safest building in this city, and you’re never going to have to know the rest of it. ”
I look at him. This man who spent three days in the dark making the thing that terrorized me quietly go away—who asked who threw the brick over a muffin, then went and ended it without ever once making me feel like a problem he was solving.
The fear I keep waiting for still doesn’t come. Something else does.
“I’m not scared of you,” I tell him. I need him to hear it. “I keep waiting to be. I never am. I just watched you do that, and all I felt was safe.”
His jaw works. Something breaks open across his face—relief, the thing he never lets anybody see. He reaches across the console and takes my face in both hands and holds it, his forehead coming down to mine.
“I know,” he says, rough. “That’s the part that ruins me.”
We stay like that a while, breathing the same air, his thumbs moving slow over my cheekbones, the street outside the glass dark and empty and finished.
He kisses me once, soft—not like it’s going anywhere, like a man setting down something heavy he’s been carrying for me.
Then he checks the mirrors out of a habit he’ll never lose and pulls us out toward home.
He doesn’t say much on the drive. His hand stays on my thigh the whole way, his thumb moving slow, and by the time the elevator opens into the apartment neither of us is pretending we’re tired.
In his bed he takes me, and there’s no call to take, no street to watch, no reason on earth to hold still. He can move now. God, he moves.
He fucks me on my back first, slow and deep, until I’m pulling at him and begging.
Then he flips me face-down, one big hand spread between my shoulder blades, and fucks me into the mattress hard enough that the headboard starts talking to the wall.
I come like that—cheek in the pillow, his voice low and filthy in my ear telling me exactly what I do to him—and he doesn’t stop.
He works me straight into the next one, his grip on my hip leaving marks I’ll find in the morning and not mind.
He only pauses when I’m shaking too hard to take more. Stays buried, drags his teeth once across my shoulder, makes me drink from the water glass. Then he starts again, slow, and I feel him smile against my back when I push onto him before he’s all the way in.
He says, somewhere in the second hour, his cock buried and his hand splayed low on my belly: “I’m putting a baby in you, Clementine. You should know that. I’m putting a baby in you and you’re going to let me.”
I say, into the pillow, “Yes.”
“Good girl.”
I sleep on his cock for the first time that night.
I dream about a man across the street lighting a cigarette and not looking at a black car and never knowing what was happening twenty feet from him.
I dream about the way Stellan’s pulse went through my walls when he saw the man.
I dream about a whimper I didn’t mean to make and a snap I might want to make on purpose next time.
I dream, mostly, about the word yes.
I sleep through until eight.