Chapter 15 Levi
I believe him.
Many people have promised things to me, and I learned young to count the seconds before they took it back. Dante doesn’t take things back. He’s standing in my rental kitchen apologizing to me after the night I put him through.
Where I come from, a man who grabs you doesn’t drive across town with donuts in a pink box after. He pretends it didn’t happen, or he tells you that you had it coming. The last thing I was prepared for was an apology from him.
I cross to the island. He slides the box an inch closer to me, and I notice he doesn’t come around it. He stays on his side with the marble between us like a fence line, and he’s got one hand laid flat on the countertop.
“I thought you might be hungry,” he says.
“I already ate a big breakfast off a delivery app.” I put a hand on the lid. “You drove all the way out here to bring me a box of donuts? That’s a lot of trouble for a man you put into a refrigerator this morning.”
“It’s a peace offering. It doesn’t mean anything past that.”
“Everything means something with you. You don’t do one thing by accident. A man as particular as you drives here with a pretty pink box, and I’m supposed to believe it’s nothing?”
“Believe what you want. Open the box, Levi. I didn’t choose the color.”
I flip the box open. A dozen of them, glazed and powdered and chocolate, three fat crullers riding the middle. I turn the box so it’s facing him and look up.
“Which one do you want?” I ask him.
While I was turning the box, I felt him staring at me. At the water sliding off my hair onto the marble, at the towel, at my chest. By the time I glance up his eyes are back on the donuts, but they landed there a half second too late.
“They’re all for you,” he says.
“Haven’t you heard it’s bad luck to eat donuts alone?” I keep my hand on the box, not picking yet, leaving him the first move. I don’t know why it matters that he goes first. It just does.
“I don’t believe in luck.”
“Course not. You believe in comps and closing costs and a hard crease in your slacks. But you’ll take one anyway and eat it. You feel bad about the refrigerator, I’m standing here dripping on the floor waiting for you to pick, and you’re polite.”
He reaches in and takes the powdered sugar one.
My smile gets bigger. “That’s a surprise. Didn’t figure you for a man who’d risk powdered sugar on his clothes.”
I’m standing here buck-ass naked underneath a towel that’s barely hanging on my hip. He takes a bite of the donut, powdered sugar dropping everywhere, and he doesn’t brush it off.
There’s sugar on his dark shirt right now and he hasn’t so much as glanced at it, because he’s looking at me. Longer than a bite of donut needs. I feel the warmth of those eyes heating me up again and I’ll be hard in two seconds if he doesn’t knock it off.
When I reach into the box, his eyes drop lower again. Just for a second, down off my face to the towel and back up. I catch it. I don’t know what to do with catching it, never have.
Dante looked down at the towel. And God help me, I want him to do it again.
“You’ve got sugar on your shirt,” I tell him.
“I’m aware.”
“The Dante I met Saturday would’ve brushed that off before it hit the fabric.”
“The Dante you met Saturday had places to be.”
“And this one?”
He doesn’t answer. His thumb moves once against the marble, the one part of him not holding still, and I add it to the pile of things I’ve started keeping about him.
I pick up a chocolate glazed and shift my weight, hip against the island, the marble the only thing holding the towel up now, and I watch him go stiller. I swallow a bite of donut and he watches me do it. His pulse jumps in his neck.
“Is something wrong?” I ask.
“I’m fine.”
He lifts his eyes off the box and holds them on mine, dead level, and I can see what it costs him to keep them there. The easy thing would be to let them fall and he’s decided he doesn’t get the easy thing. I can see it on his face.
“Eat your donut, Levi.”
“Don’t rush me. I’m getting to it in my own sweet time. As you can see, I just got out of the shower and I’m still dripping wet.”
“You’ve been getting to it a while. You’re using it to keep me standing here.”
“Is it working?” I grin at him. Can’t help it.
He doesn’t answer. His jaw clenches, and his eyes drop — a flicker, down and back — and this time he knows I caught it. He’s dying to take a good, long look and damn if I don’t want him to.
Then it’s gone again.
Whatever was in that look has gone back behind the face he wears, the one that doesn’t let anything out. He’s good at that. Better than me. I’d give a lot to be that good at it. But he can lock that face down all he wants.
I know what I saw. And I won’t forget it.
“Did you make the ten o’clock check-in?” he asks.
“I did.”
He nods, takes another bite. I think we’re done. I’m wrong.
“Who’s tracking your phone, Levi?”
Fuck.
I ran my mouth in the car last night, half past sober and worn through, and Dante doesn’t let go.
“I’ve already told you too much,” I say. “Let it go.”
“I’ve never let one thing go in my life. Ask anyone I’ve ever closed against. What else are they tracking?”
He sets the donut down on the box lid, and now both his hands are free and his attention is laser-focused on me, which is its own kind of pressure.
A minute ago, he couldn’t keep his eyes on my face. Now he won’t take them off me, and it’s nothing like the first kind of looking. I suspect this is how he gets his footing back.
“Are they tracking your visitors?” he asks. “Do they know about me? About this house being for sale?”
I study him a second. Decide what’s safe to tell him. “No. They don’t know about you or the house. And it needs to stay that way.”
“That’s not what I asked. I asked if they could find out.
I’ve got a stranger living in my listing, I pulled him out of a drunk tank in the middle of the night, and now there’s someone with eyes on you I’ve never heard of.
If they ever land on my name next to yours, I need to know before it happens. Not after.”
“They won’t. You’re a blank spot on their map. Nobody’s tracking you, nobody knows you exist.” I hold his eyes. “That’s the most valuable asset you’re holding, and you don’t even know it.”
“Whoever rented this place for you doesn’t know it’s also for sale?”
“That’s correct.”
“Why didn’t you tell them?”
I let out a long breath. Because I can’t, is the answer, and I can’t tell him that either.
The moment Freddie finds out this house is double-booked, everything is gone.
They’d be a new rental, somewhere with a grocery service and a driver who reports in.
No Dante. No apartment. No floor I can sleep on with the doors thrown open.
Everything depends on Freddie staying in the dark, and I’m not about to explain that to Dante.
“Trust me,” I say. “It’s better that he doesn’t know.”
Shit, I said the word ‘he.’ I hear it leave my mouth a heartbeat too late to take it back. Dante hears it too.
And here’s what scares me worse than the slip itself. I know exactly how it happened. A few minutes of Dante staring at me with those brown eyes, and I’m handing out clues like party favors. He doesn’t just get past my guard. He gets me to set it down and walk away from it.
“What else about you is he tracking?” he asks.
“Credit cards. Phone location.”
“Let me get this straight because I need to understand.” He says it carefully, lining it up. “When you’re at my apartment, he thinks you’re here. Because your phone’s here and it’s being tracked by an app.”
I nod.
“How long has this been going on?”
“Eight years.”
The number’s out before I can shrink it, and I watch it land. Eight years is a sentence, not an arrangement, and he hears the difference.
“Since you were what? A minor? A kid?”
“Older than I looked.” I don’t give him the number.
He goes silent, and I realize I’ve made a fatal mistake.
I handed him the knife to gut me with. It goes straight through me cold. Same as a door shutting behind me.
He knows it too.
Fuck.
I start running it down in my head. What I tell Freddie if the call gets made, which version of the story keeps me out of the worst of it.
There isn’t a better version. A knife doesn’t care how you explain it.
And the part that has me panicked isn’t that he’s holding it — it’s how little it cost him to get it.
Dante didn’t pry this loose. I set it in his hand myself, over a box of donuts, half-dressed, because he said sorry like he meant it and folded my worn shirts into squares.
Eight years I’ve kept my mouth shut on anything that mattered. He didn’t even have to ask twice.
That’s the mistake. Me, deciding just this once that it was safe to talk.
It has never been safe for me and it’s not now either. I need to remember that.
He takes another bite of the powdered donut, sets it on the box lid and brushes the sugar off his fingers, taking his time. When he looks up at me, his face is the one I saw on him that first morning. All business. No heat for me in his eyes now.
“You understand what you just gave me,” he says. Yes, damn it all to hell, I do. “One call to the property manager and you’re relocated by dinner. That’s a lot of leverage to hand over.”
He says it out loud, laid on the counter between the donuts. I don’t argue. I gave my leverage away because I trusted him and we both watched me do it.
There’s nothing I can do right now but stand right in the middle of it. I don’t reach for the chocolate glazed and I don’t look away from him.
If Dante’s going to make the call to sink me, he’ll make it whether I beg or not. I’ve spent a lifetime learning that begging just points their arrows straight at the softest part anyway.
“I’m well aware what I gave you, Dante.”
And I’m betting everything I’ve got that you won’t use it. I don’t say it. I just stand there and let him see where I stand. The silence stretches.
“Eat your donut.” He picks up what’s left of his donut.
“They’re the best in town. And then go dry off.
You’re dripping all over a floor I need to sell.
The crullers are fantastic. Don’t let them go stale.
” He takes another bite, like the phone call was a thing he considered and passed on.
He’s not going to tell me so. Saying it would cost him the edge, and Dante doesn’t spend an edge he doesn’t have to.
I’ve got nothing to bank on except a gut feeling about him.
God, I hope I’m not wrong.