16. Cami
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Cami
For four days, we lived like polite strangers.
He kept his word. He never came through the door of the blue room at the end of the east hall.
But there was coffee outside it every morning, cream and two sugars, and a different flower from the garden laid across the tray every afternoon, and when we passed in the halls we traded nods like acquaintances and kept walking.
Pedro told me the boss wasn’t sleeping. I pretended not to care.
I cared. I just didn’t know what to do with the caring, so I did what I always did when a feeling got too big to sit with.
I got petty.
It started at two in the morning with a new phone and a grudge.
I signed Logan up for every online casino I could find, more than I could count, until his inbox was an avalanche of come back and play offers for the one man on earth who’d lost everything to exactly that.
Then I got ambitious. Hendry found me cackling over my laptop the next morning and pulled up a chair before he even asked what I was doing.
“A custom sculpture,” I told him. “Anatomically detailed. The engraving’s going to say the ones you’re missing.”
He made a sound that was half horror, half delight. “Okay, but you have to let me help. Julian can make sure it can’t be traced.”
“Julian does this?”
“Julian does anything that makes a man’s life worse on paper. It’s his love language.”
By noon I had a small criminal enterprise of pettiness running out of the kitchen, Julian quietly seeding a rumor that would follow Logan into every country club in the city, Hendry agonizing over the font for the card.
It helped. For an hour, surrounded by men who’d started to feel like family, it genuinely helped.
Then the laughing ran out, the way it always did, and I was left missing a man who was forty feet away and might as well have been on the moon.
***
On the fourth night, I couldn’t sleep.
I told myself I only wanted water. I padded down to the kitchen barefoot, in the dark, and I wasn’t surprised, not really, to find the light already on.
Sal stood at the counter in sweatpants and nothing else, the bandages still wrapped around his ribs, a glass of something amber in his hand that he wasn’t drinking. He looked terrible. Beautiful and wrecked and terrible, the dark circles under his eyes, four sleepless days written all over him.
He went still when he saw me. Like a man who’d had a door opened on him.
“I’ll go.” He set the glass down at once. “You don’t have to...”
“It’s your kitchen.”
“It’s your everything else.” He was already moving toward the far door, giving me the room, keeping his word even now. “I’ll send the coffee up in the morning.”
“Sal.”
He stopped. Didn’t turn around. His shoulders were a straight, careful line.
“You’re not sleeping,” I said.
“I’m fine.”
“Pedro says you’re not sleeping.”
“Pedro talks too much.” He turned, and the careful mask slipped, just for a second, and what was under it was raw enough that I had to look away.
“What do you want me to say? That I lie awake replaying it? That I’ve started a hundred speeches and burned every one because none of them are good enough?
That I keep a list in my head of every flower in that garden so I don’t run out of ways to say sorry without saying a word you didn’t ask to hear?
” He dragged a hand through his hair. “I’m not going to do this to you. You asked for space. You’ll have it.”
“Why won’t you fight for it?” The question tore out of me, sharp and shaking.
“Pedro told me you turned the easy version down. That you could have taken the money and let Greta deal with me, and you didn’t.
You could be standing here right now making your case.
Telling me every reason I should forgive you.
Logan would. Logan would have talked me into the ground until I apologized for being upset. So why won’t you?”
His expression flickered, there and gone.
“Because that’s what Logan would do.” His voice was quiet.
“Manage you. Frame it right. Trick you into staying because he built a good enough argument.” He took one step toward me, then stopped himself, hands curling at his sides like he didn’t trust them.
“I did one unforgivable thing to you before I ever knew your name, and I’ll never stop being sorry for it.
But I won’t add to it by talking you out of your own anger.
You get to decide this clean. With everything I did sitting right out in the open where you can see it.
” His voice dropped. “If you walk, you walk. I earned that.”
The kitchen was very quiet.
And there it was. The thing I’d been circling for four days. The man who’d sent that email and the man standing in front of me right now, refusing to argue me out of hating him even though it was clearly killing him, were the same man. I didn’t have to pick which one was real. They both were.
I’d taken a step toward him. I didn’t remember deciding to.
He saw it. His breath caught. For one electric second neither of us moved, the space between us thin enough to cut, his gaze dropping to my mouth and dragging back up like it cost him blood.
“Camellia.” My name came out of him wrecked. “If you don’t mean it, go back upstairs right now. Because I am barely holding this together, and I won’t survive you changing your mind.”
I almost closed the distance.
I almost did.
But four days of grief and fury don’t undo themselves in one dark kitchen, and I owed it to both of us to be sure. So I made myself step back. Watched it land on him. And gave him the only true thing I had.
“I need some air.”
“Camellia...”
“I’m not saying no.” My voice shook. “I’m saying not yet. Give me till morning.”
He nodded. Once. And let me go.
I didn’t go back upstairs.
Instead, I went out into the garden, because the blue room had started to feel airless and I needed the sky.
The night was cool and still, the moon high, the fountain murmuring to itself, the roses gone silver in the dark.
I sat on the stone bench and breathed and let the truth settle into something I could carry.
I’d told him to give me till morning.
But I’d been lying. To him and to myself. I’d known the second I took that step toward him in the kitchen, maybe days before that. I pulled out my phone and typed before I could lose my nerve.
I can’t wait till morning. I’m in the garden, by the fountain. Come find me.
I hit send.
The reply came so fast it was almost funny. One second, maybe two.
On my way.
Then the phone lit up in my hand. Him, calling, because of course he couldn’t even wait the ninety seconds it would take to reach me. I answered, smiling despite myself, my heart doing something foolish and hopeful.
“That was fast,” I said.
“I’ve been awake.” His voice was rough, careful, like he was afraid to let himself hope. “Camellia. Whatever you’re about to say, I need you to know that I...”
I never found out what he needed me to know.
The first man came out of the dark to my left, and I was already moving, already screaming, the phone tumbling from my hand into the grass. I got one good hit in. The heel of my palm straight into a nose, the crunch of it, a grunt of pain. I didn’t wait to see more. I ran.
I made it ten feet.
The second man hit me from the side, all his weight behind it, and we went down hard into the flowerbed, the breath knocked clean out of me.
I clawed. I kicked. I screamed his name.
Somewhere in the grass the phone was still lit, still connected, and I could hear him through it, tinny and frantic, roaring my name back.
“Hold her.”
A knee in my back. A hand twisting into my hair. And then the cold bite of a needle in my neck, the burn spreading fast and merciless through my veins.
“Sal.” I got it out one more time, slurred, the garden tilting, the dark going darker still. “Sal, the garden, they’re in the...”
The dark took the rest.
The last thing I heard, far away and getting farther, was his voice through the speaker. No longer careful. No longer afraid to hope.
Just raw. Screaming.