Chapter 14
Maeve
Three Years
He starts at the beginning.
He’s twenty years old. The year is the year before his father will be killed, although he doesn’t know that yet, and the man named Theo is a Reznikov captain who has spent six months running heroin through a Greek-owned warehouse on a contract that doesn’t exist on paper because the Greek-owned warehouse doesn’t know that one of its forklift operators has been moonlighting for the Bratva.
Theo is forty-one. Theo has a wife and a small son in a townhouse in Quincy. Theo has been warned by Lex's father, in person, in March, that the next time he’s found inside a Konstantinos building, he’ll not leave it alive.
Theo is found inside a Konstantinos building in May.
Lex's father gives the order to Nico, who is twenty-four. Nico gives the order to Lex, who is twenty. Nico doesn’t give the order with words.
Nico drives Lex to the warehouse and hands Lex a gun.
Nico says, ‘you do this,’ and Lex understands that the sentence has two meanings, which are ‘you do this, and you become the brother who does this’ and ‘you do this, or our father will know you cannot.’
Lex does it.
He tells me about the room. He doesn’t soften it.
He tells me Theo was tied to a chair, conscious, and asked for Lex’s name.
He tells me Lex didn’t give it. He tells me Theo asked Lex to tell his wife.
He tells me Lex didn’t promise. He tells me what the gun did and what He tells me about the body after.
He tells me that he stood in the room for ninety seconds afterward and that he didn’t feel any of the things he had been told he was supposed to feel when Nico drove him home.
He tells me Nico didn’t speak the entire drive.
He tells me Nico parked the car in the alley behind the Konstantinos house, turned the engine off, and sat with both hands on the wheel for a full minute.
And that the minute was the longest minute Lex has ever experienced, and that at the end of the minute, Nico said, in a voice Lex had not heard before, ‘I am sorry.’
He tells me Lex had not understood why his brother was apologizing. He tells me he does, now. Then he stops talking.
The kitchen of his lake house is very quiet.
The lake is gray through the window. Nora is asleep down the hall.
The wood stove is putting out a slow, steady heat that I can feel on my hands where I have them folded around the warm edge of his counter, and Lex is six feet away from me and has just told me, with no music and no plea and no justification, the worst thing he’s ever done.
He looks at me and waits.
He’s letting me decide.
"Lex."
He looks at me. The gold eyes have not moved from my face.
Twenty. He was twenty years old, younger than the paralegal who sends me drafts.
A boy, by any measure I have ever used, and someone put a gun in his hand and a man in front of him and made him into this.
I do not know what I expected to feel. I did not expect grief.
It comes anyway, grief for the twenty-year-old sitting across a lake-house kitchen from me fifteen years later, with my daughter asleep down the hall.
“Have you done it again?” I ask. “Killed someone?”
A pause. Then, "Yes."
"How many?"
He doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t soften. He says, "Eleven. That I did myself. Six more I ordered."
"Theo's wife."
"Was told he died in a workplace accident.
The Konstantinos family paid for the son's college and his medical care for an asthma condition the family had no public reason to know about.
The wife knows. The wife has not, in fifteen years, contacted any law enforcement agency about her husband's death. "
"That is a kind of mercy."
"It is the kind I am capable of."
I think about that for a moment. I am, by training and by temperament, a woman who weighs information for a living, and the information he’s just given me is the information I asked for, and he’s given it the way a person gives information to a federal prosecutor under oath — without ornament.
He’s not asked me to forgive him. He’s not asked me to understand.
He’s answered the question I asked him because I asked it.
I cross to him.
I do not touch him. I stand in front of him. He’s very tall and very still, and his gold eyes are the gold of a man waiting to be told what to do with the rest of his life.
"I am not afraid of you," I say.
"You should be."
"I know what you are. I knew at the gala."
"You didn’t know about Theo."
"I knew about a Theo. The specific name is new. The fact of him is not."
He absorbs that. His face moves the way it does, which I have learned is how Lex feels things. Other people feel things in their chests, throats, or hands. Lex Konstantinos feels things in the exact architecture of the muscles around his eyes.
"Three years, Lex."
He swallows.
"I have been waiting for three years."
I kiss him.
? ? ?
I have planned this kiss to be slow. It is not slow.
My hands are in his hair before I have finished the thought of putting them there. His arms come around me and lift me half off the floor, and I make a sound into his mouth that is foreign even to me, and he answers me with a sound that is not a word.
"Christ. Maeve."
"I know."
"I have been—"
"I know."
His mouth is at my jaw, my throat, the place under my ear where his breath has been before.
His teeth find the cord at the side of my neck, and I feel my knees go weak.
He catches me with one hand at the small of my back and one hand at the back of my head, and he’s holding all of me up, all five-four of me, with the kind of strength I had felt at the dining-room table and have not felt against me since.
"You taste…"
"What?"
"The same."
My breath goes out of me all at once, totally caught off guard, undone low in my body, and gutted somewhere I'd thought was sealed shut. I have not, in three years, allowed myself to think about how I tasted to him at four in the morning in a hotel room. He’s not, apparently, stopped thinking about it.
"Lex. Stop. I have to ---"
He stops.
Two inches between us. Both of us are breathing the same air. His hands are still on me. The hand at my back has come around to my ribs. His thumb is on the underside of my breast through the sweater, and I don’t think he’s noticed yet. I can’t move, I don’t want to move.
"Maeve. Whatever you need—"
"I know. Listen."
I step back. I cross to the kitchen counter.
I take the book out of my bag, where I have placed it.
The hardcover Pride and Prejudice. My mother gave it to me when I was twelve and told me, in the small, careful voice she used about men, that I was going to read this book at twelve and again at twenty and again at thirty and that I would not understand it the same way twice.
She was right about that, as she was right about most things.
I open it to page seventy-three.
The note is where I have put it back, every time, after every reading. Three years. Hotel pen. Black ink. Folded once. The paper has gone soft along the fold from the number of times I have opened and refolded it.
I take it out.
I cross back to him. He watches me come, every step. The note is in my hand.
"You wrote me something. I have never opened it without my hands shaking. I want you to read it to me."
I hand him the note.
He takes it.
His hand doesn’t shake. His face does. The small architecture around his eyes does what it does, and his eyes, when they come up from the paper, are the eyes of a man who has just been told a thing he had stopped allowing himself to believe.
"You kept it."
"I kept it. From the night you wrote it. Until now."
He looks down at the paper. He unfolds it slowly and reads it without sound for a moment. He’s not said the words out loud. The words have lived in his head for three years, and he’s been not-saying them, and now he’s going to say them, to me.
"Read it to me."
He reads it. His voice is rough. The voice is two and a half registers below the voice he uses for instructions, and one register below the voice he uses for me.
"You are extraordinary."
My eyes flood. I do not let them spill.
"Now ask me what I would have answered."
He closes his eyes for one full second. He opens them. He says, in the voice that is now the voice that is only mine, "What would you have answered?”
I take a breath. I have been carrying the answer for as long as I have been carrying his daughter.
"Yes. I want this. I want you. I am sober, I am clear, I am choosing this. Take me to bed."
He picks me up.
One arm under my thighs. One arm at my back. My arms around his neck. My legs around his waist. He carries me down the dark hall past the closed door of the room where Nora is asleep, and his mouth is at my temple the whole way.
The door of the master bedroom clicks shut.
He sets me down on the bed and stands in front of me. The light from the hallway is a thin gold line under the door.
"Two things," he says.
"Tell me."
"Before you, I had not been with a woman in eleven years. You were once, three years ago. And since you, there has been no one. I don't know how to do this carefully. I'm going to try. If I move too fast, you say 'slow.' If you change your mind, you say 'no.'"
"I am clean," I say, in the small, clear voice I use for federal courtrooms. "Tested at every annual since Nora was born. The last test was in August."
"I am clean. The Konstantinos family does annual physicals."
"Then come here."
He undresses me without rushing.
The sweater goes over my head. Slow. His hands at my ribs, palms flat, the heat of him through the cotton tank underneath. The tank goes. He kneels at the edge of the bed, and his mouth comes to the place between my breasts and stops there. Forehead against my sternum. Breath warm through my skin.
"Lex…"