Chapter 13
Nico
The Butcher's Work
* * *
One light. One chair. And the man in it has stopped crying.
The warehouse is on the Southie waterfront — a Greek-controlled property that doesn't exist on any city record, a corrugated steel box that smells like salt and diesel and the particular copper tang of fresh blood. I've been here before. Many times. The chair has a drain beneath it for a reason.
The man is Bratva. Low-level, barely worth the rope holding him upright, but he was running surveillance on one of our safe houses and Lex caught him on a camera review.
He's been in the chair for four hours. Lex did the preliminary work of a broken nose, two cracked fingers on the left hand, the kind of precise damage that communicates scale without reducing function.
The man can still talk. That's the point.
I pull a chair across the concrete. The metal legs shriek against the floor. I sit across from him, close enough to see the burst capillaries in his eyes and the dried blood caked in the stubble along his jaw.
"My name is Nico Konstantinos." I keep my voice low.
Conversational. The tone I use at dinner parties and business meetings and the quiet negotiation of alliances.
"You already know that, which means you know what happens in this room.
I'm going to ask you questions. You're going to answer them.
If you answer quickly and truthfully, this ends faster than you think.
If you lie to me, my brother will break another finger and we'll start again. "
The man looks at Lex, standing against the wall with his arms crossed. The tattoos on Lex's forearms catch the single overhead light. The man looks back at me. He starts talking.
Reznikov shipping routes — three containers a week through a shell company operating out of the Revere port.
A safe house in Dorchester where Viktor's lieutenant holds court on Tuesdays.
Names: Andrei Volkov, Pyotr Semyonov, a third man called Kolya who handles the money.
Viktor's schedule is irregular. He moves, never stays more than two nights in one location, surrounds himself with a rotating detail of eight.
I listen. I ask follow-up questions. The man answers.
He's cooperative now — pain has that effect, the calculus of suffering shifting toward anything that makes it stop.
I don't enjoy his pain. I don't take pleasure in the information either.
This is extraction. Arithmetic. Lives on one side of the ledger, intelligence on the other, and the balance is paid in someone's blood every time.
"Is there anything else?"
The man shakes his head. His chin drops to his chest. He's done — wrung out, empty, a container with nothing left to give.
I believe him.
I draw the Beretta from my waistband. The man hears the slide and his head comes up. His eyes are wide but resigned. He knows. He's known since the chair.
"You've seen our faces. You've heard our questions. You know what we're looking for."
He doesn't beg. I respect that, for what it's worth.
One round. Center of the forehead. The sound is enormous in the steel box — a crack that bounces off every wall and comes back as an echo that sounds like a second shot. The man slumps. The drain beneath the chair begins its work.
I lower the gun. My hand is steady. It's always steady. The cost of this isn't in the hand — it's somewhere deeper, a place I stopped visiting years ago because the ledger there doesn't balance. It never does.
Lex moves to handle the cleanup. He doesn't speak. There's nothing to say. We've done this before. We'll do it again.
The warehouse door opens.
Siobhan.
She's standing in the doorway with the Southie night behind her and her coat pulled tight and an expression I can't read — or rather, I can read it perfectly and what I see makes me go cold.
She's looking at the body. The blood. The chair.
The tools on the side table that Lex used during the preliminary work.
The gun in my hand, still warm, smoke still threading from the barrel in the overhead light.
Everything I am is in this room. Every ugly truth I've hidden behind tailored suits and controlled silences and a penthouse that smells like her shampoo. This is what I do. This is who I am. And she's seeing it with her own eyes for the first time.
Our eyes meet. I don't flinch. I don't apologize.
I don't lower the gun or step in front of the body or try to shield her from any of it.
She came here — she tracked me through my driver when I'd been gone for hours after Lex's urgent call.
She didn't know what she'd find. I'm certain of that.
She came because I'd left without explanation after Lex's call pulled me from the desk where I'd been kissing her two hours ago, because she is a woman who runs a crisis management firm and her first instinct when information goes dark is to find the source.
She came looking for her husband. She found the butcher instead.
She walked through that door, and now she sees.
I wait.
The silence stretches. The warehouse hums with the distant sound of the harbor. Blood drips into the drain. Somewhere outside, a ship's horn sounds, low and mournful.
"Is it done?" she says. "Whatever you needed?"
I blink. I've prepared for every possible response to this moment.
Horror. Disgust. The particular revulsion that crosses a person's face when they realize the man they've been sleeping beside is capable of this.
I've rehearsed the aftermath — the silence in the car, the separate bedrooms, the slow inevitable retreat of a woman who finally saw the thing she'd been pretending wasn't there.
She asked if it was done. Like it was a task. Like it was a task I needed to finish before I could come home.
"It's done."
"Then come home. You have blood on your shirt."
She turns. Walks out. The warehouse door closes behind her and the sound it makes is final and gentle and the opposite of everything this room contains.
I look at the gun in my hand. I look at the body in the chair. I look at the door she just walked through.
A wall I've maintained for fifteen years — the one that says no one can see this part of me and stay — she just walked through it like it wasn't there.
* * *
Two in the morning. The penthouse is dark. She's in the kitchen — not the bedroom, the kitchen, sitting at the island in my t-shirt with coffee, not water. She's been waiting. The realization lands somewhere between my ribs.
I've showered. Changed. The blood is gone from my shirt, from my hands, from everywhere I can reach. But I can still feel it — the phantom residue that never quite washes off, the weight of the Beretta's recoil in my wrist, the sound of the echo in the corrugated steel.
She looks at me. I sit across from her at the island. The same seats as the 3am kitchen. The same positions. A different conversation entirely.
"Did he deserve it?"
"He gave information that will save Greek lives. Then he would have reported back to Reznikov. So yes."
"Okay."
"Okay?"
"I knew who you were when I married you. I knew what the blood on your hands meant before I agreed to share a hallway with you. I'm not going to pretend surprise at a choice I made with my eyes open."
The words land. Not soft, but solid. The weight of a woman who has thought about this, who has turned it over in the dark during the nights she couldn't sleep, who made a decision about what she could live with before she ever walked to his door. Before she ever considered knocking.
She pauses. Studies my face. "You missed a spot. Behind your ear."
I reach. She's right. There’s dried blood, a smear I couldn't see in the mirror, evidence of the thing I did clinging to the place where my jaw meets my neck.
My fingers come away dark.
She stands. Takes a cloth from the counter. Wets it under the tap — warm, I can see the steam. Comes around the island to where I'm sitting and reaches up.
Her fingers are steady. The cloth is warm against my skin.
She cleans the blood from behind my ear with small, careful strokes that are gentle, thorough, the way you'd clean a wound on someone you love.
Neither of us speaks. The kitchen is silent except for the water in the cloth and the sound of my breathing and the quiet fact of her hands on my skin, wiping away the worst of me without flinching.
She finishes. Folds the cloth. Sets it on the counter.
This — this small domestic act after the violence — breaks me more completely than anything she could have said.
Words I could have argued with, deflected, rationalized.
But her hands on my skin, cleaning blood she has every right to recoil from, steady and warm and matter of fact.
There's no defense against that. There's no wall that holds.
"Come to bed," she says. Not his bed, not hers…just bed. A destination, not a negotiation.
"Siobhan —"
"You don't have to talk. You don't have to explain. Just come to bed."
She walks down the hallway. I hear her door close. Her door. Not mine. The invitation isn't sexual — it's something harder. She's offering to hold the weight of what I did tonight, to lie beside me in the dark knowing what these hands have done, to sleep next to a killer and call it coming home.
I sit in the dark kitchen for a long time. My hand goes to the spot behind my ear where her fingers were. The skin is clean now. Warm where the cloth touched it.
Two days. I give myself two days before the wanting kills me. She keeps seeing the gun in my hand. I know because her eyes track my hands whenever I move — not with fear, not with revulsion, but with the focused attention of a woman who is deciding, in real time, what she can carry.
She sees the gun. She sees the hands. She sees the monster.
And she didn't leave.
Maybe that's the most dangerous thing about Siobhan Konstantinos…
She sees the monster and wants him anyway.