Chapter 13 #2
“I’m not a man who watches a block,” I said.
“I mean—I am, today, that’s the job they gave me.
But that’s not what I am.” I held her eyes because I owed her that, because looking away would have been one more lie.
“I’m a made man, Katerina. A soldier. In the family.
You understand? Mafia. A criminal. The Scordatos—it’s not a name and a wedding and Tella with her spreadsheets, or it’s that too, but underneath it’s—” I reached for the word and didn’t soften it.
“It’s the life. The thing in the movies, except real, except boring most of the time and ugly the rest. I do what they need doing.
I’m good with my hands and I’m good in a fight and I’m the one you want next to you when it goes physical, and I’ve been that since I was a kid, since my father got killed and my brothers raised me into it. ”
Her eyes had gone wide. Shock—I’d expected the shock. I’d braced for it. But there was something else under it I couldn’t read, the same something I’d seen the morning she told me she knew what a Daddy was, that watchful settling, and I couldn’t tell if it was the thing turning toward me or away.
“I’ve hurt people,” I said. “I’m not going to pretty that up either.
The same hands that carry your flour and gently tied that towel around your wrists—they’ve done things you’d have nightmares about.
I’ve killed men, Katerina. More than one.
For the family, on orders, and I’d be lying if I told you I lay awake over all of them, because I don’t, because that’s what I am, and pretending otherwise to your face would be the worst lie of all.
” My voice had gone rough and I let it. “There’s a man in me you’ve never met.
He’s quieter than the one who buys your bread.
He’s the one who’d have kept this secret your whole life and called it love and never blinked.
I almost let him. This morning I almost let him win. ”
The room was so quiet I could hear the dog breathing.
“So that’s it,” I said. “That’s what I should have told you.
The block, the cousin, the curb. And what I am.
A mafioso. A killer. The opposite of safe to know.
” I made myself stop reaching, made my hands lie flat and still on my knees, the way you set down a weapon to show you’ve come unarmed.
“I told you because I made you sign that paper. Because I can’t hold you over a lie.
And because I’d rather lose you with the truth than keep you on the lie, even though losing you—”
I couldn’t finish it. The big loud man who never runs short of words in three languages, and I sat there in the gray and could not finish the sentence, and waited, with my whole chest open, for her to do whatever she was going to do with it.
I’d seen Katerina angry. I’d watched her tear a buyout offer apart with two words and a look. I’d seen her go cold and clipped and cutting. I’d braced for that now—for the explosion, for get out, for the door coming down so hard the new glass rattled in its frame.
It didn’t come.
She was quiet a long time. Long enough that I stopped breathing somewhere in the middle of it.
“You’ve been so worried about telling me,” she said. “Haven’t you?”
“Katerina—”
“Don’t. Let me get there.” Her voice was low, even, working it out as it came, the way she works out a flour order.
“There’s been a machine pointed at my corner for months.
Real men, real money, the kind that breaks windows and then breaks more than windows.
And you knew. From the first morning. You put yourself between me and the danger before I even knew it was there.
” She breathed. “I thought you were the high point of my brutal mornings. You were the only thing keeping the morning from being my last one.”
I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t a thing to say to that.
And then the anger came, but it wasn’t the kind I’d braced for. It was the clean kind, the kind with no poison in it.
“I’m furious with you,” she said, and her eyes had gone bright, and her voice cracked at the edge and held.
“Not because you’re—what you are. Give me a minute on that, I’m not there yet.
I’m furious because you lied to me. After we were so honest with each other.
After I beared everything.” Her chin came up.
“You decided I couldn’t handle the truth of my own life, my own danger, and you decided it for my own good, and that is the precise shape of the thing I told you I’d die before I let happen again. ”
“I know,” I said. “You’re right. You’re right about all of it.”
“I’m not finished.” She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, hard, annoyed at them.
“But here’s the thing I keep running into, and I hate it.
” She breathed. “You’re telling me now. Nobody made you.
You decided to tell me. And I know how difficult it is.
You handed me the one thing you most wanted to keep, knowing it might cost you everything, because—” She stopped.
Looked at me. “Why? Say it again. Why now.”
“Because I love you,” I said. “And I can’t lie to you.” My voice came out wrecked. “I had to tell you. Even the part that—” I gestured at myself, the whole of me, the killer, the thing she’d never met. “Even that.”
She didn’t run.
I’d been so sure she would.
But she didn’t. She was furious and she was crying and her knuckles were white on the blanket, but she was still here.
“The thing you are,” she said, quieter now. “The family.” She looked at my hands, lying flat and still on my knees where I’d set them like surrendered weapons. “You think it’s the dealbreaker. You laid it out like a confession waiting for the sentence.”
“It should be a dealbreaker,” I said. “Any sane woman—”
“I’m not a sane woman, Tonio, I run a failing bakery on four hours of sleep and spite.
” The joke came up through the tears, sudden, devastating, and a laugh got punched out of me before I could stop it.
“Don’t laugh, I’m being serious.” But the corner of her mouth had gone up, the near-smile, the standing ovation, even now, even through all of it.
Then it dropped, and she was serious again.
“I grew up next to violent men. I’m not naive about what they are.
I knew there was a soldier in you weeks ago—I watched him come up the night of the car, the night you put yourself between me and the dark street.
I’ve seen the wall. I just didn’t have the word for it.
” She held my eyes. “You think the killer is the part I won’t be able to see past. But the killer is the part that’s been keeping me alive. ”
“Katerina.”
“I’m angry,” she said. “I get to be angry. You can’t lie to me, but you know that.And I get a vote in my own war from now on, those are conditions, not requests.” Her voice had gone thick. “But I’m not running.”
The whole earth went quiet.
“Because I love you too.”
My heart was pounding.
She loved me. I’d shown her the worst of me, and she loved me.
She moved to me. Crossed the gap. The blanket slid off her shoulders and pooled at her waist and she came across the bed to me on her knees and fisted both hands in the front of my shirt and she kissed me.
And this was different.
This was just a mouth on my mouth and her breath gone ragged and her fingers white in my shirt, two people who’d both finally set everything aside to be together.
I felt the difference go through me like a current reversed.
She wasn’t handing me anything. She wasn’t taking anything either.
She was just here, choosing me with her whole shaking body, the truth out and nothing left to hold back.
My hands came up to steady her—the reflex, the Daddy in me reaching to slow it, to take the reins, to make it mine to give—and she pulled back and looked at me and stopped me with one word.
“No.” Soft. Not the boss. Not surrender.
Something underneath both. “Not like that. Not this time.” Her eyes were wet and dark and dead level.
“You don’t run this one. I’m not your Little right now.
I’m not handing you anything to hold. I’m just a woman who knows exactly what you are and wants you anyway.
” Her hands flattened against my chest. “Like this.”
And she started on my buttons.
I let her. God help me, I let her. She pushed the shirt off my shoulders and I shrugged out of it, and there I was, bare to the waist in the gray light, all of it on display—the tattoos, the Madonna over my heart, the piece for my father along my ribs, the scarred knuckles, the boxer’s body, the whole record of the life written on my skin where she could finally read it.
I reached for the hem of her top and she lifted her arms and I drew it off her, slow, and then there was nothing between us. The red lace I’d chosen for her yesterday, gone. Just her, flour-strong and tired-eyed and beautiful, and me, the killer she loved.
I have been looked at by a lot of women.
I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But I have never in my life been looked at the way she looked at me then—not at the charm, not at the body as a thing to be had, but at me, the whole of me, the tattoos that told the truth and the hands that had done what they’d done.
She put her palm flat over the Madonna on my chest, over my heart, where the thing was going like I’d run somewhere.
“You’re beautiful,” she said.
“I’m a thug,” I told her, because I couldn’t help it, because she had to keep knowing, because I needed to watch her keep choosing it.
“Yes.” She didn’t flinch. Her hand stayed on my heart.
“A beautiful thug.” And she said it the way you’d a fact, a thing settled and true, and it went through me hard and cold, all the way down to a place I’d boarded up so long ago I’d forgotten the room was there.
“I’m not afraid of you, Tonio. Not even a little bit. ”