Chapter 43
Chapter Forty-Three
EDIE
The sushi place he likes turns out to be an extremely popular spot with a line out the door.
“Ohhh, no,” I say.
“It’s fine. There’s a table for us.”
I follow him up to the host desk. “So nice to see you, Mr. Zogaj.” The host heads off. When I look up at Luka, he’s giving someone a ferocious stare.
“What?”
I follow his gaze to three men on the other side of the host’s desk. He points at his eyes. They straighten up, raising their gazes to the space above my head. “Learn a little respect.”
I set a hand on his arm. “It’s okay.”
“Disrespect is never okay,” he says, gaze still fixed hard on them. They seem to have shrunken in size, somehow, huddled together, eager to demonstrate that they’re innocent guys talking.
I tug on his shirt, trying to wake him up from whatever fever state he’s in and go up on tiptoes to kiss his cheek.
He grabs my hair and kisses me roughly, like all of his dark, protective energy is pouring into that wild and dangerous kiss, and I could live in it forever .
When he pulls away, he seems calmer. And I feel alive. I have the strangest thought that we really do fit together. Like forbidden puzzle pieces nestling right into each other.
I lean my head on his shoulder. Everything smells delicious, and I’m thinking about Mary. Does she have decent food? Tampons? And what will I use as my proof-of-life question? I’m stressing out about it a lot.
Another guy appears—the owner. He shakes Luka’s hand. “It’s so nice to see you. Please. This way.” He leads us to a romantic window table.
Luka pulls my chair out for me as he chats with the owner about some kitchen things.
I grin up at Luka when we’re finally alone. “I feel like we got the best table!”
He sits. “My brother was bringing hell down on this place, and let’s just say this guy’s glad I took over.” He hands me a menu. “Everything here is amazing.”
“So you like sushi?”
His lips quirk. “It’s my favorite.”
“What’s so funny?”
“Us. Having normal things in common.”
We figure out our order and hand back our menus.
“I bet we have a lot of normal things in common,” I say.
“Like what?”
“We both speak Latin,” I point out.
“Yeah, we haven’t discussed that yet, have we? Orton’s and my secret fucking language. Nobody’s supposed to know that.”
I shrug. “Language of medieval manuscripts. Whadya gonna do?”
He grumbles in the joking way he sometimes does. Eventually, our drinks arrive—a scotch for him and a cosmopolitan for me.
I say, “My classics teacher’s head would explode if he knew people were using Latin to discuss nefarious criminal enterprises. ”
He picks up his glass and swirls the amber liquid around and around. “The more nefarious, the better.”
We talk about his travels and random city things and my textbook idea with my fave girl historian.
It’s fun, though sometimes I catch him looking grimly at my wrist, which he so carefully bandaged up before we left.
I’m keenly aware in these moments of what he is, a dangerous—and yes, nefarious—criminal who’d hunt and kill for me. He wants to hunt and kill Bender for what he did to me. He’d rip him apart with his bare hands if he could.
It means everything.
But he’ll hold off in order to find and protect Mary. That means everything, too.
Our gazes meet. His dark angel eyes sparkle.
Shivers slide over my skin. I just want to live in this moment.
Our first course comes, and we dig in. The salmon rolls are incredible. He encourages me to taste the surf clam, a.k.a. the hokkigai. “It’s mind-blowing when it’s fresh.”
I sell him on the natto roll, which he seems to have categorized in his mind as hippie sushi. He’s shocked that he likes it, which is highly enjoyable due to how expressive I’m learning he can be.
We order another round of just our favorites, and then his phone dings.
The way his eyes narrow slightly when he reads the message—not quite his full intimidation squint, but close—is something I’ve come to recognize.
I love how I can read these tiny shifts in his expressions now, like a secret language only I understand.
“Here we go,” he says. “Pictures for you to look at.”
“To see if any of them are Bender?”
“You good to check them out?”
“Let me at them!”
None of them are Bender, as it turns out. I try not to feel hopeless.
Luka is undeterred. “It means we ruled these guys out, that’s all. We’ll find him. And we’ll find Mary. He’ll get what’s coming to him.”
I nestle a ginger slice onto a bit of sushi, creating a perfect bite. “So you became king—kyre—just to get the killers’ names?”
“Yup.”
“And then what? When you find and take care of the final guy, will you pass the crown to somebody?”
“I like being king—for now. I’ll leave when I decide to leave, and it won’t be in a casket, I promise you that. And it won’t be because of some DNA test.”
It seems so sad. “Your home is temporary. Your job is temporary...”
“Everything’s temporary, Edie.”
“That’s such a cop-out. Even a rental apartment deserves curtains.”
He raises an eyebrow. “You suggesting I need curtains?”
“I’m suggesting you stop acting like you’re just passing through your own life.”
He grunts his neutral grunt. Not a yes, not a no.
We walk down Johnson Avenue after dinner. I haven’t spent a lot of time in the Bronx, and it’s kind of delightful. Luka can’t believe I haven’t been to the Bronx Zoo.
“I get that life’s temporary,” I say, “but it doesn’t mean you can’t put down your flag and say, ‘This is what I want now.’”
“Act as if things aren’t temporary?”
“Exactly!”
“That’s what’s known as a delusion.”
“No, it’s called hope. It’s called defiance.” I stop walking. “It’s called not being a commitment-phobic fatalist.”
He pulls me close. “You’re hot when you’re worked up.”
“Don’t deflect. I’ve seen you running the Ghost Hound family. You went through all this trouble to—you know...”
“Brutally kill my brother?”
“To take the throne,” I correct. “And now you run it like you were born for it. That restaurant owner practically genuflected when you walked in.”
He gives me his Luka squint. “What’ll it take to get you doing that?”
“Shut it!” I give him a playful punch and set back off walking. “You’ve been king for what—a month? And already, your guys would follow you anywhere.”
“You sound like Orton.”
“Smart man, that Orton.”
“Practical man. He wants to serve a king. The men just want to survive. The restaurant owner just hated my brother. It’s not about me.”
“And Storm follows you because... what? He likes your cologne?”
“It’s all transactions, Edie.”
“Oh, please.”
He takes my hand. He kisses my fingers.
“You won their loyalty, and you’re not gonna convince me otherwise. Not even with sex. The ‘nefarious criminal’ thing suits you, and you’d throw it all away?”
“The schoolgirl approves? I thought the schoolgirl hated criminals.”
I find that I do approve. This is who he is... and I’m rolling with it. “The schoolgirl likes this criminal. And his barbarian might-makes-right thing.”
“You are so hot when you’re a little bit bad.”
I snort and gaze across the street. That’s when I spot a bookstore. “Look!”
“Uh-oh,” he grumbles.
“Murderous rampages are one thing,” I say, “but fake books? That is not a character flaw that I can overlook in a boyfriend.”
There’s this sudden silence where we both realize I just called him boyfriend.
It’s awkward on about ten different levels—at least for me.
Luka not so much. He smiles at me. He likes it. He pulls me to him and kisses me. “Let’s get some fucking books, princess.”
The bookstore is a labyrinth of worn wooden shelves housed in an old three-story building tucked between a bodega and a laundromat. Inside, the mustiness of aged paper mingles with sandalwood incense and the faint scent of coffee from a tiny counter in the back.
“I could live in this smell,” I say.
Luka takes my hand. He’s not a man who puts down his flag, but he just agreed he’s my boyfriend. It feels strange and dangerous and a little bit wonderful, and I’m not thinking of the future. I suppose you could say I’m ripping a page out of his book for now.
We wander around the main floor, all shiny new books on every subject imaginable.
The upper floors hold the used books. Dusty old scholarly affairs from other centuries, colorful cookbooks and art books, and endless sections of tattered, well-loved paperbacks—mysteries, romances, fantasy, and more.
I find an old edition of a favorite werewolf book of mine. “This is the cover it had when I first read it.” I show it to him. We compare it to one of the later editions and discuss which covers are best.
We ramble through the travel section, and I make him show me pictures of Tucumayo. They didn’t get out of the prison-like school much, but there was a jungle-y courtyard complete with monkeys.
We head on through the genres. Luka, as it turns out, gravitates toward military science fiction. He shows me a few favorites, but he refuses to buy those because he “already read them.”
It’s so him not to be sentimental about the past or to buy something he might read again in the future. He thinks of today and possibly tomorrow.
But he does pick out a few new books by authors that he’s liked. That’s something .
Eventually, we drift over to nonfiction.
“Maybe we should get you a book on meditation, like something on ratcheting down your nervous system,” I joke.
“Why would I need that?”
“You almost gutted three men for looking at me.”
“I like my nervous system just fine the way it is.”
I give him a mischievous smile and threaten him with meditation lessons.
We move as a unit down the rows of books, making comments and showing each other our finds. It feels easy. Even silent browsing feels easy. At one point, he stands behind me with his arms wrapped around my waist and his chin on my head. I feel like we’re bandits, spending stolen time together.