Chapter 2
Dominic
I knew Ivy Castellano the way you know weather you're not standing in. From a distance. By its effect on everything around it.
I'd never spoken to her. In a year of her living three blocks from the clubhouse I'd traded exactly zero words with the woman, and I could have told you a hundred things about her anyway, because paying attention is the one skill I never managed to put down along with the rest of my old life.
Old habits don't all leave when you decide to be a different man.
Some of them just find honest work. The same eyes that used to map a target's routine now mapped a town I was trying to belong to, and the town had a lawyer in it who'd caught my attention without ever once aiming it at me.
I knew she walked fast past the clubhouse with her chin tucked.
I knew she carried her case files clutched to her chest the way some people carry a thing they're afraid to drop and some people carry a thing they're using as a shield, and that with her it was both.
I knew she had wire-rim glasses she pushed up with one knuckle when she was tired and that she was tired most of the time, dark circles under sharp eyes, running on coffee and whatever it is that makes a person fight battles that aren't theirs.
I knew she wore blazers over jeans like a woman who'd decided to be taken seriously and was prepared to enforce the decision.
And I knew — this was the thing I had no business knowing, the thing I'd watched too long from the bench by the park — that all of that armor came off when she crouched down to talk to the Delgado kids on the playground, that her whole face changed, that there was a fierce gentleness in her that she rationed out to children and clients and apparently no one else, and that watching it was like watching a fist unclench.
I admired her from a distance I had no intention of closing.
That was the whole arrangement, as far as I was concerned.
Some men get to want things and reach for them.
I had given up reaching. A man with my hands does not get to put them on a woman like that, and a man with my past does not get to imagine she'd ever let him, and so I had filed Ivy Castellano under the long list of good things in the world that existed near me but not for me, and I'd thought that was the end of it.
I was wrong about a great many things in those days. That was one of the bigger ones.
She came to the garage on a Thursday. In daylight.
That was the first impossible thing — that she'd come at all, that she'd walked through the open bay door of an Iron Thorn shop in the middle of the afternoon, the lawyer who stiffened at the sight of a cut, into a building full of the exact men she crossed the street to avoid.
I was alone, which was its own small mercy; the brothers were out on a parts run and I was on my back under a Dyna with an oil pan in my hand, and I heard her before I saw her — heels, then a hesitation, then heels again, the sound of a person making themselves do a thing.
"Mr. Salcedo."
Nobody called me that. I rolled out from under the bike and stood up too fast, wiping my hands on a rag, and there she was, standing just inside the bay door in a gray blazer with the spring light behind her and her files held against her chest, and I had the distinct experience of my whole carefully managed distance collapsing to nothing in the space of two seconds.
"It's Dominic," I said. Then, because I'm an idiot: "Or Viper. Whichever's less."
"Less what?"
"Less of a problem for you."
Something crossed her face — surprise, maybe, that I'd named the thing instead of pretending it wasn't there — and she set her jaw and decided to ignore it.
"Dominic," she said, like a person testing whether a floor would hold her weight.
"I have a proposal. A business proposal.
I'd ask you to hear me out before you respond, because it's going to sound insane, and I need you to understand that I've thought it through, and that it is, despite how it sounds, completely logical. "
"Okay," I said.
"You don't even know what I'm going to —"
"You said hear you out. I'm hearing you out." I set the rag down. I gave her the only thing I had to give a person who'd walked into a place that scared her: stillness, and my whole attention, and the implicit promise that whatever came out of her mouth, I wasn't going to laugh.
And then she laid it out, and she laid it out the way I imagine she laid things out in a courtroom — clinical, precise, every word load-bearing, no waste.
A case she was fighting. A judge who decided things on a feeling.
A motion against her own standing that turned on a word I watched her hate to say: roots.
The fastest legal instrument for manufacturing the appearance of permanence.
A marriage. Strictly legal. Limited duration.
Purely transactional. She would draw up terms. Separate lives under one roof for the sake of appearances and the court record.
An end date, or at least an exit, built in from the start.
She needed someone local, established, recognized by the town as planted, willing to sign and ask no questions and want nothing from her but the arrangement.
She got that far without looking at me, eyes fixed somewhere over my shoulder like she was addressing the bench. Then she made herself meet my eyes, and her voice changed, got careful in a way the rest of the pitch hadn't been.
"And you," she said, "would get something out of it too.
A married Iron Thorn man with a respectable wife — an attorney, an officer of the court — reads very differently to a town than a single defector with a reputation.
It would be —" she chose the words like she was lifting something heavy and trying not to drop it on either of us — "something that proves to this town you're more than what you were. "
It landed exactly where she'd aimed it. Right in the soft place under the patch that no amount of scrubbed floors had ever filled.
She didn't know me. She'd built that line out of rumor and a glance across a dark street, and it shouldn't have had the reach it had.
But it was true, that was the thing, it was true in a way I'd never once let anyone say to my face — that I was still, eighteen months patched, a man trying to outrun what he'd been, a man certain brothers watched at the edge of their vision, a man who stood at the fence while the warmth happened behind him.
And here was a stranger in a gray blazer who'd correctly diagnosed in two minutes the wound I'd spent two years pretending I didn't have, and who was offering, as a side effect of her own desperation, the one thing I'd never figured out how to earn: visible, undeniable, town-recognized proof that the defector had become something else.
A respectable man's life, rented out for the term of a court case.
Every instinct I had said no.
No, because a marriage to me would put my shadow on her, and she had no idea how long that shadow was or who it belonged to.
No, because the only clean thing I'd done with my life was decide to want nothing for myself, and this was wanting.
No, because she was looking at me the way you look at a tool you've decided to use — useful, regrettable, held at arm's length — and some pride I didn't know I still had recoiled from being the thing a woman like that settled for.
No, because I'd watched her long enough to know that under the blazer was a person who had been hurt by men who looked like me, and a decent man would not let her chain herself to one even on paper, even for a good cause, even with an exit built in.
She stood there in the spring light with her files held to her chest and her exhausted, righteous, beautiful eyes fixed on mine, waiting for the no she'd clearly braced for, already half-turned toward the door in her mind, and I opened my mouth to give it to her.
"When?" is what came out.
She blinked. "When — what?"
"When do you need it done."
The relief that went through her was so naked it was almost hard to watch — relief, and then immediately suspicion of the relief, the face of a person who's spent her life learning that anything that comes easy comes with a hook in it. "You'll do it."
"I said when."
"Why?" She narrowed her eyes. "You don't know me. I just walked in here and asked you to marry me to win a case for people you've never met. Most people would have questions."
"You said no questions."
"I said I needed someone willing to ask none. I didn't say I'd trust a man who didn't have any."
That, I'd remember later, was the first time she made me almost smile — the speed of her, the way her own terms turned in her hand and she still came out ahead. I gave her the truest answer I had, which was the smallest part of the real one.
"Two reasons," I said. "One, you need it, and it'll help a family that needs it more, and I've got nothing better to do with a marriage license than that.
Two —" and here I should have stopped, and didn't — "you walked into the one building in this town you're afraid of to ask.
That cost you something. People don't pay that for a plan they haven't already decided is the only one left.
So you've thought it through better than I could in five minutes, which means there's no question I'd ask that you don't already know the answer to. When do you need it done?"