Chapter 27
TWENTY-SEVEN
The moonlight came through the glass wall of the room in a wide, pale sheet, laying itself across the white linen, across the curve of Jessica's shoulder, across the slow rise and fall of her breathing.
Dante lay on his back and watched the light move—the water outside shifting it in imperceptible increments, the shadows on the ceiling drifting like something alive.
She was almost gone. He could feel it in the weight of her, the way she'd softened against his side in stages, her hand loosening on his chest, her breathing finding a slower rhythm.
Not quite asleep. Still present enough that when he moved his thumb along her shoulder, she made a small sound and pressed closer.
He didn't move otherwise. He lay still and let her drift and kept his eyes on the ceiling.
He was good at stillness. He'd learned it young, in rooms where moving at the wrong moment had consequences, and he'd carried the skill forward into a life where it mostly just meant he could wait longer than other people without it costing him anything.
Stillness had served him well. It had kept him alive in situations where alive was the best available outcome.
He'd never had much cause to resent it before tonight.
He'd made the decision in the dark of the warehouse, while she slept.
It had simply been there, waiting, the only option that left her standing at the end of it.
He'd known her long enough to know she would fight him on it if she knew.
She'd burn the whole thing down before she let him walk into it alone.
Which was why she wasn't going to know. Not until morning. Not until it was already done.
He felt the thought try to surface fully—the morning, what it looked like, what she would say when she understood—and he pushed it back down. Not yet. He had a few more hours. He was going to use them for this.
“Dante.” His name in her mouth, blurred with sleep, barely there.
“I'm here,” he said.
She settled. Her breathing slowed again. He felt the exact moment she went under, the last small tension leaving her hand, the weight of her becoming total and trusting.
He closed his eyes.
Her hair smelled of the management company's shampoo and underneath that something else, something that had nothing to do with the house or the night or any of it, something that had been the same for thirteen years.
He looked at the Gulf. The moon was lower now, its light thinner, the room beginning to shift almost imperceptibly toward the first suggestion of grey.
Jessica woke to light, the sun burning gold and flat beyond the glass wall, the room warm with it. She lay still for a moment, eyes half-open, and let the unfamiliar ceiling remind her where she was. The house. The West End. The white linen, the smell of cedar, the sound of the water.
Dante.
She reached without looking and found the sheet beside her cool, the warmth of him long gone. She opened her eyes fully and looked at the space he'd left.
Last night came back to her in pieces. His hands.
The steam of the bathroom. The scent of his skin and the feel of him inside her.
She'd fallen asleep with her face against his chest and his arm around her and the sea outside and for the first time in longer than she could accurately calculate, she hadn't dreamed about anything at all.
She wanted to stay in it. She wanted to pull the sheet up and stay in the warm borrowed quiet of the room and not let the day start yet.
She knew better than to think she could, but she wanted it anyway.
Some version of ordinary that she'd been constructing in the back of her mind for years without letting herself call it what it was.
She got up. Found her t-shirt on the floor and pulled it on. Then she moved down the hallway, one hand trailing the wall, and stepped into the living room.
Dante was standing at the glass wall, facing out. His back was to her. He was dressed—jeans, his jacket, boots. Fully dressed, she noticed. Not the clothes of a man who'd been up for ten minutes getting coffee.
She followed his eyeline through the glass.
The deck ran the full width of the house, and beyond it the beach, and the Gulf burning in the early light. A woman was coming up the deck stairs from the sand. She moved without hurry, one hand light on the railing, her dark hair pulled back into a tight braid, her face turned slightly away.
Jessica didn't recognize her, but in that moment, she knew exactly who she was. It was the woman who had been hunting them. It had to be. Her mouth went dry.
“Dante.” His name came out of her barely above a whisper.
He turned. His face did something she didn't have a word for. It wasn't guilt, not quite, but something in the neighborhood of it.
“It’s okay,” he said.
He said it gently. That was the thing she would keep coming back to, later, when she had the distance to examine it: the gentleness of it, the way it sounded like something he'd been preparing.
He turned back to the glass.
The woman had reached the top of the deck stairs.
She was smaller than Jessica expected. She stopped there, one hand still on the rail, and looked through the glass at both of them.
Her expression was neutral in the way of a woman who had decided, some time ago, to keep her face as a private thing.
Her eyes moved to Jessica briefly, then back to Dante.
Dante walked to the door.
Jessica watched him cross the room. Watched his hand find the handle. Watched him open it—not cautiously, not with his body angled for cover. He opened it the way you open a door for someone you're expecting.
The woman stepped inside.
Then the three of them stood in the living room and the morning light fell across all of them equally and nobody said anything for a moment.
The woman looked at Dante, and something passed between them.
Jessica felt the floor tilt.
She looked at Dante. He was already looking at her, and his face had the expression she didn't have a word for, and she understood suddenly that whatever was happening had not started this morning.
Dante looked at her steadily. Beside him, the woman stood at the edge of the room and said nothing, which somehow made her more present rather than less.
“You reached out to her,” Jessica said. “You contacted her.”
The woman spoke first. “No. It was me who contacted him. Made him an offer he…” she drew out the word, “couldn’t refuse. His life for yours.”
Jessica ignored her. Her focus was laser-sharp on Dante and Dante alone. “When?”
“At the warehouse,” Dante said.
Jessica heard the words but had to spend a moment assembling them into a shape she could understand.
Since the warehouse. While she'd been lying on the canvas sails listening to Trent on the floor below.
While she'd asked him about Borya and felt his arm tighten around her.
While she'd been choosing to trust him and walking into the dunes at his side.
The Gulf light was very bright. She was aware of herself standing in the middle of the room in just a shirt, her hair loose, no shoes, and she felt the specific vulnerability of that—how unprepared she was for this exact moment, in every possible sense.
“I don’t understand.”
When he spoke, his voice was soft. “I've been running the options. There's no version of this where we both walk away from it. Borya doesn't stop, you know that. You've known it longer than I have. If he wants me, he can have me. As long as he leaves you out of it. For good this time.”
“No,” she said. Her voice came out steadier than she expected. “No. We’ll find another way. There's another way out of this, Dante, there's always –”
“There isn't.”
“We don't know that. We haven't –”
“Jessica.”
“We haven't exhausted every option. We could go to the FBI, we could find someone in Borya's organization who wants out, we could—” She heard herself and knew how it sounded and kept going anyway because stopping meant accepting this madness.
“Miller had contacts, and even if Miller was compromised there might be someone else, someone we haven't tried yet.”
“There's no one,” he said softly.
She looked at him. “So you just decided. By yourself.”
“If I'd told you, you'd have said no.”
“Yes.” Her voice cracked on the word. “Yes, I absolutely would have said no.
I would have said no because you don't get to make this decision on your own.” She shook her head.
“You came back into my life three days ago.
Three days. And now you're standing there telling me you've arranged to give yourself up?
She's going to take you straight to him, Dante.
Do you understand that? She's going to hand you to Borya and he is going to kill you.”
“I know what he'll do.”
The flatness of it silenced her for a moment.
She looked at the woman then—really looked at her, for the first time since she'd come through the door.
Her features were a strange mix: olive skin, pockmarked at her cheeks, pale blue slanted eyes, black hair.
A combination of Slavic and Hispanic, although she spoke with the accent of neither.
She was watching the exchange with an expression that was difficult to read—taking in everything and returning nothing.
“We should go soon,” she said to Dante.
Jessica turned back to Dante. She felt the bargaining run out of her like water out of a cracked thing. All the alternative routes, the other options, the versions where this ended differently were gone.
“Don't do this,” was all she could say.
He crossed the room to her.
She felt him coming and told herself she wasn't going to let him touch her, that she was going to step back, that she wasn't going to make this easier for him by letting him hold her while he broke her apart.
She stood her ground for approximately two seconds after his hands found her face, and then she went to pieces against his chest in a way she hadn't let herself go to pieces in years.
He held on. She felt how hard he was holding on, she felt him press his mouth against the top of her head, felt the long, shuddering breath he took and the way he controlled it on the way out.
He almost broke. She felt it move through him like a tremor, felt the moment it reached the surface and the moment he pushed it back down, and she hated him fiercely and completely for the strength of it.
“You were supposed to stay,” she said into his chest. Her voice was wrecked. “You were supposed to stay this time.”
He didn't say anything. He held her tighter for a moment and then he stepped back. Then he walked toward the other woman and the door and the morning outside.
The door closed behind them.
The room was very quiet and very bright and entirely empty of everything that had mattered, and Jessica stood in the middle of it and breathed, and breathed, and breathed.