17. Elena
Elena
My phone buzzes against the table while I’m still trying to decide between the eggs and the bread, and I almost let it sit, because I haven’t fully stopped flinching at sudden noises since yesterday, and a buzzing phone on a hard table is exactly the kind of sudden noise that’s been getting to me.
Then I see the name in the headline, and the eggs stop existing.
I read it, then I look up, and Adrianos is across the table with his coffee, the little pot from his grandmother already drained beside him. He cocks his brow when he notices I’m watching him.
“Petros is dead,” I say, and it comes out wrong, slower than anything I usually say, like the sentence had to get past something on its way out.
“I know.”
Two words. That’s the whole response. He doesn’t reach for the coffee, doesn’t look away, doesn’t do any of the things a person does when news catches them off guard, because it hasn’t caught him off guard at all, and that hits me harder than the headline did, fast and from an angle I never saw coming.
“You know.” I set the phone down, because if I don’t set it down now, I’m going to throw it across the kitchen. “As in you already knew, before my phone told me. As in this isn’t news to you, it’s just a confirmation of something you’d already filed under done.”
“Elena.”
“No. Don’t. Don’t do the voice. I know the voice; the voice is for when you want me to slow down, and I’m not slowing down for anyone this morning.
” My hands have started shaking again, the same shake from the doorway yesterday, except this time it isn’t only fear running through me, it’s wearing something else on top of it, and the anger fits better.
“He had a daughter. Nineteen. At Fordham. He sat across from you and begged, used the actual word, please, told you about her graduation in the spring, told you he wanted to be alive to drive her there. I know you said he was a liability, but I assumed you’d be merciful enough to let him see his daughter graduate.
What you did wasn’t mercy. It was you deciding how he’d die instead of whether. ”
“You’re assuming too much.”
“I’m not assuming anything, I’m reading two facts, and reading facts is my entire job description, so here they are.
A man got close enough to your enemies to actually matter, and now he’s dead the morning after a car tried to turn both of us into a stain on the sidewalk, and you knew about it before my phone did, and you’re sitting there with your coffee like none of that is information.
” My voice is climbing, and I’m letting it.
“You’re a murderer. I knew that, obviously, I’ve known it since the trunk, I’m not new here, but I let myself forget it for a few days because you make good coffee and you threw yourself in front of a car for me yesterday, and now a man’s dead, and his kid is going to walk across a stage in May with an empty seat where he should be sitting, and you ordered it, with that face, the exact same one you’ve got on right now. ”
“Are you finished?”
“No, actually, give me a second, I have more.” I don’t, not really, but I’m not letting the silence sit on his terms. “You’re also a coward.
A rich one, with a coffee pot from your grandmother and a view of half the city, but a coward, because you couldn’t even give the man his spring.
Three months. That’s all he wanted, and don’t tell me three months would’ve cost you a single thing, because nothing costs you anything, that’s the whole rot at the center of you.
You’ve got so much and so little left to lose that everyone else’s losses don’t even reach you anymore. ”
“It wasn’t me.”
That’s the quietest thing he’s said all morning, and it stops me mid-breath, because there’s nothing running under it, no charm, none of the warmth he turns on like a tap when he wants something out of a room.
He sets the cup down, and for the first time since I sat at this table, he looks like a man choosing his next words instead of already knowing them.
“They found the crown symbol on him,” he says. “The same one burned into the deck of my parents’ boat. The same one that’s been left on every body OB6 wants the Crown to find.”
The anger doesn’t go all at once. It’s still there, sitting in my chest like a held breath, but underneath it, the floor goes out from an argument I’d already half delivered in the coldest way possible.
“They killed him,” I say. “Not you. They killed him and marked him, the same as the boat.”
“Yes.”
“Why would they?” I stop, because I already have the answer, and I hate how obvious it looks from this side of it.
“Because he talked to you. Because he gave you a name. The only thing that’s different since yesterday is that you and I walked into a building chasing that name, and a car tried to put us through a wall on the way out, and now the man who gave us the thread is dead with their symbol carved into him, which means they’re done covering tracks.
This is a message. For you. Maybe for both of us. ”
“Yes.”
I think about that, and the anger doesn’t disappear, it just stops having anywhere left to go.
“I just called you a murderer,” I say. “At your own table. Over eggs.”
“You did.”
“And a coward. I think I hit coward twice.”
“You did.”
“For the record, I had a whole plan for those eggs, and now they’re a casualty too, which feels about right for how this morning’s going.
” I press the heels of my hands against my eyes, because the whole day is trying to land on me at once, the headline, the car, last night, all of it stacked and tipping sideways.
“But I got it wrong. The actual thing. I said it loud, with extra adjectives, while a man’s dead and his daughter doesn’t know it yet, and I spent making it about you. ”
“You weren’t wrong to be angry.”
“I was wrong about where to point it.” I drop my hands and look at him.
His face is giving nothing away, except his eyes, which have something running under them now, closer to grief than to the menace he wears like a second jacket.
“The people who killed Petros are the same ones who took your son, your parents, Kalliopi, and they nearly got us yesterday, and I just spent five minutes screaming at the one person actually trying to stop them.”
“You needed somewhere to put it. It’s better it lands on me than you.”
“That’s not how this is supposed to work. You don’t get to be the place my feelings about the people trying to kill us go. That’s not a job that exists.”
“It does now.”
“You say things like that and just expect me to keep functioning. Like you’ve confirmed a dinner reservation.
” I shake my head, but there’s no heat left in it, just the dry tail end of an argument that burned through everything it had.
“I don’t have anything for that one. Write the date down, it’s historic. ”
The coffee’s gone cold in front of me, and the headline’s still open on my phone, Petros’s photo clearly pulled from some company site, a tie, a smile working too hard, a man who thought the worst thing that could happen to him this year was getting caught.
“I’m still angry,” I say, finally. “Just not at you. Or not only at you. There’s plenty left in the tank, you’re not off the hook for the trunk, or the rest of the list I’m keeping, but this morning, the actual thing on this table, I aimed it at the wrong person, and I don’t love how fast I got there. ”
“You got there because it made sense. He’s dead, I’ve killed before, the conclusion tracked.
” Adrianos reaches across the table, not for my hand but for the phone, turning it face down against the wood slowly like he’s putting something to rest. His fingers brush mine on the way, and neither of us pulls back right away. “It was wrong this time, that’s all.”
“This time.” I look at the phone, face down now, Petros, his daughter, and her graduation all hidden under glass and plastic. “How many times has it been right?”
He doesn’t answer, and I don’t make him.