Chapter 8 #2
"He was my best friend," I said. "We grew up together. He was the first person who told me I was becoming like my father, and the only person I listened to."
"What happened to him?"
I heard the question inside her question. What did you hide from me?
"He died because someone gave D'Angelo information about a route he was taking."
"Who?"
"Someone I loved."
Elena went still.
"Your ex?"
"My fiancée. Lucia."
The word still felt wrong in my mouth. It had been too long for it to hurt so much.
"Did she mean to?"
"She says she did not."
"Do you believe her?"
"I do not know."
That was the answer I had been unable to give anyone else. Roman had called doubt weakness. Nico had called it human. Adrian had called it irrelevant to the legal facts. None of them had been enough.
Elena rested her elbows on the railing. "What happened to her?"
"She disappeared after the investigation. Her brother was found dead in a motel outside Hartford. She left the city before anyone could decide whether she was a victim or an accomplice."
"And you have been waiting for the betrayal to happen again ever since."
I looked at her.
She did not say it cruelly. She said it like a person who had watched her father make fear into silence and recognized the pattern somewhere else.
"Yes," I said.
The word seemed to take something from me.
"That is why you do not tell people things," she said. "If you control the information, they cannot use it against you."
"That is the theory."
"And how is it working?"
I looked at the dark field beyond the trees. Somewhere in the distance, a train moved along old tracks, its sound low and mournful.
"Poorly."
She laughed softly. Then she turned toward me.
"I am sorry about Rafe."
No one had said that to me in years without adding something else. A warning. A demand. A reminder of what I owed the family.
"Thank you," I said.
Her fingers tightened around the mug. "I am still angry you lied."
"You should be."
"And I am still angry that you married me like this."
"You should be."
"You are agreeing a lot tonight."
"I am trying something new."
The smile came again. This one stayed longer.
She stepped closer. The porch was not large. Her shoulder nearly brushed my arm. I could smell rain in her hair, citrus from the soap in the safehouse bathroom, something warmer beneath it that was only Elena.
"Can I ask you something?" she said.
"Yes."
"When you saw me at that wedding, what did you think?"
The question cut through me with such unexpected force that I almost gave her another evasive answer.
I did not.
"I thought you were the only person in the room who knew what was real," I said. "Everyone else was performing. You were working. You made people feel held without letting them see how much it cost you."
Her eyes lowered.
"That is a strange thing to notice."
"I notice strange things."
"I noticed."
The silence that followed was not empty. It had weight. Permission. Fear.
I lifted my hand, then stopped before touching her.
"Elena."
She looked up.
"If I kiss you, I need you to tell me to stop if you want me to. At any point."
Her breath caught. Not dramatically. Just enough that I heard it.
"I will," she said.
"And if you do not want this because tonight was frightening -"
"Damian."
The way she said my name did not feel like an interruption. It felt like a decision.
She set her mug on the porch railing. Then she touched my face with her bandaged hand.
"I do not want you to keep asking questions because you are afraid of the answer," she said. "But I want you to ask this one."
I leaned into her palm for a second I should not have taken.
"Do you want me to kiss you?" I asked.
"Yes."
I kissed her.
There was nothing careful about the first second.
Every attempt at restraint I had held between us snapped under the simple fact of her mouth opening beneath mine.
Then I made myself slow down. My hand settled at the side of her neck.
Her fingers caught in my shirt. She kissed me back with a kind of fierce attention that made my chest hurt.
When I pulled away, her forehead rested against mine.
"That was not very controlled," she whispered.
"No."
"Is that going to be a problem?"
"Probably."
She smiled, and I kissed her again.
Inside, the radio crackled. A reminder of the world waiting outside the porch. We ignored it for another minute. Then another.
Inside the safehouse, Elena insisted on making soup.
"You were shot at two hours ago," I said.
"Streetlights were shot. The car was hit. I have a cut on my arm. None of those things mean I cannot open a can."
"You do not have to prove you are capable every five minutes."
She looked at me across the kitchen counter. "That is rich coming from you."
Nico had gone to check the generator with Marcus. The house was quiet except for rain and the old refrigerator humming against the wall. Elena opened a cupboard, found two cans of tomato soup, and held them up.
"We have options," she said.
"That is the same thing twice."
"It is a safehouse. Lower your standards."
I found a pot and put it on the stove. She tore bread into uneven pieces while I lit the burner.
The domesticity of it felt unreal. I had spent the last hour mapping exit points and checking bulletproof glass.
Now I was watching Elena Marchetti Voss use a wooden spoon to stir canned soup in a kitchen that had probably not seen anyone cook in years.
"You are staring again," she said.
"I am thinking."
"That is worse."
"Probably."
She smiled faintly. Then the smile faded.
"Do you ever get tired?"
"Of what?"
"Being ready for the worst thing to happen."
The question made me look at the stove. The soup had begun to simmer, small bubbles breaking at the edge.
"I do not know how to be ready for anything else," I said.
She was quiet for a moment.
"My mother used to say people confuse vigilance with love," she said. "She would make Papa sit down when he came home from work and check every lock twice. She would tell him that he could not protect us by never being in the room with us."
"Did it work?"
"Sometimes."
I looked at her. "You think I am like him."
"I think you have different reasons for the same habit."
The answer should have irritated me. It did not. Elena never used insight as a weapon unless someone had earned it.
I poured the soup into bowls. We sat at the small kitchen table across from one another. Outside, a branch scraped against the window at irregular intervals.
"I am sorry about your mother," I said.
She looked down at the bowl. "Thank you."
"I am sorry you had to find out she knew more than you did."
"She was trying to protect me."
"I know."
Her eyes lifted. "Do you?"
The question was not accusing. It was an invitation to be honest.
"I know that protection can become an excuse," I said. "I do not know how to stop wanting to do it."
"Wanting is not the problem."
"What is?"
"Whether you let the person you are protecting tell you what safety feels like to them."
I thought about the rules in her notebook. Ask. Do not make protection feel like punishment.
"What does safety feel like to you?" I asked.
She took a breath. "Knowing someone will listen when I say I am afraid. Knowing I can leave a room without being followed. Knowing that if I make a decision you do not like, you will not make me pay for it later."
Her list was simple. It felt like a language I had never learned.
"All right," I said.
She gave a tired laugh. "You cannot say all right and solve it."
"I know."
"You keep saying that."
"I am trying to learn what it means."
For a while, we ate in silence.
Then Elena reached across the table and touched the bandage at my hand, the one from the broken glass in the library.
"Does it hurt?" she asked.
"Not much."
"That was not the question."
I looked at her fingers resting lightly over mine.
"Yes," I said. "It hurts."
She nodded.
The rain kept falling. The soup grew cold. And in a safehouse built for fear, we sat across from one another and practiced telling the truth about small things.
Later, when the rain grew colder and the house grew quieter, she stood in the doorway of her bedroom with her hand on the frame.
"You can stay," she said.
I stopped in the hallway.
Every instinct I had told me to take the invitation before fear changed its mind. Another, newer instinct asked whether she was offering because she wanted me or because the night had made loneliness unbearable.
"Are you sure?" I asked.
The safehouse had once been a caretaker’s cottage at the edge of an abandoned vineyard outside the city.
It had stone walls, a narrow kitchen, two bedrooms, and a fireplace that smoked when the wind changed direction. It was not beautiful in the Voss way. Nothing gleamed. Nothing had been selected to impress anyone. That was why I trusted it more than the estate.
Rain had trapped us there after the shooting on the road.
Marcus had taken the other team to sweep the surrounding routes.
Nico had gone back toward the city to meet Adrian.
For the first time since Elena entered my life, there were no guards in the next room and no brother waiting to make a comment if I said the wrong thing.
Elena sat at the kitchen table wearing one of my shirts.
The sight had no right to affect me as much as it did. The shirt was too large, the sleeves rolled twice. Her hair was still damp from the rain. She had wrapped both hands around a mug of tea and was staring at the cracked glaze on the table as if it could tell her how to arrange the next hour.
“You should sleep,” I said.
She looked up. “You said that at the hospital.”
“It was good advice then too.”
“You should stop giving advice when you mean instructions.”
I leaned against the counter. “I am trying.”
“That phrase is becoming dangerous.”
“Why?”
“Because I am starting to believe you.”
The fire snapped in the grate. Outside, rain battered the roof in steady waves.