Chapter 32 - Wren #2
Nico nods once. "We cost them something at the Gilded Lily. They'll want it back. The next move will be patient and specific." A pause, brief and hard. "Jimmy's thread is closed. The leak is sealed. But they built from what he gave them, and that information doesn't un-exist."
The table holds the statement. Nobody looks away from it.
"Then we make every move bleed them," Logan says.
The room orients toward him, and pride surges through me. That’s my man.
The gathering winds down in stages — plates pushed back, the table becoming a landscape of half-empty glasses and breadcrumbs and a candle burned to nothing.
Sera wraps portions to send home with everyone, moving through the room with containers and an expression that makes clear refusal is not an option.
The smell of the food lingers. It will be in my hair when I go to sleep. I don't mind.
I look at the bar.
Isa is still there. Present, efficient, refilling drinks when asked, never sitting, her back to the room. She didn't eat at the table. Didn't join a conversation I saw.
I stand up.
Logan glances at me. I don't look at him for reassurance. This one is mine.
I cross the room.
She doesn't turn when I reach the bar. She's reorganizing something under the counter — bottles, the quiet industry of a woman who will find something to do with her hands until the room empties.
"Can I get something to drink?" I ask.
She straightens. Turns. Her dark eyes hold mine for a moment, measuring. Not hostile, not warm, just assessing.
The silence between us has the weight of months in it — months of cold assessments and deliberate distance, of Juliet getting the real smile in thirty seconds while I earned nothing in weeks.
I hold her gaze and don't fill the silence.
She's the kind of person who says what she means, and noise won't help.
She turns to the shelf. She pours without asking and slides the glass across. Something amber, cool. I don't know what it is and I don't ask.
Then she reaches under the bar.
A sketchbook lands on the counter — leather-bound, new, quality visible in the way the light sits on it. Better than the worn spiral notebooks I keep buying and throwing away. She slides it across beside the drink. One smooth, deliberate gesture.
No explanation. No note. No conversation about why.
I look at it. Then at her.
"Your other ones were cheap," she says.
Flat. Factual. The warmth underneath it is deep enough that she would never call it warmth.
"You're one of us now," she adds, in the same register she'd use to confirm a vendor delivery. "So that's how it is."
I pick up the sketchbook. The leather is good — the real kind, meant to last, the kind that doesn't shed at the corners after three months. The kind you buy for someone when you expect them to still be using it next year.
"Thank you," I say.
She's already turning back to the shelf. "Don't make it weird."
I carry the sketchbook back to Logan.
He sees it before I've said anything. His eyes go from the leather cover to my face, then back again. His arm comes around me, easy and certain.
"I told you she liked you," he says.
I whack his chest with the notebook. "No you didn’t."
I hold the sketchbook against my chest for a moment, the leather cool and solid under my palms.
Adrian is last to leave the table. He says something to Isa behind the bar, quiet, and she responds without looking up, and he doesn't look wounded by it — the coffee and the non-response their entire language and apparently sufficient.
He's bringing the last of the glasses over when he pauses beside me.
"Mi reina." He doesn't raise a glass — just says it, warm and direct, like it's been decided. "Come back soon."
"I'm not going anywhere," I say.
Something in his expression shifts. He squeezes my shoulder once and heads for the door.
Logan surprises me with a long, hard kiss.
"Home?" he says, quiet, just for me.
The word means something now. The penthouse with the rooftop pool and the marble floors and the bay going silver in the mornings.
The place where his shirts are on the bathroom floor and my sketchbooks are on the dining table and his access code is my birthday because he knew it before I told him.
Home. A word that used to feel like a lie I was telling a city that didn't know me. Not anymore.
"Yes," I say.
He holds the door and I step through into the main floor, dark and closed, the stage unlit, the chandelier hauled up. Emergency lighting casts everything in green shadow.
We walk through the dark floor together. His hand finds mine somewhere between the bar and the entrance.
The war continues. The world stays what it is.
But we have this. The sketchbook under my arm, the leather warm from my hands.
His hand in mine. The family, dispersed into their own evenings, all of them carrying something — grief or fear or love or all three at once, which is, I'm learning, how it goes in a family that doesn't pretend otherwise.
I came here looking for fear. I came here looking to feel something after five years of nothing. I found everything else instead.
At the front door, we step out into the open night together, the city spreading out ahead of us, indifferent and bright, and we move into it without looking back.