Section 39
Bite Marks
Lucky
Which is how I end up standing in my own doorway, barefaced, looking at Sylvie Hart.
“Oh,” I say.
“Yeah,” she says. “Oh.”
She’s in a hoodie three sizes too big and shoes that don’t match it, like she left somewhere fast and grabbed whatever was near the door. A rideshare pulls away behind her, tail lights swallowed by the block.
She came alone. To an address she shouldn’t have. At midnight.
That feels exactly like something Sylvie Hart would do.
“Does Dante know you’re here?”
“Does that matter?”
“To me? Enormously.”
“Then no.” She looks past my shoulder into the apartment, cataloguing it the way she catalogued the stairwell. Exits. Angles. Whether anyone else is breathing in there. “Are you going to make me stand in the hall?”
I step back.
She walks in like she’s already decided how she’s leaving.
Diablo lifts his head off the rug, considers her, and crosses the room. He shoves his skull into her hip with all the subtlety of a dropped anvil.
“Diablo,” I say. “Boundaries.”
“It’s fine.” She puts a hand down. Scratches behind his ear.
It’s the bent one. The finger sits wrong against his fur, curled where it should be straight, and my whole body goes quiet watching it.
She catches me looking.
“He’s got good taste,” she says. “Not sure that’s a point in your favor.”
“It usually is.”
“Yeah, I heard.” She straightens. “Gia mentioned the dog thing.”
She doesn’t sit. I don’t offer.
I stand across the room from her with my hands open at my sides, which is a thing I learned to do a long time ago and have never once had a good reason for.
“Okay,” she says. “Here’s why I’m here.”
“You don’t have to explain—”
“I’m going to, though.” No wobble in it. “Last night, Gia asked me if I recognized you. And I said yes.”
“Okay.”
“And then I said some other things.” She folds her arms. “I said the vibes were off. I said you weren’t the one in charge. I said you didn’t enjoy it.”
Something turns over in my chest, hot and unearned.
“I didn’t ask you to—”
“I know.” Her jaw sets. “Nobody asked me. I just handed it over. Free. Like a coupon.”
She takes a breath through her nose.
“I’ve spent a whole day furious about it. Not at her. At me.”
“Okay…”
The apartment is quiet.
“So I need to know if I lied,” she says. “That’s it. That’s the whole errand.”
I open my mouth.
Nothing good is in it.
“I never touched you,” is what falls out, and it’s true, and it’s the worst thing I’ve ever said.
Sylvie tilts her head.
“Say that again,” she says. “Slower. Listen to it this time.”
I don’t say it again.
“You were the door,” she says.
Her voice is small but it makes a huge dent in my chest.
“There were four of you in that hallway and I was fighting all of them, and then I looked down the hall at the man in the helmet and I understood there was no version of that night where I got out. That’s what you were for. You didn’t have to touch me. You were the reason I stopped trying.”
I stand there and take it.
“I bit somebody,” she says. “In the doorway. Hand over my mouth, and I got teeth into it. Through the glove.”
She’s watching my hands.
She was watching my hands the first night too, in the club, before she ever said a word about my face. Flick down, flick back up. I thought she was checking whether I was armed.
“Yeah,” I say.
I pull up my sleeve and turn my left hand over.
Two pale crescents at the base of the thumb, faded to nothing much. You’d have to know what you were looking for.
She knows what she’s looking for.
She looks for a long time.
“Huh,” she says.
“You got all the way through the leather.”
“I was motivated.”
I don’t know whether to offer her a cup of coffee or to get down on the floor and beg her forgiveness. I do neither.
“I carried you down the stairwell,” I say, because if we’re doing this we’re doing all of it. “It smelled like mold and weed. You looked at me once, straight through the visor.”
“I was memorizing you.”
“I know. I could tell.” My voice comes out wrong. I let it. “I’ve thought about that look maybe four hundred times.”
“Good.”
“I didn’t hit you. I didn’t threaten you. I didn’t do the thing he liked to do after.” I make myself keep going. “And I didn’t put you down and walk out either. I could have. There was a whole minute on the second landing where nobody was watching me, and I did the math, and I kept walking.”
Sylvie says nothing.
“That’s the part,” I say. “Everything else is a technicality.”
She nods slowly. Like a woman confirming a delivery.
“Okay,” she says. “So I didn’t lie. You didn’t enjoy it.” A beat. “You also did it.”
“Yeah.”
“Both of those are true and neither one cancels.”
“Yeah.”
I take a breath and do the stupidest thing available, which is standard for me.
“You can tell Dante,” I say. “Or Gia. Whatever version you want, I won’t correct it. Or if you want to put me on the floor first, I’ll stay down. That’s not—it’s not a bit. I mean it.”
Sylvie stares at me.
Then she laughs, which sounds nothing like a laugh.
“Oh, absolutely not,” she says.
“I—”
“No, you don’t get that.” She points at me, and the finger she points with is the crooked one. “You want me to hit you so you can feel square. You want me to say it’s fine so you can put it down and go be somebody’s good dog with a clean conscience.”
My mouth is dry.
“I’m not your priest and I’m not your firing squad,” she says. “I’m a woman who lives on the fourth floor and had a bad year.”
The radiator ticks.
Diablo’s tail moves once against the cabinet, uncertain, reading the room better than I am.
“So here’s what you actually get,” Sylvie says. “I’m not taking back what I told her, because it was true. And I’m not forgiving you, because that’s mine and I’m keeping it.”
“Fair.”
“You get to live with the fact that I was kind to you anyway.” She pulls her hood up. “Turns out that’s heavier. I checked.”
She’s right. I feel it land.
“For what it’s worth,” I say, “I’m—”
“Don’t.”
“Okay.”
At the door she stops with her hand on the frame. Doesn’t turn around.
“She’s going to lose Red before she gets it back,” she says. “The men Frank moved into the south checkpoint aren’t Frank’s. He’s borrowing. Somebody’s lending him bodies and not asking for interest yet.”
I go still.
“Why are you telling me that?”
“Because you noticed the checkpoint changed and she doesn’t know it, and you’re going to do something reckless about it either way.” She shrugs, small. “Might as well be aimed.”
“That’s not forgiveness.”
“Correct,” Sylvie says. “It’s logistics.”
The door closes.
I stand in the middle of my own apartment for a while.
Diablo comes over and puts his chin on my thigh, which is his entire emotional vocabulary and also, honestly, more range than I’ve got tonight.
I don’t reach for a joke. There isn’t one in there.
“She’s right,” I tell the dog.
He doesn’t argue.
I pick up the helmet off the hook, and then I put it back, because it isn’t armor anymore. It’s just the thing I was wearing in her hallway.
Somebody’s lending Frank bodies.
Somebody with bodies to spare.
I sit down on the floor next to the dog, and I start doing the arithmetic on every man I ever stood next to.