Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
GIA
The house is too quiet.
After the noise of the event, the music, the voices, and the human density, the silence of the entrance hall when Dante brings me home lands like a held breath.
I stand there for a moment after the door closes.
Dante has already disappeared somewhere to make calls.
I go to the living room off the main corridor and sit down and do not turn on the television and do not pour a drink and do not do any of the things a normal person might do while waiting, because I am not waiting. I am thinking.
The northern transport run.
Dante said it in the car, just those words, clipped and flat, not for my benefit but not hidden either. And the thing that is sitting in my chest right now, cold and specific and getting colder, is the memory of what I typed into the burner phone two days ago.
I sit with my hands in my lap and I look at the wall, I think about my father, Killian O'Rourke and what they needed that information for, and the answer that arrives is not complicated, but it sits in my stomach like something swallowed wrong.
That was me.
Whoever planned tonight needed to know the exact width of that gap and I handed it to them while Rafael slept forty feet away.
I betrayed him.
I press my fingers to my mouth, breathe through my nose and stay very still until the room stops spinning.
Laura. I think about Laura because that's the only thought that has ever made any of this livable. Her face. The nightlight she won't admit she needs. The way she grips the seat edge when she's scared. I think about the footage my father showed me and I make myself remember every second of it.
It doesn't help as much as it used to.
I hear the car before I see the lights. Then voices in the entrance hall—Enzo's first, and then another that I feel in my sternum before I've consciously registered it as Rafael's. I'm on my feet before I've decided to be and I'm in the entrance hall doorway when they come through the front door.
Enzo has one hand at Rafael's back. Rafael is upright, moving under his own power, but his left hand is pressed flat against his side and his shirt is bloody.
My heart does something I don't have time to examine.
"What happened—" I start.
"It's handled," Rafael says, and his eyes move over me with the flat assessment of a man taking inventory, checking I'm present and undamaged. Nothing in his face that resembles relief at finding me here. Nothing that resembles anything.
"You're bleeding!" I gasp.
"I'm aware."
Enzo looks between us. "He needs it cleaned."
"I know where the kit is," I say.
Rafael looks at me. "I don't need—"
"Sit down," I say. "Please."
I see he wants to argue or something in that line, but Enzo puts a hand on his shoulder and says something in his ear that I don't catch. Rafael's jaw tightens and he moves toward the sitting room without another word.
I rush to get the kit.
When I come back he's in the chair nearest the window, shirt pulled away from the wound. He's examining it himself with the detached interest of a man assessing damage to something he owns, not particularly bothered. Actually unbothered, which is somehow more unsettling.
Enzo takes one look at the scene, at me with the kit, at Rafael in the chair, and makes a decision. "I'll be in the kitchen," he says. He leaves. The door doesn't fully close behind him.
I pull the low table in front of Rafael's chair and sit on the edge of it and open the kit.
I look at the cut. It's long, down the left side, below the ribs, shallow enough that the danger has passed but deep enough that it's still bleeding sluggishly and will need closing. The skin around it is already darkening.
I open the antiseptic.
"This will sting," I whisper.
"I know what antiseptic does."
I give him a look that says. “Of course, Mr. Smarty pants.”
I apply it and he doesn't react. At all.
Not even a breath change, not even the small flinch that most people can't help, just absolute stillness under my hands like pain is a language he stopped speaking years ago.
I work carefully, cleaning the length of it, and he sits there and watches me do it with those green eyes that give nothing away.
"You don't have to do this," he says. Not warmly. Just as a statement of fact.
"I know."
"Then why are you?"
I don't answer immediately. I finish cleaning the wound, set the cloth aside, reach for the closure strips.
My hands are steady, they're not shaking, the way I'm able to be here and do this thing and not come apart, and I think it's because having something to do is easier than sitting alone thinking about twelve minutes.
"Because you're injured," I say finally.
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one you're getting."
Something moves in his face. Not softness.
Something more like recalibration, a small internal adjustment, there and gone.
I place the first closure strip, pressing it flat against his skin, and I am close enough to him now that I can smell the night on him—cold air and the chemical bite of the fire and underneath his cologne, still there, still the same dark cedar, and I focus on the wound and not on any of that.
I place the second strip. To do it properly I have to lean in, both hands at his side, my face near his shoulder. His breath moves the hair at my temple. I feel it and I don't look up and I place the third strip with complete concentration.
"Who taught you this?" he asks. His voice is closer than it was. Lower.
"My father had men who needed patching up. I watched." I place the fourth strip, smooth it flat. "You learn things in houses like ours whether you want to or not."
He says nothing to that.
I sit back. The cut is closed, four strips neat along the length of it. I look at my own hands for a second, then at the wound, then I make the mistake of looking up.
He's already looking at me.
The kind of attention that has weight behind it, that sits on your skin, and I am still close enough that if either of us moved even slightly, the distance would be nothing at all.
My pulse does something inconvenient.
"Done," I say.
He doesn't look away. "Are you."
It's not a question about the wound and we both know it. I hold his gaze for one second, two, and then I sit back further and reach for the antiseptic packaging to give my hands something to do.
"You should eat something," I say. "Enzo said—"
"I heard what Enzo said."
I start closing the kit. He watches me do it.
The room is very quiet, just the two of us and the low lamp in the corner and the specific charge of a silence that has too much in it.
I am aware of him the way I am always aware of him, that constant peripheral attention my body keeps trained on him without my permission, but it's sharper now, up close, after my hands on his skin, after that look.
Enzo appears in the doorway. "Car's out front. I'll leave you to it." He looks at Rafael. "Eat something. Sleep." He looks at me. Nods once. Then he's gone, the front door closing behind him.
Just us.
Rafael shifts in the chair and the movement brings him marginally forward and the distance between us, already not much, becomes less.
He's looking at the window now, not at me, his hand resting loosely over the closed wound, the long line of him relaxed in the way dangerous things are relaxed—not at ease, just resting, still entirely capable.
I should go to bed.
I stay exactly where I am.
The silence stretches and I am looking at his hands and thinking about the fact that those hands were doing something entirely different a few hours ago and that the cut under the closure strips is partially my fault in a way I cannot say out loud to anyone in this house.
The guilt and the wanting are pressing against each other in my chest in a combination that makes no sense.
"Get some sleep, little Gia."
There it is. Low, without looking at me, delivered to the window like an afterthought.
I hate it the way I always hate it — that immediate, specific flare in my jaw, the chin that wants to come up, the words that line up behind my teeth.
And underneath all of that, now, the other thing.
The thing that started in the bathroom and has been building ever since, the thing that his cologne and his proximity and his hands at the base of my zipper have made progressively worse.
The name in his mouth in this quiet does something to the base of my stomach that I refuse to acknowledge.
I stand up. Pick up the kit.
"Good night," I say, and my voice comes out even, which is the only victory available to me right now and I will take it.
I feel his eyes on my back the entire way to the door.