Chapter 9 #3
She tells me her family is enormous, loud, and constitutionally incapable of minding their business—the antithesis of mine.
Her yiayia plays old Greek songs too loudly, hoards recipes she swears are secret, and believes rain is a sign the dead are gossiping in heaven.
Her younger sister paints on anything that will stay still long enough.
Yara likes rain. Art galleries. Quiet storm R&B.
Stargazing, though she says it with such reverence that I suspect she means something more devotional than looking at the sky.
“Sade,” she says, nodding toward the music murmuring from the speaker. “By Your Side. All-time favorite.”
I pause with my chopsticks halfway to my mouth. “This is Sade?”
Nothing in the room has registered properly except her, which makes failing to recognize one of my favorite artists less surprising than it should be.
Her brows lift. “You know her?”
The excitement in her voice is unmistakable.
“Of course. Sade got me through more three-in-the-morning financial models than caffeine ever did.” I glance toward the speaker. “But I don’t know this one...”
I trail off, certain I have bored her with the most unromantic explanation possible, but Yara only smiles, not the least bit put off.
“I like how your mind works, Xavier.”
“You do?”
“A lot, yes.”
Heat blasts up my neck. My toes might as well curl. Fuck me, I am one compliment away from twirling.
“My parents used to slow dance to this song,” she whispers, her eyes moving to the rain-streaked glass. “I’d see them laughing and being disgustingly romantic, and it used to creep me out.” A faint smile softens her face. “Now I listen to it whenever I miss them.”
I find myself wondering how long she has been away from home, but I don’t press.
She comes from people who clearly loved without rationing it. I can hear it in the way she speaks of them, in the easy generosity of her laughter, in the casual way she offers pieces of herself without seeming afraid someone will use them badly.
I listen with excessive concentration, despite the fact that my focus has never required supervision.
Everything she loves seems to exist in direct opposition to the career she has chosen. It makes me wonder if her head is just as loud as mine, and the punching bag is simply where she puts the noise.
Over the next hour, my silence suffers a slow death.
Somewhere between the empty bowls, the music trickling from the speaker, and the two of us turning our chairs toward the rain-streaked glass, I start answering questions I never intended to answer.
Favorite color? Easy. One look at her eyes, and I knew. Likes and dislikes. How much sleep I get. Whether I learn faster through demonstration or repetition, until the movement finally submits to muscle memory. Which environments make me sharper. Which ones make me shut down.
I spare her the architecture of my childhood, though. All it would invite is pity, and I have no appetite for it. Besides, the way she studies me suggests she already knows there is more I am not saying.
I realize too late that she has been quiet for several minutes, and I am the one blabbering.
It must be the coziness of it all that dismantles my defenses. The ramen. The rain. Her bare foot tucked beneath her on the chair. The gratified softness in her expression every time I give her something honest.
The regret should come immediately.
It doesn’t.
Not when she looks at me that way—pleased, attentive, and entirely devoid of pity.
Perhaps this was temporary. Her curiosity would burn bright for a while, then gutter out the moment I became more trouble than novelty.
It had happened before. Yet some treacherous instinct in me believed Yara wouldn’t leave easily, and the possibility frightened me far more than abandonment ever had.
“You hate it,” she observes, inclining her head toward me.
We sit side by side now, so close I’m compelled to maintain a careful distance from her bare shoulder—a ludicrous precaution after almost an hour of her hands correcting my body.
“Ramen?”
“Boxing.”
The answer should be easy. Yes. Obviously. I hate the way my body knew fear before it knew anything else, and I hate that she saw it within an hour of meeting me.
Instead, I say, “I dislike inefficient violence.”
Her mouth curves. “That is such an expensive way to avoid saying yes.”
“I’m not avoiding anything.”
“You are. Badly.” She absorbs the glare I level at her without so much as a blink. “You think boxing is about hurting someone.”
“It isn’t?”
“No.” A rush of air exhales from the vents, snuffing the candles one by one until moonlight becomes the only source of light, rendering Yara almost mythic. “Hurting someone is easy. Any idiot with a fist can manage that. Boxing is about not panicking when someone tries to hurt you back.”
I look down at my hands. How can I not panic?
Yara keeps going, answering the question I can’t force past my teeth. “It is breath. Balance. Timing. Knowing where your body is when fear tells it to disappear. Knowing how to stay inside yourself when every instinct says leave.”
My throat tightens around nothing. “That sounds rehearsed.”
“It is.” Her smile turns crooked. “I tell it to every man who walks in here thinking power lives in his shoulders.”
“And where does it live?”
She taps a finger against my chest. My pulse fractures into a frantic staccato. I forget to breathe.
“Here first.”
Goosebumps pebble my skin in the wake of her touch. Christ. I’m acting like a schoolboy with a crush.
“Then the feet,” she adds, ruining whatever strange thing my body is trying to make of the moment. “Mostly the feet, actually. Yours are a tragedy.”
A laugh almost escapes me.
Almost.
She intercepts the attempt all the same. The woman’s perception is damn near uncanny.
“There,” she says, pleased. “Progress.”
“I did not laugh.”
“No, but you considered it. I accept partial payments.”
I shake my head, but the corner of my mouth betrays me again.
“Why do you do it?” I ask.
“Box?”
“Yes. ”
For the first time since she sat down, the ease in her expression shifts. Not gone. Recalibrated.
“My father put me in classes when I was young because I kept fighting boys at school.”
“Why?”
“They kept touching my hair.”
I suppress my amusement. The more she speaks, the more impossible she becomes to dismiss. I find myself seized by the ridiculous urge to know what she looked like as a child.
She shrugs, but there is nothing careless in it. “And because I had too much anger for a girl, according to people who felt entitled to measure it. My parents disagreed. My yiayia disagreed louder.”
“Louder?”
Her dimples reappear. “She was the kind of woman who should’ve been a colonel, but was born into a village that thought a woman’s war began and ended in her kitchen. She heard I was fighting boys and said, ‘Good. Now teach her how to win properly.’ ”
A guarded part of me softens with every tick of the clock.
“It started with my sister.” Yara fiddles with the hem of her sweatpants. “Althea. She’s younger than me. Just as hotheaded, but with zero stomach for violence. A bit like you.”
I give her a flat look.
Her mouth tilts. “One day, a boy cornered her behind the schoolyard and tried to make her kiss him. When she refused, he shoved her hard enough that she split her lip against the stone wall. I found her sitting there with blood on her shirt, trying not to cry because his mother had already told her boys only teased girls they liked.”
My teeth lock together, anger moving through me with frightening precision. For one second, I almost make peace with the violence I despise. I have a younger sister too. I would die before letting some worthless bastard put his hands on her.
“I found them because Althea and I have a telepathy no one in my family has managed to disprove. She needed me, and I knew.” Her fingers mimic a small sprint across the air. “So I went.”
“What did you do?”
“What any devoted sister would do.” Her expression doesn’t waver. “I broke his fucking nose.”
Satisfaction cuts through the rage simmering in my blood.
“How old were you?”
“Eight. My father put me in boxing classes the next week because I came home furious that I hadn’t broken it properly.” She takes a sip from her can, casual as a confession. “And because other boys kept mistaking my patience for permission.”
I watch her throat work around the swallow. Pride commingles with the unfamiliar feeling I am beginning, reluctantly, to acknowledge.
“What did your parents say after the fight?”
“They checked if I was hurt first. Then they told me my anger needed discipline.” A veil of nostalgia settles over her sharp features. “My mother said rage without direction was just a fire looking for curtains. My father said if I was going to hit, I should learn where my feet belonged first.”
I try to imagine a house where anger is corrected without being condemned. Where a child comes home bloody and someone asks what happened before asking who might see.
Clean yourself up before someone sees.
The thought empties something out of me.
Lucian might disagree. He was the golden child. The one my mother touched with gentle hands, the one my father corrected in public and protected in private. I used to think love was a finite resource, and he had been born first enough to inherit most of it.
“So I did exactly that,” Yara continues. “Boxing gave it somewhere to go. A shape. Rules. It taught me anger doesn’t have to make you cruel.”
The realization arrests me.
That is the difference. The thing I couldn’t name while she corrected my stance and told me to hit cleaner, not angrier.
“I was taught the opposite,” I blurt out.
Fuck .
Yara orients herself toward me. “Who taught you that?”
I withdraw a fraction. “No one important.”
She accepts the lie with a small nod, which somehow feels worse than pressing. “Okay. Then we start there.”
“With hitting harder?”
“No.” Her tone gentles, though nothing about her loses its certainty. “With teaching your body it has options. Whatever taught you otherwise is not in this room.”
Surprise reverberates through me, followed by recalcitrant admiration and a strange reprieve I have no idea how to accept. It congeals in my throat, strangling the defensive response already rising there.
She encroaches on my space until the edge of the table bites into my lower back. “Do you understand?”
Yes. No. I don’t know.
Every rational thought vacates my head. The room recedes. The rain, the music, the whole miserable architecture of my life—gone.
Only her remains.
Her gray eyes, silvered by moonlight. The three tiny flecks near the corner of her left eye. The infuriating calm in her face while mine threatens to come apart entirely.
Our breath mingles. Hers carries strawberry and spice, subtle and disarming, drawing me closer rather than warning me away. I inhale despite my better judgment. It feels less like breathing than remembering my lungs were built for more than survival.
Drop. Drop. Drop.
Rain strikes in uneven beats, and my pulse answers every one.
She is smaller than I am by a considerable margin, all compact strength and controlled danger, yet the urge to shield her rises in me with embarrassing ferocity. Irrational, considering who she is.
I came to The Ninth Bell because of Dominic Karras. Because of the deal. Because of the first credible path to wealth I had ever been close enough to touch.
But now, with Yara Markakis looking at me while rain needles against the moonlit glass above us, I understand with quiet, inconvenient clarity that Karras is no longer the only reason I will return.