Chapter 9
Pierce
Laura collapses into a nearby chair. Her shoulders curl forward like a closing fist, elbows locked against her ribs, fingers digging into her own arms as though holding the broken pieces of herself together.
Her lips flush crimson where she’s been biting them.
For a second, I think she’ll stand up and shoot me anyway, or else break the glass against my face out of pure sad symmetry.
Instead, she asks, “Tell me everything.”
The voice is carved flat—no sarcasm, no warning. It’s the sound of a woman reconstructing the rules even as she burns the old book.
So I tell her: about the ride in the black SUV, the hood they used that smelled of bleach and gasoline, the damp palm that held me by the throat while my nose filled with blood.
The translation of pain into threat. The way they made me kneel in the back of a cold butcher warehouse while Dominic himself stared through me, not at me, as if I was a slide under a microscope.
I tell her about the envelope handed to me, fat with money and a sheet of paper that read in block capitals: GET ON THE PLANE. IF YOU CALL HER, HE DIES.
She shakes her head once, and it’s not denial but self-punishment. Like she expected no better of her father, and less of herself. “Who?” she manages.
“Adam. And my grandparents.” My voice feels like chewing glass.
“He had photos. Your dad’s people were in the backyard.
In their house. The morning I left, I found one of the old Polaroids in my mailbox.
‘Nice lawn,’ was written on it in red pen.
He wanted to make sure I knew I could never come back, not even by letter. ”
Her throat cinches. She presses her palms to her eyes, and when they come away, her mascara webs under the lights. Fury, grief, violence. Her hands quiver, and she whispers, “I’d have killed him myself if I knew.”
“That’s why I never told you.”
“Bullshit. You never told me because you thought I couldn’t help. Because you thought I’d do something reckless.”
I let that hang. Somewhere in the city, a siren starts its lonely descent, barreling through the night air, my own personal Greek chorus.
I imagine what I look like right now: a ruined champion, a waxy shadow, in a kitchen filled with nothing but skeletons and Steve Winwood’s greatest hits humming through the wall from the neighbors.
Her mouth works. Nothing comes for a full ten-count, then: “After you vanished, he told me you’d left because you couldn’t handle it. That you hated my family. That it was business—always business. I waited. You never called.” Her voice is furious, but the words are fluid, almost delicate.
I want to reach for her, but I know better. “The truth is I loved you too much to let you become a widow before you turned twenty-five.”
She stares at me with all the broken galaxies in her eyes.
I ask, “Why did you come tonight?”
Her voice is red with violence. “The Old Man sent me to kill someone. Didn’t tell me who.
Just an address.” She swallows hard. “I saw you through the window. Standing there like... like a ghost.” Her fingers curl into fists, then release.
“I almost pulled the trigger right there. But I had to know why you were back. Why did my father want you dead without telling me it was you?” She huffs, a ragged laugh that’s more like a bite.
“So I came to check your pulse before I stopped it.”
The confession cracks something elemental in me. I realize I am cold, my hands numb, my chest hollowed like a condemned house. But the pain feels clean for once, almost bracing. Like jumping off a roof and realizing, for a few seconds, you don’t regret a goddamn thing.
She stands. Her hands dig into the countertop, then move to her ribs and hug close, like a girl holding herself in the middle of a rainstorm. I want to scold her for not bringing a warmer jacket. Instead, “I’m sorry.”
She tosses her head back, and that dark river of hair flows down, covering her face. “No, you’re not. Not really.”
I don’t argue.
“You ever think about it?” she says, voice so low it almost belongs to a stranger.
“All the time,” I say. “Sometimes I picture you on the other side of a glass wall, and I spend my whole life clutching a phone that doesn’t work, yelling until my throat splits open.
Sometimes I picture it differently. It’s the old place.
You’re making eggs. The sun is coming through the curtain.
” I stop short because I don’t want to say the rest.
She finishes it for me. “And then I walk in and you’re not there.”
“Yeah.”
She moves around the kitchen island and stands in front of me. She’s five foot three, but right now I swear she’s a foot taller than God. Her hand comes up, and she runs a thumb along the line of my jaw, almost clinical. Her voice is stripped raw: “I never even looked at another man.”
In my head, that should make me feel invincible, triumphant. Instead, I just feel tired and a little bit ashamed.
“Did you?” she asks, like it’s a dare.
I think of the cold London flats and the FSU girls with sharp teeth and short memories. The answers would only make things worse. “No one worth my time.”
She nods. Her breath is heavy and a little sweet—she’s been chewing wintergreen gum, which is so her it’s almost painful. I want her to slap me, or kiss me, or both. The space between us is an exposed wire, shorting out all the lights in my brain.
Then she kisses me– it’s swift, brutal, direct. I taste wine, gun oil, and a metal tang that could be blood or just the ghost of what we used to be. I respond like a man crawling out of a six-foot trench: greedy, half-mad, gasping at the world above ground.
She’s the one who breaks away first. Her mouth is slanted, her tongue running along her teeth as if she’s unsure whether to devour me or start laughing.
“Is that what you wanted?” I ask.
She shakes her head no, then yes, then no again. “I don’t know what I want. But I know what I missed.” Her hand finds my wrist, and she pulls, not gently. The force of her grip is pure muscle memory.
We leave the kitchen in a frenzy. The gun is lying abandoned on the counter, and the thought that we could both just as easily die as fuck tonight makes me smile in a way that feels closer to the truth than anything in years.
The stairs are dark and narrow, and the carpet is threadbare, but she climbs them two at a time and never once looks back.
I follow her, desperate and dumb, and when we get to the top landing, she turns and pushes me, not hard, just enough that I stumble backwards into the bedroom, where the only light is a single lamp on my nightstand and the New York skyline pulsing through the window.
She closes the door behind us. The click is final.
She’s on me before I register it, her hands in my shirt, the buttons scattering across the hardwood like loose teeth.
She tugs until the fabric splits, then palms my chest—my skin is hot and flushed, lit up like a crime scene under blue lights.
Her mouth goes for my neck, my jaw; I taste her everywhere, every inch of her, and I realize I’ve been holding my breath since she stepped through my front door.
I grab her, lift her, slam her into the wall.
She wraps her legs around my hips and bites my ear, gentle and savage all at once.
Every part of her is so familiar it hurts: the way her thighs flex, the clean angles of her shoulders, the tiny scar on her left eyebrow from that time in Philadelphia.
If there is a heaven, it feels like this; if there is a hell, it will be the memory of this hour, playing forever.
She strips off her jacket and her top in one motion, exposing skin pale as a confession.
Her breasts are small, but her taut nipples look like they could cut glass.
There’s an inked crown of thorns on her ribs–it’s new and bitterly beautiful.
I want to worship every inch of her. I settle for holding her face and kissing her until she’s trembling.
“Tell me you want me,” she rasps, a demand and a plea all wrapped up together.
I do.
She unbuckles my jeans, the leather belt making a soft whip sound as it comes free.
My boxers catch on my erection as she yanks them down.
Before I can register the cool air on my skin, she pivots us toward the bed with surprising strength.
We land in a tangle of limbs, laughing breathlessly as our bodies recognize each other.
Her skin is winter-pale against the dark sheets, except where flush blooms across her chest. I trace a new knife scar along her ribs, memorizing its texture.
When my mouth finds her collarbone, the salt there tastes like home.
I work my way down, past the softness of her stomach, until I’m between her thighs.
Her sharp intake of breath when my tongue finds her center is the only encouragement I need.
I lose myself in her taste—sweet and musky and unmistakably Laura—as she arches against my mouth.
My tongue traces slow circles, then quickens as her thighs begin to tremble.
She cries out, her body tensing and shuddering against me, hands fisting in my hair so tight it hurts.
As the last waves of her pleasure subside, I scramble upward, positioning my thighs between her legs, her skin still flushed and slick beneath me.
We move together, ache together, collapse and rebuild ourselves in the space between each gasp.
She is relentless, and I am famished. I thrust into her with a rhythm that builds like a storm, each movement deeper than the last. Neither of us lets up.
I bury my face in her hair and find her earlobe, bite it softly; she laughs, or maybe sobs, hard to tell anymore.
Her body arches beneath mine, her nails digging crescents into my shoulders as she tightens around me, trembling and crying out as she comes undone.
I follow moments later, spilling into her with a primal groan, watching through half-lidded eyes as evidence of our reunion glistens on her inner thigh when I finally pull away.
She collapses next to me, throat working, chest heaving, and stares up at the ceiling as if searching for constellations in the peeling paint. Sweat beads her brow; her mascara’s smeared into orbital bruising, her lips raw. She looks ruined, and I adore her for it.
We lay like that for a while. Neither of us speaks, but the silence is alive now, coiling and breathing between us. I reach out and lace my fingers through hers. This time, she doesn’t pull away.
After an eternity, she turns on her side and presses her forehead to mine. “You have to run,” she whispers.
“No,” I whisper back. “Not without you.”
She considers this. “If I go with you, I have to kill my father. Or he’ll never stop.”
She says it like an observation, not a threat.
Logic, not rage. I should be terrified, or at least repulsed, but all I feel is the deep, relentless heat of her next to me, the iron certainty that this is what the universe owed us all along: one final, full-bore escape.
I see in my head the two of us on a train, on a ferry, burning down every bridge behind us and never looking back.
“You want to?” I ask.
She nods, and a single, savage smile splits her face. “I’ve dreamed of it since I was sixteen. Some nights I rehearse the shot.”
I kiss her again, slower this time, letting the moment play out as long as it can. “We can leave in the morning,” I say, “or tonight. Either way, I’m with you.”
She closes her eyes, breathes in deep, and for the first time since she walked into my apartment, she lets herself look vulnerable. “Tonight,” she mutters, “I want to remember. I want to forget. I want to die and be born a hundred times with you. I love you, Laura.”
“I love you, too,” she answers without hesitation.
I almost tell her I love her again, but instead I pull her in, wrap her up, and let the world fade out at the edges as we spin and spiral and fall again.
The city howls outside, but in my bedroom it’s just us, our bodies, our ghosts, and the soft metallic hush of a future neither of us can name, only chase.
Tomorrow, maybe, we’ll plan the murder of a king. Tonight, we’re alive, and that’s enough.