12. Dorian
DORIAN
Three days of this, and I understand for the first time in my life what men mean when they talk about coming home.
I’ve always had a house. The best house money can build, in fact.
Stone walls and iron gates. Staff and security.
A kitchen that could easily serve forty.
But it was never a place I walked into and felt like some gear I didn’t know I had was clicking into a position it was always meant to be in.
I walked into my house the way I walked into my office.
It was a location, a base of operations.
The place where Lillie slept, and I paced, and the work followed me in no matter how many guards I posted at the door.
No matter how determined I was to leave it outside for her sake.
That’s changed.
Quinn’s shoes are by the front door. Her sneakers, kicked off at an angle, because she takes them off the second she’s inside and never puts them where they belong.
There’s a hair tie on the kitchen counter.
A mug she didn’t finish sitting by the sink with a lipstick print on the rim.
Her phone charger is plugged in next to mine in the bedroom, and the bathroom smells like whatever it is she puts in her hair.
Something clean and sweet. I can’t name it, but I’d recognize it anywhere.
She’s everywhere now. In every room, on every surface.
She’s even in the way the house sounds now.
It’s not quiet the way it used to be. It’s alive.
There’s music. She plays music from her phone while she cooks with Lillie, terrible pop songs I pretend to hate.
Lillie sings along, and sometimes I hear them from down the hall, and I stop walking and just stand there listening, like a man who stumbled into someone else’s life and is afraid to move in case it notices.
It’s been three days. They’ve been the best three days I can remember. They are also, by a wide margin, the most dangerous.
The Castellanos have been quiet. That’s worse than noise. Noise I can respond to—a car outside the wall, a rumor at the docks. Quiet means planning. It means they’ve moved from measuring to deciding. The deciding is what kills people.
Tristan’s briefing two nights ago was short.
The shell company behind the car has been linked to a second shell, which connects to a property the Castellanos purchased six months ago.
A warehouse, three miles from my east wall, with a clear sight line to the service road.
They bought it six months ago. That means they’ve been thinking about me for longer than I’ve been thinking about them.
That gap is the kind of thing that gets families put in the ground.
I’ve doubled security yet again. There are now more men on my property than I’ve had since my father was alive, and the house feels it. The way the grounds hum with a low, constant alertness.
Quinn feels it too. I see it in the way she looks out the kitchen window. She noticed the new face at the gate, too, when we came back from her apartment with the things she packed. She’s started watching me when she thinks I’m not paying attention.
She’s too smart for this. That’s the problem I didn’t plan for.
I planned for a girl who would accept the explanations I gave her.
I didn’t plan for a girl who pays attention to the guards and notices patterns and hides it all behind a smile that says okay while her eyes say I don’t believe you for a minute.
This morning, she asks.
We’re in the kitchen. Lillie is at the island, eating cereal and telling Poptart’s life story to a stuffed rabbit. Quinn is standing by the window with her coffee, looking out at the east lawn where two men are standing in positions that have nothing to do with gardening.
“Can we go to the park today?” she asks. Light, casual. The tone she uses when she already knows the answer and wants to see if I’ll lie about the reason.
“Not today,” I reply before sipping my own coffee.
“It’s been three days,” she murmurs.
“I realize that.” I join her by the window, keeping my voice low for Lillie’s sake. Let’s face it, for my own sake as well. I don’t particularly feel like being bombarded this morning.
“You know, she’s been asking too.” Quinn glances at Lillie, who has gone suspiciously silent. “She wants to see the ducks. She’s been talking about it for days.”
“Not today,” I repeat as gently as I can. “There’s some work I need to stay close to. We’ll do something here. The paddock, the pool.”
“We’ve done the paddock and the pool.” She takes a sip of her coffee and says nothing else, which is somehow worse than arguing.
I watch her eyes move across the lawn again. She’s keeping tabs on the men. I know she is, because she’s been doing it for days.
I’m losing her, aren’t I? Not in the way I feared. Not physically, not through danger. I’m losing her to the lie. I have to get her back somehow. So I make a decision.
“Tonight,” I say. “We’ll go out tonight. Lillie’s favorite pizza place. All three of us.”
Quinn looks at me. I watch as her suspicion flickers, then recedes. It’s not gone, but it’s shelved for now, set aside in favor of something she wants more than answers right now, which is normalcy. “Really?” she murmurs.
“Really. Tell Lillie.”
We don’t have to tell Lillie. Lillie heard. Lillie has been hearing this entire conversation with the supernatural auditory range of a child who wants something. She’s already off her stool and launching herself across the kitchen. “Pizza! Quinn, we’re getting pizza!”
“I know!” Quinn catches her, laughing, and I watch them spin in the middle of my kitchen. The warmth in my chest is so sharp it almost hurts. Underneath it, the cold thing sits and waits, the way it always waits.
I pick up my phone to text Tristan. Taking them out tonight. Gino’s. 7 PM. I want four on the restaurant, two on the street, and someone on the kitchen exit. Nobody visible.
It takes less than ten seconds for him to reply. Understood.
Then, five seconds later: You sure?
I’m sure.
He doesn’t respond again, which is his way of saying he disagrees and will do it anyway. That’s what Tristan does. He disagrees with me quietly, prepares for the worst without being asked, and is right often enough that ignoring him is a calculated risk I take with open eyes.
Lillie takes forty-five minutes to get ready for pizza. It involves changing her outfit three times, insisting on the shoes with the butterflies, and asking Quinn to braid her hair in a way she saw on a video. It seems to require the engineering skills of a bridge architect.
Quinn does it, though. She sits on the bed with my little girl standing between her legs and her tongue poking out the side of her mouth.
It’s the same face Lillie makes when she’s concentrating.
She braids Lillie’s hair into something complicated and beautiful while Lillie narrates a movie she wants to see.
I stand in the doorway watching them, and I think about the warehouse just miles away. Does a man in my position have the right to take his family to a pizza restaurant on a random weeknight?
His family. I used that word without deciding to. It’s becoming harder not to.
We take the car. Sal drives. The security detail follows in a vehicle I chose specifically because it looks like every other SUV on the road—unremarkable, which is the point.
Quinn doesn’t notice it. Lillie is too busy explaining the menu to Quinn, who has somehow never been to Gino’s, which Lillie considers a personal failing she intends to correct.
The restaurant is small, loud, and smells like garlic and burning wood.
It’s been Lillie’s favorite since she was three, since the night I brought her here after Sofia’s funeral because I couldn’t face the house, and she wouldn’t stop crying.
A man named Gino brought her a slice of pizza with extra cheese, and she stopped.
Just stopped. Like the cheese was an answer to something.
We’ve been coming back ever since.
The bad feeling starts in the car and settles in my gut the way bad feelings do. It’s not sharp or specific, just a low hum of wrongness that could be paranoia or could be instinct. I’ve learned not to dismiss either one because they’ve kept me alive.
I scan the room as soon as we walk in. The booths along the walls, an open kitchen in the back, two exits—the front door and a service entrance through the kitchen.
There are maybe thirty people in here. Families, mostly.
A couple at the bar. A group of teenagers in one corner.
Nobody who sets off the part of my brain that runs threat assessment in the background like an operating system I can’t shut down.
My guys are in position. I can’t see them, which means they’re doing their job.
There’s one at the bar who I recognize by his shoulders—Marco’s cousin, new to the crew, reliable.
There’s another outside, leaning against the building across the street with a phone in his hand, looking like every other guy waiting for an Uber.
Two more I can’t place, which is exactly how it should be.
Lillie orders before the menus arrive, the moment we’ve sat down, because she has been ordering the same thing since she was three and sees no reason to consult a piece of paper about it.
Quinn, on the other hand, studies the menu with the focus of someone defusing a bomb.
“There are too many options,” she murmurs. “This is stressful.”
“It’s pizza,” I point out.
“Pizza is never just pizza,” she informs me. “Pizza is a series of decisions that reveal your character. Are you a pepperoni person? Do you prefer sausage? Extra sauce? Extra cheese? Or, the worst decision of all…”
Her eyes narrow, and her voice drops to a dangerous whisper. “Do you like ham and pineapple?”
“I would never commit a crime like that,” I assure her, tracing an X over my chest.
“You better hope not. Because that’s a dealbreaker, sir.”
I almost order ham and pineapple just for the hell of it, but decide on pepperoni anyway. She orders something with goat cheese and arugula—Lillie looks at it like it personally insulted her. We eat, and the bad feeling in my gut eases slowly.
This is normal. This is what normal feels like.
A loud restaurant, a sticky table, a five-year-old with sauce on her chin arguing about whether pineapple belongs on pizza in the first place.
Quinn is telling a story about her old roommate’s cat that involves a ceiling fan and a bag of flour.
Lillie starts laughing so hard she winds up hiccupping.
And I watch all of this while sitting here with a piece of pepperoni pizza in my hand, like I’m any other man in any other restaurant.
I reach across the table to wipe sauce off Lillie’s chin with my napkin. She swats my hand away. “I was saving it.”
“You were saving pizza sauce?”
“For later.”
“I’m afraid that’s not how sauce works.”
“You don’t know how sauce works,” she informs me in a way that makes me seriously dread the day puberty hits, because it’s going to hit like a motherfucker when it does.
Quinn laughs so hard she starts choking on her water, and I think: this.
This is the thing. Not the money or the house.
This table. These two people. This is everything, and everything else is the machinery I’ve built to protect it.
Dessert is cannoli, because Gino’s cannoli are the reason God invented sugar.
Lillie eats hers with the methodical precision of a jewel thief: shell first, then filling, licked off her fingers one at a time.
Quinn watches her do it with an expression of such open, unguarded love that I have to look away for a second because the feeling is too big for me to handle.
Finally, Lillie puts down her plate. “I have to go potty.”
“I’ll take her,” Quinn says, already standing and reaching for Lillie’s hand.
Fluid, instinctive, like they’re connected by something I can’t see.
Lillie slides out of the booth and takes her hand, and they walk toward the back of the restaurant together, Lillie’s butterfly shoes clicking on the tile, Quinn’s free hand resting on top of her head the way it does when she’s steering her through a crowd.
I watch them go. Quinn glances back over her shoulder and catches me watching, and she smiles.
It’s easy, warm. Lillie is saying something to her, tugging on her arm, and Quinn looks down at her and laughs.
They turn the corner toward the restrooms, and I sit in a booth with cannoli crumbs on my fingers and think about how lucky I am.
A man like me doesn’t deserve this. A girl who smiles at him over her shoulder, a daughter like Lillie, and a night like this that feels like the entire point of being alive.
I’ve spent my entire adult life building walls and cataloging threats.
None of it—not a single moment—prepared me for the simple fact of being happy.
Because that’s what this is. This is happiness. I’m living in it at this very moment, and I’m afraid I don’t deserve it.
Lillie will come out with wet hands because she never dries them properly, and Quinn will carry her because Lillie’s legs will suddenly not work, the way they stop working at the end of every long day.
We’ll go home, and I’ll tuck my daughter in, and I’ll take Quinn to my bed.
Tomorrow will be another day, and I’ll figure out the Castellanos the way I figure out everything. Carefully. Completely.
I pick up my water and take a drink, waiting.