Chapter 22 #2
Olivero leaned forward slightly, forearms braced on his knees. “It doesn’t have to stop. You don’t have to make it stop.”
I looked at him then. “Don’t I?”
My own voice sounded strange to me, flatter than I felt.
“I knew the Albanians were dangerous. I knew taunting Adam was reckless. I knew better, and she got hurt anyway.” I swallowed, the words growing sharper as I said them aloud. “Not in some abstract future I could pretend I would handle when it arrived. Not someday. Now. Here. Because of me.”
At least the Albanian operation Besnik had dragged into this for the sake of one man's wounded pride was already being dismantled.
My father had made clear that whatever personal arrangements existed between Adam Calloway and the Bashkim family ended the second we walked into that warehouse.
Valon Bashkim was not a man who tolerated expensive mistakes, and Besnik had made one of the most egregious in recent memory.
That problem, at least, would resolve itself.
Men like Valon did not need our help punishing their own.
And Emily would face nothing further from them.
Olivero watched me for a long second, the argument clearly still sitting on the edge of his mouth.
“I just think?—”
“No offense,” I cut in, “but my decision is made.” I pushed to my feet before he could try again. “I’m emailing the office now, and we’ll go home for Christmas as planned.”
“I hate when you sound like your father,” he muttered, standing too.
“That makes one of us.”
For once, he didn’t rise to it. He just nodded and headed for the guest room, giving me privacy that felt too much like pity.
The apartment went quiet, and I stayed where I was, both hands around the cold coffee, looking at nothing in particular.
I knew what I was about to do to her. Not to us, not to myself, not to some abstract future I could mourn cleanly from a distance.
To Emily. To the woman who stood in my apartment three weeks ago and told me exactly what she needed, who laid out her terms with the precision of someone who learned the hard way what happened when she didn’t, who looked me in the eye and said if she asked me a question, I should answer honestly, and she would decide, and if at any point she said stop, I had to stop.
I said yes to all of it. Meant it when I said it. Still meant it now, in the specific, useless way a man meant something he was choosing not to honor.
She gave me the terms of how not to become Adam Calloway, and I was about to break every one of them.
Not out of cruelty. Not out of malice. It was fear dressed up as love, which was, as Emily would have been able to tell me, the most effective disguise available.
I was going to decide what she could survive, hand her the verdict, and call it protection.
I was going to take the choice from her because I was afraid she would choose me anyway if I left it in her hands.
If she did, and the world reached for her again, I would have to live with knowing she had walked toward it with full knowledge.
I was not doing this for her. I could admit that.
I was doing it because I was not brave enough to let her choose damage, and I did not know how to say that without it sounding like exactly what it was.
I opened my laptop.
A formal message to the dean’s office. A brief explanation about graduating remotely. A request for final confirmation of the credits. Then another message, shorter and far worse, drafted and deleted twice before I ordered myself to stop trying to make it kinder than it was.
There was no kind way to cut out your own heart.
I heard the bedroom door open before I turned.
Emily stood there in one of my shirts, barefoot, her hair still tangled from sleep, the bracelet back on her wrist. For one deranged second I wanted to say nothing at all, cross the room, pull her into me, and pretend I had not spent the last hour preparing to ruin both our lives in the name of saving hers.
Instead I looked at her and said, “You should sit down.”
Her face changed very slightly.
Recognition.
“No,” she said quietly. “I think I’d rather hear this standing.”
The words cut.
I closed the laptop.
“Emily…”
She waited.
I had rehearsed this in my head. The danger. The promises I could not keep. The life I had no right to ask her to survive. All the careful, noble language men used when they wanted to make cruelty sound like sacrifice.
I hated myself for recognizing that while doing it anyway.
I had told her the truth of my world. How it worked. Who held it and why. She had listened, and she had stayed anyway—which was either the bravest or the most reckless thing I had ever witnessed, depending on the hour.
And because I had already named the truth in my own head, because I knew exactly what Emily would call this if I gave her the chance, I did the cowardly thing.
I spoke before courage could stop me.
“This life is too dangerous,” I said at last. “The promises I made you? I can’t keep them.
Not honestly. I thought I could protect you enough to make this work.
I was wrong. You got hurt because of me, and if you stay with me, it won’t be the last time my world reaches for you. I can’t let that happen again.”
She was very still by the time I finished.
Too still.
Then she nodded once. “Right.”
That was all. I stared at her.
She folded her arms lightly across herself, not defensive, just contained. “It seems very well rehearsed. I assume there’s nothing for me to say.”
“Emily—”
“No further input required,” she went on, her voice calm in a way that immediately started to unnerve me. “I see. Well. Thank you for letting me know.”
The detachment in her tone was far worse than if she had shouted.
“You have to understand?—”
“I do,” she said, and that stopped me more effectively than if she had raised her voice. “That’s why I said fine.”
I felt something cold move through me.
Fine?
That was all I got? Fine?
She looked at me for one second longer, and whatever she saw in my face seemed to confirm something for her.
“Tell me,” she said quietly, “you didn’t actually expect me to negotiate this.”
I said nothing.
Her mouth curved, but there was no warmth in it. “Or beg, maybe. Is that what this speech was for? So you could nobly destroy us and I could make it easier for you by crying on cue?”
“That’s not fair.”
“No,” she said. “It isn’t.”
She crossed the room then, calm enough that every step felt like judgment, and started gathering her things from the chair by the sofa.
My shirt came off over her head with quick, efficient movements, folded and set down.
She dressed without hurry, and the fact that she could stand there and put herself back together while I came apart watching her was almost unbearable.
“This decision reveals a lot,” she said at last.
I swallowed. “Reveals what?”
She looked at me fully then, and whatever was in her eyes was not tears. Tears would have been easier.
“That you’re one of them.”
The words landed with brutal force.
I laughed once, short and disbelieving, because otherwise I might have stopped breathing. “That’s not true.”
“No?” she asked. “A man deciding what is best for me without asking whether I’m willing to choose it myself, dressing it up as protection and expecting me to be grateful? It feels very familiar from where I’m standing.”
“That is not what I’m doing.”
“It’s exactly what you’re doing.”
She picked up her bag.
My whole body went rigid.
“Emily.”
She paused at the door, but only because she was polite enough to let me say one last thing that would not matter.
“Please don’t do this like I’m some villain in your story,” I said, hearing too late how weak it sounded.
For a moment, her true feelings flickered across her face.
Disappointment.
“You don’t need my help for that,” she said. “You’ve done perfectly well on your own.”
Then she opened the door.
I heard myself say her name again, but quieter, because something in me already knew I had lost the right to raise my voice.
She looked back once.
“Good luck with your future, Pietro.”
She walked out.