Lena
TWENTY-FIVE
Opal is in my lap on the couch. This is where we are, and this is where we’re staying for now—both my arms around her, both her arms around me, her head against my collarbone, the warm weight of her against me the most important thing in the room right now.
My hands still shake underneath her arms, where she can’t see them. But she feels it. I know she does. I’ve been holding my face together with the kind of concentrated effort that leaves marks. My cheeks might bruise from the effort.
One already is. I can feel it. Ed’s fist did that.
It takes a while before the office door opens.
Ed comes out first, limping slightly. He looks like a man who has been through something definitive—pale, careful with his movements, one arm in a sling. But he’s upright, and he’s weirdly composed.
If Dario wasn’t next to him, I’d grab his throat and never let go.
I was panicked and disoriented before. Didn’t think clearly. Couldn’t see my target. But I see it now. I know exactly how I’d kill him now.
I trust that Dario has him under control, but it takes a monumental effort not to do it anyway.
When Ed’s eyes find Opal on the couch, he does something I didn’t anticipate.
He takes a chair from the side of the room, swings it over, and sits down, positioning himself at her eye level in the deliberate, respectful way adults use when they want a child to feel attended to rather than spoken to.
He looks at her. “Hey, kid. Remember me from the park?”
Opal looks at him. The weighing look—the forty-year-old look. Then nods. “Your arm looks bad.”
“I owe you and your mom an apology. What happened tonight—” He glances at me, and in the glance is something I don’t have the bandwidth to fully decode right now.
“It was a stupid prank that went way, way too far. I scared you, and I scared your mom, and I’m sorry for that. Genuinely. I didn’t mean to at all.”
Opal considers this. The tilted head. The slight narrowing of the eyes. “A prank.”
“A stupid one,” he says. “I don’t recommend it.”
She thinks about it for a moment. “Pranks don’t have guns.”
“No,” he says. He doesn’t qualify it or look for an angle. “They don’t. That was the stupidest part. I didn’t think about that ahead of time, and—” He raises his arm, wincing. “I paid for that.”
Another beat of assessment. “Does your arm hurt?”
“A lot.”
Her tiny glare cuts me. “Good.”
Even Ed’s surprised. Then he laughs. “Yeah. That’ll teach me.”
“Guns are bad.” She looks at his arm, then at his face. “Dario fixed it, though.”
“He did,” Ed says. “He’s a very good man.”
“He fixes everything,” Opal says. Then she looks up at me. Her eyes are too old for her face. They have been too old since the first fever that wouldn’t break. “I need to sleep.”
I start to shift her weight. “Okay, baby—”
But then she looks at Ed one more time, her head tilted with an expression I can’t fully read. “You probably need to sleep too. You look like it’s past your bedtime.”
She climbs down and goes to her room. Her door clicks shut.
He exhales. “She’s a tough one. You’re gonna have your hands full—”
“Of your throat if you don’t get the fuck out of my home right the fuck now.”
He swallows. “Yes, ma’am.”
Dario walks Ed out. I hear the front door. The lock. Silence.
More pain rushes in. Some of it is physical. Not all of it. I sit on the couch alone and breathe for a moment. Then I get up.
No Dario. He must have left with Ed. I don’t know if he left to kill him somewhere else or what, but at least there’s quiet for now.
I drift through the halls. Not sure why I don’t just go to bed, other than I’m too wired to sleep, and I know it. I’d probably just lie there and vibrate. So, I drift.
Dario’s office door is open. The light is on. I stand in the doorway.
The room is clean. Not cleaned—clean, in the way a room is clean when nothing has happened in it. The desk is bare. No instruments. No blood on the floor. No evidence, not even a smell, of the things I know were in this room forty minutes ago.
There were dead men here. They didn’t attack him in our bed. They knew he’d be ready for that. Last week, when I changed the sheets, I found an arsenal beneath his side of the mattress. So, that was smart of them.
They thought his medical office wouldn’t be ready for an attack. They thought wrong.
I don’t know why he was in there, until I remember the breaker panel is in there. Probably in case his medical equipment trips one when he’s in the middle of surgery or something. So he was checking the breakers when they attacked. Nothing less would have kept him from protecting us.
And then they died. I know it in my gut the way I know the sun will rise in two hours, give or take.
The floor is clean. The surfaces are their usual organized selves. The waste bin is empty. Like it never happened.
I wish he could clean me out just as thoroughly, so I could pretend it never happened. But it did.
I stand in the doorway of this room and feel cold from the inside out.
Not afraid. Not angry. Just cold. I get it now.
I know why he wanted to relocate. When he says things are going wrong, this is what he means.
This is the depth of the machinery underneath the life I’ve been living for the past three months.
Rooms I was never in. Things handled in ways I never knew about. Evidence erased so completely that the evening begins to feel unreal, begins to feel like something I dreamed.
But my hands still shake. They crave the feel of Ed’s throat giving way against my palms. I’ve never felt bloodlust before, but I think that’s what this is.
Opal told my attacker that it was past his bedtime.
My daughter. My five-year-old. Who threw her beloved books at an armed man in the dark and screamed for Dario while she tried to save me.
And she did.
She distracted him long enough for me to gain an advantage. But it’s dumb luck that he was shot instead of me. Or Opal.
A wave of nausea nearly takes my feet out from under me.
I let myself feel it—the full weight of what tonight was and what it almost was and what it says about the world my daughter has been living in for the past three months, even if she didn’t know it.
I let myself feel it for thirty seconds, which is all I allow myself, and then I put it where I put things I’m not going to fall apart over.
I need to talk to Dario. Right now. But he’s gone.
I double-check every room, just in case. Balcony, empty. Kitchen, empty. Hallway, his keys missing from the hook.
That’s almost more eerie than anything else. He left without a word.
Maybe ghosts are real.
I go back to the living room, and I sit on the couch, and I know what I have to do when he comes home, and I hate it. I hate it completely, but I’m going to do it anyway.
Opal shouldn’t have had to throw books and scream for help. She shouldn’t need to tell my attacker to go to bed. She shouldn’t have to tell him she’s glad his gunshot wound hurts.
But I’m glad she did all of that.
I sit, and I wait for the sound of Dario’s key in his door. And it is his door. His penthouse. His home. I’ve been thinking about it like this is ours, and that was a mistake. His world can’t be mine.
I think about the version of tonight that didn’t happen. The one where we didn’t win the game. The one where we all ended up dead. Or worse.
I stop thinking about it. I’ve given it the moment it requires, and now I’m done with it. Can’t keep thinking about that. It didn’t happen that way, and I won’t let fear run my life anymore.
What I think about instead is the clean office. The complete, perfect, impeccable erasure of everything that happened in it. The penthouse that looks perfect on paper, just like Dario.
Dr. Dario Spinelli. The man who heals people. The man with too much money and good looks, who made an offer I couldn’t refuse.
I had no idea what I was getting into when I said yes.
There’s no version of this life where tonight doesn’t happen again eventually.
There’s no version where Opal isn’t in proximity to this, where the infrastructure of it isn’t in the walls of wherever we live.
I can love him—and I do, I know I do, I’ve known for weeks—and still understand that loving someone doesn’t change what they are or the world they inhabit.
Loving my uncle didn’t make him stop being connected. Didn’t stop them from taking him out.
Opal deserves a safe and stable life. I’m her mother. I owe her that.
I owe her everything.
When I hear his key in the lock and see him walk in, I’m going to have to look at him and say the thing I don’t want to say.
What Dario is—what his life is—isn’t something that happened to him or that he stumbled into. No one stumbles into the life. My uncle proved that to me over and over. Dario’s parents were in it, made him go to medical school. He could have left it all behind. But he didn’t.
It’s what he chose, and what he maintains, and what he’s very good at. The clean office is not an accident. Tonight was not an accident. Tonight was the world Dario lives in colliding with our lives.
Opal deserves better.
She needs a world where the office doesn’t clean itself up. Where the people who love her don’t have other people who want to use her as leverage.
If Ed had threatened her instead of me, tonight would have gone very fucking differently for him. I would have done whatever he wanted.
And he knew that. And he didn’t do it. He came after me directly.
That realization throws a wrinkle into my hatred for him. It doesn’t end my hatred of him—but it adds texture. He’s an evil piece of shit, but even he has lines he doesn’t want to cross.
Weird.
Not that it matters now. Dario probably slit his throat once he got him somewhere private. Good riddance and all that, but still I wonder who Ed would have been if he hadn’t joined the organization.
I make a cup of tea to calm my nerves. Should be vodka, though. I’ll need some courage when I talk to Dario. I know what I’m going to say when he comes home. I’ve known it since I stood in the doorway of that clean room and understood what it meant.
Breaking up is the right thing. It’s also the hardest thing I’ve decided in a long time, maybe ever.