LENA
TWENTY-SEVEN
He comes back in the early morning, and the first thing I notice is that he looks relaxed.
Not relieved. Relaxed. There’s a difference, and I clock it immediately—relief has a quality of release to it.
This is the opposite. He moves through the door with a quietness I’ve never seen in him before, like a frequency that’s been running just below audible has finally gone silent. He sets his keys on the hook and a large paper bag on the hall table.
He’s trying to be quiet. Must think we somehow slept after everything.
I’ve been on the couch all night. My tea is cold. The drawing on the refrigerator catches the first yellow light coming through the window. I look at it, then I look at him.
There’s blood on his cuff. Dried, dark, a stripe of it across the left sleeve of a denim jacket I don’t recognize.
He sees me seeing it. He doesn’t explain. He takes in the couch and the cold tea and the burned-down candles, and he reads all of it in one pass, the way he reads everything I do—completely, without asking me to explain it to him.
He goes to his office. The door stays open, like an invitation.
I follow him.
He’s already got the jacket off by the time I get there—the one with the blood on the cuff, folded over the back of his chair like it’s any other jacket. The blood doesn’t bother him. I doubt it would in his profession.
Either of them.
He’s standing at his desk with both hands braced on the surface, looking at it. Not at anything on it. Just at the surface itself.
“Dario.”
He meets my gaze.
A cut above his eyebrow is closed with medical tape.
His forearm is bandaged where his sleeve is rolled back.
He’s standing, and he’s here, and he’s unhurt in any real way, and I feel the thing I always feel now when I look at him after something has happened.
The thing that took hold in a park when Ed said the word pieces and hasn’t let go since.
The specific, undeniable weight of it. Of us.
The way it’s been living in my chest like a tenant who stopped pretending months ago.
But I’ve been rehearsing this. Hours on the couch, running it in my head until the words came out the way I needed them to.
“I can’t do this.” My voice comes out even.
I’m grateful. “Whatever happened tonight—I can’t have Opal inside it.
I can’t have her growing up in a life where the power cuts and men come through the hallway in the dark.
I can’t have her throwing her books at armed strangers because she needs to save me. I won’t do that to her. Can’t.”
I brace for the argument. I’ve been preparing for it since he left this morning—the case he’ll make about his own capabilities and the level of protection he offers, and how things are different now, how he has it handled, and how leaving would mean giving up everything we’ve built.
I’ve got answers for all of it. I’m ready for whatever comes out of his mouth.
“I know.”
I blink at him. “You know…?”
“You can’t do that to her. I know.”
Just that.
I wait for the rest. There isn’t any.
“Neither could I,” he says as a reasonable fact.
Something in my chest does something complicated.
But it doesn’t matter. Whatever he’s saying, none of it changes things.
“I don’t want to leave you.” The words come out before I’ve decided to say them, and once they’re out I don’t take them back, because they’re true and he should know they’re true.
“I want to be here. I want—this. You.” I stop.
Start again. “But she’s five. She screamed your name in the dark and she didn’t even hesitate, like you’re her person to call, like that’s just—settled.
And I love that. I love that she feels that way.
But I won’t have her building that certainty inside a life where she has to keep proving it. ”
He holds my gaze for a long moment. “I know. I won’t either.”
Okay, I didn’t plan for him to agree with me. Thought about everything else. Not that.
He moves away from the desk and comes to stand in the middle of the room. He looks at me, and he starts talking. “You know who my parents were.”
I go still. “Yes. But what does that have to do with Opal and me?”
“My mother was the organization. My father ran it technically. His name was on everything—he sat at the head of the table, his face was the one in the newspaper when the newspaper covered things it shouldn’t have covered.
But Angela was the engine. Silent, invisible, without mercy when mercy wasn’t useful, and brilliant enough that nobody ever thought to look at her.
She let them not look. She preferred it. ”
I don’t know where he’s going with this. I know most of it already. “Go on.”
“My father loved her the way you love something that exceeds you. His whole life, he knew she was more than him. Better than him at everything. Smarter, faster, colder. He told me once that the trick was to be grateful for it rather than be destroyed by it. It took him years to figure that out.”
“The photograph,” I say, nodding to the one on the bookshelf across the room. “The woman. That’s her, isn’t it?”
She’s beautiful, raven-haired and curves, tossing her head back as she laughs. A white dress and a matching hat. Behind her, a small cobblestone street. The woman could have been a movie star with looks like that.
“That’s her.”
“She’s beyond pretty.”
He smiles a little pridefully. “Marco took over when my father died. He came to me first—offered me a seat at the table. A seat at my parents’ table.
I turned it down because they had asked me to finish my residency and I honored that.
I’ve thought about that decision a great deal over the years.
” He pauses. “Whether honoring what they wanted was the same thing as doing what I should have. Whether I let something sit empty that I should have claimed.”
“You did what they wanted. It’s honorable.”
His jaw shifts. “Marco spent years in a role that was never his. Running it the way a man runs something he knows he has no real claim to—aggressively, loudly, constantly proving a point that no one who mattered was asking him to prove.”
That makes sense with how Ed was with me. “The single moms.”
He looks at me.
“The collection tactics. Ed showing up in a park and smiling at my daughter, pushing her on the swings…” I feel an edge in my voice, and I don’t soften it.
“Men like Reggie Millstone, who got away with whatever they wanted because the world was designed to let them. That’s what living in a Marco-run neighborhood looks like. That’s what I’ve been living in.”
“Yes,” Dario says simply.
“And he came for us because…?”
“He came for me because all these years I never gave him a reason to doubt me, other than my lineage, and with you and Opal, he had an excuse to take me out. He accused me of getting soft after I went to him and offered to pay your debt.”
“You did?”
He nods. “Made him think I was soft for you. And softness—any kind—was unacceptable. He made that clear. But since then, I think it was eating at him. He thought I had split loyalty, and Marco was never one to tolerate that in his men.” He swallows, thinking.
“And if I’m honest, I wonder how long he’d been looking for an excuse to do it.
Being who I am, he knew I was a threat. But if he did me, there are dons who would take offense to that, because of my parents.
They held a lot of respect in our community.
And that extends to their sons to a degree. ”
“So Marco knew he couldn’t touch you without cause.”
“He knew he could send Ed and make it look like a personal vendetta, on account of you. He saw the opportunity to take me out by using him. Can’t blame a guy for the actions of another, even if he works for him.
Marco would have killed Ed and his guards after they killed us.
Nobody would have known that he’s the one who ordered the hit. ”
A chill runs through me. “Everything tied up with a nice little bow. If—”
“If you and Opal weren’t such badasses.”
I chuckle in spite of everything. “So what happens now?”
“Marco is gone. The organization isn’t. Organizations don’t die when the head does—they wait for whoever comes next.” He looks at me steadily. “It’s mine. It was always supposed to be mine. I just took the long way to get it.”
“You killed Marco, didn’t you? That’s why you left after everything.”
“Yes.” He doesn’t bat an eye at the accusation.
He killed the man who ordered our deaths.
Good.
“And you’re going to run it differently from him?”
“Yes.”
“That’s exactly what someone in your position would say to someone in my position right now.”
He holds my gaze. “I know that. I’m saying it anyway, because it’s true, and I’d rather you believe it because you’ve been paying attention than because I’ve been persuasive.”
“I know you’re not him—you’d never order a child to be…” I can’t say the words.
He takes a breath. “No. I fucking never would. I’ve spent years watching what Marco built and what it cost. Women working three jobs whose wages were skimmed by collection operations designed to look legitimate.
Neighborhoods that look the way they look because someone decided a long time ago that making people afraid was cheaper than building anything worth living in.
I’m not interested in that. I’ve never been interested in that.
The reason I’m standing, and Marco isn’t, is that I understand what this can be, and he only ever saw what he could steal from everyday people. ”
I look at him for a long moment. “So you’re in charge.”
“Yes.”
“And things will actually be different for normal people, because you won’t let them stay the same.”
“Yes.” Something in his face shifts.
He crosses to me slowly and stops two feet away. Looks at me in the pale yellow light. And then, without ceremony, he goes down on one knee.
I look at him. “What are you doing? This is not a sexy conversation—”
“You know who I am better than most people ever will.” He pauses, and I can’t breathe, because my head is telling me things that my heart doesn’t trust. “I am not a good man. But I’m yours, if you’ll have me.”