29. Eva
EVA
The last time I cried this hard was when I found out our parents were killed in that car crash. My heart was split in two when that hammer dropped.
I didn’t think I’d feel such agonizing pain ever again.
I wake up in Sal’s bed with swollen eyes and no idea where I am for about three terrifying seconds.
Then it all comes crashing down around me. The cabin. The laptop. The highway. And then showing up here at close to two in the morning with mascara running down my face and a hole in my chest where my heart used to be.
Sunlight pushes through the blinds. It’s morning. Thursday morning.
My stomach clenches because I know what today is. And I know what tonight is supposed to be.
A knock on the door jolts me from the toxic thoughts looping through my mind.
“Come in,” I croak out.
Sal pushes open the door, his forehead pinched. “What happened?” He stands there, arms folded, looking at me like he’s bracing for the worst possible thing.
“I had a fight with Wolfe.” I pull myself to a seated position and tuck my hair behind my ear.
“A fight that has you showing up at my door at almost two in the morning?”
“It was a really bad fight.”
“How bad?”
I pick at the edge of the comforter, dropping my eyes. “Bad enough that I need to be here and not there. And I didn’t want to be alone.”
“Did he hurt you?” His voice drops and my head pops up. His lips twist like he just tasted shit and his shoulders square. He’s probably running through every violent abuse scenario his brain can manufacture, which for a guy who grew up in this neighborhood, is plenty.
“No. He didn’t put a hand on me. It’s not like that.”
He steps forward and sits on the edge of the bed. “Then what is it like?”
Shaking my head, I say, “I can’t get into it right now, Sal. I just need to be here. With you. Okay?”
He stares at me. I can see the war waging behind his eyes. Push or let go. Demand answers or trust me. His jaw tics for about five seconds before he lets out a long, defeated breath.
He’s letting it go. For now, anyway.
“Okay,” he finally says. “But you need breakfast. It’ll be good for you to put something into your stomach.”
“Fine.”
“And if I ever see him again, I’m going to need a very good reason not to break his face.”
“Gotcha.”
He pulls me into a hug. It’s tight and solid, and it tells me exactly what I need to be reassured of right now.
I’m here, I’ve got you, nobody gets through me.
I press my face against his shoulder and breathe him in, holding on for longer than I should because the only other person who’s held me like this in the past month is the reason I’m in this apartment at all.
He leaves a few minutes later and it isn’t long before I hear the sizzle of bacon frying on the stove. I love bacon, but the scent of it has bile crawling up the back of my throat. Still, I promised my brother I’d eat, so I head into the kitchen.
He looks at me. “Ready to talk?”
Over coffee and breakfast, I give Sal the minimum. Wolfe and I had a fight. I found out things I didn’t know about him, and now I need time to figure out what it means.
“What kind of things?” he asks, sitting across from me at his tiny kitchen table.
“The kind I can’t share.”
“E, you’re killing me.”
“I know. I’m sorry. But this one I have to work through on my own.”
“Is it over between you two?”
The question punches me square in the chest. I stare at my eggs. “I don’t know.”
“Do you want it to be?”
My mind stumbles back to our time in the cabin, sitting on the porch in those two chairs, holding hands, making love after he opened up to me about his mom, the way he said “I know” when I told him this thing between us was real.
But then an image of my case file pops into my head, followed by his stupid relocation plan and those cold, hard texts where he didn’t stand up for me. He didn’t tell Ronan to fuck off, that he has feelings for me.
Of course he didn’t. Because it’s always the fucking family.
And maybe admitting to those feelings was just a smoke screen to throw me off track, which it fucking did.
A sigh heaves my chest, and I throw my hands in the air. “I honestly don’t know, Sal.”
He reaches across the table and squeezes my hand. “Okay. You don’t have to know right now. But whatever he did, you’ll figure it out. You always do.”
“Yeah.” My voice is thick. “I always do.”
We walk the two blocks to Rosario’s and my eyes don’t stop moving.
Every parked car. Every person on the sidewalk.
Every window with a line of sight to the street.
I’m scanning the way I always did and the Wolfe does, and the irony of me using our shared habit to protect myself from a danger he was supposed to shield me from is not lost on me.
I catch sight of Wolfe’s car parked outside Sal’s building.
Halfway to Sal’s, it hit me that there must be some kind of tracker on it.
Wolfe is the kind of guy who counts the number of minutes I spend in the bathroom and measures the space between the edge of his cereal box and the counter.
There’s no way in hell he doesn’t know where I am right now.
Good. Let him know. Let him sit behind his laptop monitor at his family’s cushy mansion and watch the blinking little dot on his screen, knowing it’s the woman he planned to throw away. I hope it fucking haunts him that I figured his shit out before he could execute it.
Sal talks about the soup he’s planning for today’s special.
I nod in the right places and laugh when he expects me to.
The whole time I’m calculating whether Dmitri’s people are watching this block right now, and whether walking out in the open with my brother was the dumbest thing I’ve done since leaving the cabin.
Which is saying something because leaving the cabin was pretty fucking dumb.
But I’m here now. And going back isn’t an option.
We make it safely to the restaurant. The scent of garlic and olive oil consumes me once we walk inside. I’ve been breathing these familiar smells for as long as I can remember. And fuck Dmitri if he thinks he can just take it all away from us.
I sit at the bar while Sal starts his prep. He puts coffee in front of me and gives me small jobs rolling silverware and filling salt shakers. The kind of mindless work that keeps your hands busy while your brain tears itself apart.
My phone is in my pocket. I haven’t turned it on since I left the cabin. I pull it out and stare at the black screen for a long time before I press the power button.
Seventeen missed calls. All Wolfe. No voicemails.
My throat tightens and air abandons my lungs. Seventeen calls. He didn’t leave a single message because he knows me well enough to know that words on a phone aren’t going to fix what I found. He knows the only way this conversation happens is face to face with his eyes on mine.
I shove the phone into my back pocket and keep working.
Around noon, Sal shows me his phone while he’s wiping down the prep counter.
“Hey, Andersen rescheduled. He sent me a text this morning. It’s kind of a bummer, but next week works, too, I guess.”
I read the text on his screen and my pulse jumps.
The number. The one I memorized at this bar and texted to Wolfe. He spoofed the message. He rescheduled the meeting. Even after I left.
My brain catches on that and won’t let go.
He spoofed that text after I left. After I found everything on his laptop and drove out of his life. The operation is still running. The plan I helped build is still in motion. And Wolfe is still keeping his promise to protect Sal even though I’m gone.
But why? If the endgame was always to cut me loose on Friday, why does he care what happens to my brother after I’m out of the picture?
Your brother will be safe on Friday morning. That’s a fact.
The thought sticks in my chest and burns. I try to smother it under the anger and the hurt and the image of that relocation plan with my name at the top. But it won’t die. It just sits there, flickering, refusing to be snuffed out.
I push it down deep because I have a bigger problem. The reschedule text came from Wolfe, not from Dmitri. Dmitri’s guys don’t know the meeting was canceled. As far as they know, tonight is still the night. They’re still planning to show up at this restaurant after close.
That was the plan.
And now, because I pretty much drove right into the lion’s den, I’m sitting in the middle of it.
That realization chills me bone-deep, and throughout the afternoon, it taunts me like ice water dripping down my spine.
I try my best to distract myself by helping with prep.
I run plates during the lunch rush. I pour sodas and smile at customers, and the whole time my brain is running a countdown to closing time.
I can’t leave. I know that sounds insane.
I know the smart thing would be to grab Sal and get as far from this restaurant as possible.
But where would we go? How the hell do I explain it?
And what about the next time? Dmitri’s guys won’t stop coming around if they don’t find Sal here tonight.
They will eventually get what they want.
And next time Sal will be here alone, with no warning, and I won’t be able to stop what happens.
I trusted Wolfe to handle this. I trusted him with Sal’s life. And then I found a seventy-two-hour plan for erasing me from his world. So forgive me if my faith in other people’s promises is running a little low right now.
I can’t leave because I can’t trust anyone else to be here.
That’s it. I’m not staying because it’s part of a strategy or a plan.
I’m just a sister who refuses to leave her brother’s restaurant unprotected on the night somebody might walk through the door looking to hurt him as a way of punishing me.
The last tables clear out at nine-thirty. Marco says goodnight and heads out the back. I help Sal with the closing routine. I walk around the space, wiping tables and stacking chairs while Sal handles the register.
My eyes keep flicking back to the clock over the bar, my heart pounding so hard my hands tremble around the wet rag.
“You should head out, Sal.” I make my voice as casual as I can manage. “I’ll finish up.”
“It’s fine. I’m almost done.”
“You’ve been on your feet since seven. Go home. I’ve got this.”
He stops counting bills and looks at me. “Why are you trying so hard to get me out of here?”
“I’m not trying to get you out of here,” I say with a forced smile. “I’m just trying to do something nice for my brother.”
“You’ve been jumpy all day, E. I’ve caught you checking the door every five minutes and looking out every window. Now you want me to leave you alone here after closing?” He puts the money down. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing is going on.”
“Bullshit.”
“Sal—”
“No. You showed up at my apartment at two in the morning. You won’t tell me what happened with Wolfe. You’ve been staring at the front door all night. And now you’re practically shoving me out of my own restaurant.” He folds his arms. “I’m not leaving.”
“Sal, please—”
“I said I’m not leaving.” His voice takes on a hardness I’m not used to hearing. “Whatever is going on with you, we’re dealing with it together. Because that’s what we do. That’s what we’ve always done.”
Tears sting my eyelids. Because he’s right. That is what we’ve always done. Through our parents’ deaths, my arrest, my prison sentence… through every piece of wreckage my life has produced, Sal has been the one standing next to me saying “we’re together in this.”
And right now, I need to get him out of this building and I fucking can’t. Because telling him why means telling him everything. The complete truth. And I’m afraid that confessing to my secrets will break something between us that I don’t know how to fix.
“Fine,” I say. My voice cracks. “Stay.”
“Was that so hard?”
“You have no idea,” I mutter, my mind spinning with scenarios I have no freaking idea how to manage. I can hack my way into the Pentagon, but navigating Russian gangsters? Not high on my skill list.
He goes back to counting the register. I finish wiping down the tables, then the bar. The restaurant is dark except for the light over the bar and the glow from the kitchen.
It’s 10:15. The front door is locked. The street outside is quiet.
Dread snakes through my insides.
Something is about to happen. Something I am completely unprepared to deal with.
I reach into my jacket and feel the knife handle against my palm. Not because I think I can fight whoever walks through that door. Because holding something solid is the only thing keeping my hands from shaking hard enough for Sal to notice.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. I pull it out with trembling fingers.
It’s a text from a number I don’t recognize.
Stay inside. Lock the back door. Don’t move.
I stare at the screen. My heart slams against my ribs so hard it rattles my teeth.
Someone knows I’m here. Someone is watching this restaurant right now. And whoever sent this message knows what’s about to happen.
I look at Sal. He’s stacking receipts behind the register, humming the same song he always hums when he closes. He has no idea that everything he thinks he knows about his life is about to shatter.
I want to tell him. God, I want to tell him all of it. That I love him, and I’m sorry, and none of this is his fault, and the man who is supposed to invest in his beloved restaurant was actually supposed to hurt him.
I grip the knife in my jacket and move toward the back door to check the lock.
My hand is on the handle when I hear it.
The front door. A knock. Slow and deliberate.
Sal looks up from the register. “We’re closed,” he calls out.
Another knock follows. Harder and more insistent this time.
My hand drops.
Then the door handle turns.