Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve: Savannah
I'm awake when Emilio gets home just after four. I've been sitting on his bed since midnight in one of his t-shirts and my underwear with the bottle cap in my hand, just waiting for him to open the damn door.
I hear his boots in the corridor. I know his walk now, the rhythm of it, heavier on the left foot, faster than most people because Emilio doesn't stroll anywhere. He moves through the world at a pace that matches the speed of his brain, which is to say too fast and without brakes.
The door opens, and there he stands in the frame, somehow looking both terrifying and extremely fucking attractive.
"Hey, asshole" I say. “You’re home late.”
"My apologies, vixen, putting down the local rabid dog was a bit time consuming."
"How did it go?"
"Dead."
"Good… come here."
He stands in the doorway for another second, then walks in and closes the door and sits on the edge of the bed next to me, putting his head in his hands.
He doesn't cry. He doesn't shake. He just sits there with his elbows on his knees and his fingers in his hair and breathes, and I put my hand on his back between his shoulder blades, and rub.
I don't say anything because there's nothing to say when a man comes home from doing what he did tonight.
After a while he lifts his head. His eyes are tired and old and not the eyes of a twenty-eight-year-old man who makes jokes and bounces his knee and calls me vixen. These are the eyes that Kreiss saw before he died.
"He had a manifest," Emilio says. "In the briefcase on the boat. Names and ages. Girls. The youngest was fourteen."
My hand grips the fabric of his shirt. I don't respond because the words fourteen and girls don't belong in the same sentence as manifest and trafficking and there is no response that meets the size of what he's telling me.
"I shot him," he says. "He told me I was killing middle management, and the system would replace him inside a week." He pauses. "He was probably right."
"He's still dead."
"Yeah. He's still dead." Emilio straightens up.
Rolls his shoulders. Reaches over and takes the bottle cap out of my hand and holds it between his fingers the way I hold it, pressing his thumb into the center, testing the feel.
Then he hands it back. "I need a shower, and a drink. And about fourteen hours of sleep."
"Shower first. You smell like a grave."
"Always in with the sweetest compliments."
"Dumbass, I’m trying not to gag."
He almost laughs. The sound gets halfway out before it dies, but even half a laugh is better than the blank face he walked in with, and I'll take it.
He goes to shower, while I sit on the bed and listen to the water and roll the bottle cap and think. I think about the fact that the world contains men who abuse children and men who stop them, and how those things exist at the same time and always has and always will.
Gigi would say something about this. Something about how the cruelty doesn't stop, it just changes addresses, and the best you can do is stand in front of it when it shows up at yours.
Emilio comes out in shorts with wet hair, but his eyes are brighter now, and he’s got a little smirk on his face when he catches me checking him out.
He gets into bed beside me and I curl against him and his arm goes around me.
We don't talk, we don't fuck and we don't do anything except exist in the same bed while the world goes quiet around us.
He falls asleep first. I feel his breathing even out and his arm go heavy and his body relax into the mattress in a way it hasn't since I've known him. The mission is over. Kreiss is dead. The pipeline… this branch of it, anyway, is severed.
I don't sleep yet because I just want to live in this moment, right here, where everything is peaceful and no one is dying or being kidnapped or out on missions.
I lie there with my head on his chest and my hand over his heart and count the beats because his heartbeat is the best sound in this building and I'm not ready to stop listening to it.
Everyone is up at the ass crack of dawn, already celebrating the win from last night.
Someone produces three bottles of whiskey from a supply closet that Leone pretends doesn't exist. The kitchen fills up by noon with soldiers who are louder than they've been in weeks.
Carmelo sits at the counter and eats a sandwich and looks at the celebration with no interest in joining.
Claudio and Charlotte appear briefly, long enough for Claudio to accept a glass of whiskey from a soldier who looked terrified to offer it, and for Charlotte to steal a cookie from the tray she baked yesterday.
Emilio is still sleeping and I figured he deserves to rest, so here I am, wandering through the crowd alone.
I drift through the celebration feeling restless. The Kreiss operation is over. The immediate threat is gone, and I'm standing in a kitchen full of armed men drinking whiskey at noon wondering what the fuck I do now.
I don't belong here… not the way they do.
I'm not a soldier, not an analyst, not a wife or a girlfriend or even accepted into the family.
I'm just the bartender who heard a conversation and got lucky and gave intel that turned out to be important, and now the intel is used up and the mission it served is complete and I'm standing in the middle of the aftermath with an empty purpose and a bottle cap in my pocket.
Time to find the bar. All mafias have one, just gotta look.
It's on the ground floor, past the kitchen, through a corridor I've walked a dozen times without ever trying the door at the end because I assumed it was locked.
It's not locked. The handle turns and the door opens and behind it is a room that hits me with nostalgia because despite it all, I really didn’t mind bartending.
It's a bar. A real one. Not big, maybe twenty feet by fifteen, with a counter along the back wall and shelves behind it and stools that are dusty but sturdy and a mirror that needs cleaning.
There are bottles on the shelves, most of them half empty, all of them dusty, the kind of collection that happens when men buy good liquor and then forget about it because drinking alone in a dusty room isn't anyone's idea of a good time.
I stand in the doorway, and I look at this room and I see it.
Not what it is but what it could be. Clean shelves, stocked bottles, the stools wiped down, the counter polished, music from somewhere, people sitting at the bar talking shit while someone pours their drinks and listens to their problems and makes them feel like the world outside doesn't exist.
I could do that. I know how to do that. It's the only thing I've ever been good at besides throwing lamps and having questionable taste in men.
So, I start cleaning.
I don't ask permission. I don't find Leone and request authorization, I just go to the kitchen, grab cleaning supplies, come back, and start wiping down the counter.
The dust comes off in thick gray sheets.
Under it the wood is dark and warm and solid, the kind of counter that was built to last and has been waiting for someone to give a shit about it.
I clean the shelves. I organize the bottles by type, whiskey here, vodka there, the gin that nobody's touched in what looks like years going in the back because gin is a cry for help and I don't serve cries for help, I serve hope in the form of liquid courage.
I find glasses in a cabinet under the counter, wash them, line them up.
I wipe the mirror until it's clear and the room doubles in the reflection and suddenly the space feels bigger and warmer and like somewhere you'd actually want to sit.
It takes me three hours. By the time I'm done the bar is clean and stocked and glowing in the afternoon light and my hands smell like lemon cleaner and my back hurts and I feel better than I've felt since I walked into this compound.
I hear footsteps behind me and turn to find Alexandra in the doorway. She's holding her laptop against her chest the way she always does, her armor and her weapon, and she's looking at the bar with surprise.
"I didn't know this room was here," she says.
"Nobody did. That's the problem."
She walks in slowly and sits on one of the stools and sets her laptop on the counter and looks around. "You did all this?"
"Three hours, some Windex, and a lot of swearing."
"It's beautiful." She runs her hand along the counter. "Charlotte would love this."
"Everyone's going to love this. They all need it." I pull a bottle of whiskey from the shelf, one of the good ones, the Macallan that some idiot left to gather dust for God knows how long. I pour two glasses and set one in front of Alexandra.
She looks at the glass, then at me. "It's two in the afternoon."
"We just dismantled a trafficking pipeline, and Emilio took out the big bad pedo-wolf. I think day-drinking is medically prescribed."
She picks up the glass and drinks as I drink mine. “So, you and Emilio, huh?” She winks and downs her drink, tapping it on the counter as I smile and refill it.
"Ugh, yes, but don’t tell him that. From what I gather, we're all idiots who fell for men with guns," I say.
Alexandra laughs. "Pretty much."
"Gigi would have opinions about that."
"Gigi sounds like she would have opinions about everything."
"She did. Very fucking loud ones. Often unsolicited. Mostly correct." I pour us each another inch. "To Gigi… and to the idiots who love the men with guns."
Alexandra lifts her glass and clinks it against mine. We drink it down in one gulp.
This bar is mine now. Not because anyone gave it to me, but because I found it and cleaned it and claimed it the way I've claimed every good thing in my life, by showing up and doing the work before anyone could tell me no.
Gigi taught me that. I’ve been thinking about her more lately, especially as my life became more expendable than it was a few weeks ago.
The compound has a bar now, and the bar has a bartender. Maybe now they’ll let me stay, even though my usefulness has ran out.
That maybe is the best feeling in the world. Better than whiskey. Better than sex.
Well… almost better than sex.