Chapter Seventeen #3
I looked at my hand. A thin line across the knuckles — Theo’s fingernails, probably, a mark I hadn’t noticed in the adrenaline haze of stabbing a man and then kicking him in the face, which was a sequence of events that had not been on my afternoon agenda and was now retroactively occupying several slots.
“It’s not my blood.” I met his eyes. Held them. The corridor around us was smoke and broken plaster and the distant sound of something structural having a very bad day.
None of that mattered because Ari was looking at me like I was something that had been threatened and he was now recalculating several previously held assumptions about the appropriate response.
Ari went very still. The stillness that happened when the temperature dropped and the air got thin and the man standing in front of you had just decided that someone was going to have a very expensive conversation with gravity.
I delivered the full briefing without pausing.
“Theo is in the room behind me. Alive. Switchblade wound in the thigh, approximately two inches deep, not arterial. He also has a foot-shaped opinion on his face that I delivered personally and stand by completely. We should probably leave before the next explosion because I have had enough of those today and my tolerance for architectural rearrangement is currently operating at capacity.”
Ari looked at the closed door. His jaw did the thing. The specific thing where the muscle tightened along the line of his jaw and his eyes went flat and dark and the temperature in the immediate vicinity dropped by approximately three degrees.
I grabbed his sleeve and pulled.
He let himself be pulled.
I filed this under significant data. Aristoteles Romano, a man who treated personal space as something he occupied by right rather than request, allowed himself to be steered down a smoke-hazed corridor by a five-foot-five blond with a switchblade and bare feet.
We moved at speed. Ari’s hand shifted from my sleeve to the back of my neck — warm, firm, the specific pressure of someone who had decided that steering was more efficient than following — and guided me around a section of ceiling that had made a poor decision about its relationship with gravity.
The plaster was dust on the marble. The air was thick. Somewhere ahead, voices — shouting, the sound of men who were having a very bad day and were now implementing contingency plans they had hoped would remain theoretical.
We reached the opening to the salon. The double doors were half-ajar, light spilling through the gap in long amber streaks across the ruined marble of the corridor.
Alexios Romano stepped into the doorway with a gun in his hand and the expression of a man who had been rehearsing this moment in front of a mirror for longer than was medically advisable.
Ari moved in front of me without a word.
One step. His body between mine and the gun. His shoulders filled the corridor. The denim vest caught the low light, the silver chain at his throat gleaming dully against the dark fabric of his shirt.
Alexios talked. And he was good at it — I’ll give him that. He clearly believed his own argument, had built a narrative about his own righteousness, and was now delivering it with the conviction of someone who had stopped checking whether the narrative matched the facts.
Illegitimate. A dock worker. A mistake dressed up in a title. The Romano family deserved better. He had always been the logical choice. The bloodline choice. The choice that made sense to men who understood what family meant.
And Ari had ruined it. Ruined a perfectly good non-violent plan by being impossible to remove quietly, so now people had to die, which was apparently Ari’s fault, the way everything was apparently Ari’s fault in the story Alexios had been telling himself.
I clocked the word “non-violent” against the gun currently in Alexios’s hand and did not point this out because this did not seem like the moment for semantic precision, and also because pointing things out to armed men was a habit I had mostly broken by age nineteen and saw no reason to revisit.
Alexios pointed the gun directly at Ari. “You need to die!”
Ari said, quietly, “You first.”
The knife left his hand so fast I almost missed it. A blur of silver, the arc of something that had been thrown by a man who had thrown knives for longer than he had done anything else, and then the sound — wet, thick, the sound of metal finding the place it was aimed at.
I did not miss the sound.
The second knife followed before Alexios had finished falling. Before his body had fully registered the first impact, before the gun had fully left his hand, the second blade buried itself beside the first with the precision of someone completing a task he had started.
Alexios went down. The gun hit the floor with a clatter that carried in the quiet salon. His body made a sound — not a scream, something smaller, the sound of a man discovering that the story he had been telling himself had a different ending than the one he’d written.
Ari crossed the room. Three strides. Boots on marble. He picked up the gun, checked the chamber, and tucked it into his waistband.
Then he crouched. Pulled the first knife free with one smooth motion. Wiped the blade clean on Alexios’s jacket — the jacket that cost more than most people’s monthly rent, now serving as a rag for blood that belonged to the man wearing it. The second followed. Same motion. Unhurried. Efficient.
He spoke while he worked. Not to the room. To Alexios specifically, in the quiet tone he used for things that had already been decided.
“We knew about the plan a month ago. The allied families knew a week ago, when I briefed them. Everyone in that room was waiting for you to make your move so they could be in position when you did.” His voice was low.
Even. The cadence of a man reading a weather report for a storm that had already passed.
“The Romano title was never going to be yours. Your problem — the one you’ve always had — is that you overestimate yourself and underestimate everyone else. That is a very expensive habit.”
Alexios’s eyes closed. His breathing was shallow.
The blood on his jacket was dark and spreading, and the room around us was smoke and broken glass and the distant sound of something else coming apart, and none of it mattered because the thing that had been building for months had just reached its conclusion and the conclusion had been written in knives rather than words.
Ari stood. Turned. Crossed back to me in three strides.
He pulled me in with both arms.
One hand pressed to the back of my head, holding me against his chest with the grip of a man who had been thinking about this for the last ten minutes and was not being subtle about it.
His heart beat against my ear — steady, slower than mine, the rhythm of someone whose cardiovascular system had not received the memo that the building was exploding.
A beat. Two. His chest rose and fell under my cheek. The cedar-and-coffee scent of him cut through the smoke like something that belonged there.
“Why aren’t you in the safe room?”
“Couldn’t find it.” Muffled against his chest. The fabric of his shirt was warm from his skin. I could feel the scars through the thin cotton, topography I had memorized without intending to.
“What am I going to do with you?”
I tipped my chin up and looked at him. Those black eyes were warm. Giving away everything — all the heat, all the focus, all the things he had been keeping behind his walls of stone.
“I have a few ideas.”
His arms did not loosen. If anything, they tightened like he had decided that the distance between us was unacceptable and was now correcting it.
I reached into my pocket. One caramel. Gold foil, slightly crushed from the events of the last twenty minutes, the crumple of something that had been handled by fingers moving too fast to bother with neatness.
I unwrapped it. The foil crinkled, loud in the quiet corridor. I broke the caramel in half — not clean, messy, the kind of break that suggested sugar was not something that responded well to precision — and offered Ari half.
He took it. His fingers brushed mine. Warm. Callused. The roughness of hands that had worked docks for longer than most people had been doing anything.
Somewhere in the building, something else exploded. The sound carried through stone and old plaster, a bass note that started in the floor and worked its way upward.
Neither of us moved.