Chapter 32 #3
And that — that, on a sidewalk, with the hazards going and Mrs. Esposito watching from her stoop — was the first evidence I had that anything in him had actually changed.
"Okay," I said. "Then let's go find out what he wants."
He picked me up and carried me down my steps and through my door and into my kitchen, and there he was, exactly as advertised, sitting at my table with his hands folded like a man at a wake.
He stood when he saw me. Tall as Raq, close enough, and put together in a way that made you check your own hands: dark hair, dark clothes, a face like something off a museum ceiling.
Nothing about him belonged in a basement kitchen in Bensonhurst, and he was sitting in it like he'd been waiting a while and was prepared to wait longer.
Behind us, Nina came through the door with the gas station bag and the hospital paperwork and stopped so hard the bag swung.
"Oh, come on," she said. "How are there two of them?"
"Nina—"
"No, I'm asking. Genuinely. In what universe." She put the bag on the counter without looking at it, and squared up, and pointed. "Who the hell are you?"
"Camael." He inclined his head. "Cam. Raq's brother.
You'll forgive the intrusion — I heard there was trouble, and I came, and there was no one home, and I let myself in rather than stand on the stoop and be discussed by the entire street.
" A pause, and then, warmer, exactly calibrated: "You must be Nina.
He speaks of you. You're the one who runs everything. "
And I watched my best friend — furious, exhausted, ninety minutes off the highway — get handled.
"Somebody has to," she said.
"Somebody always does." He looked at the container in her hand, at the cabinets she'd already opened. "Please continue. I've upset the house enough for one evening."
Nina turned to me with her eyebrows all the way up. The brother? the eyebrows said. The brother lets himself in?
I gave her nothing. I sat in Nonna's chair with a hospital bracelet on my wrist and gave her absolutely nothing, and she took it, and I watched her file it exactly where I knew she'd file it: two enormous men, no wives, no mothers, no cousins, one of them sitting in a locked house at nine at night on business he wasn't naming.
The family. That's what her face said. Of course there's a brother.
She heated the soup anyway. She put it in front of me with a spoon and a glass of water and the paperwork squared on the table where I'd have to look at it, and she kissed the top of my head, and at the door she pointed at Raq and then at Cam, in order.
"Feet up. Two weeks. If she lifts anything heavier than a fork I'm hearing about it from Mrs. Esposito before you two have your coats off." She got her keys out. "Cate. I'm calling you at seven."
"Nina—"
"Seven," she said, and went up my steps, and the door shut behind her.
And the whole warmth of that woman went out of the room with her.
Cam sat back down. Raq had not moved from the doorway since he set me on my feet, and he did not move now, and neither of them said anything at all for a moment, and my kitchen — the saints, the soup, the pad on the refrigerator — filled up with something cold that had been waiting politely for the civilian to leave.
"Okay," I said. "You. In my house, in my kitchen, at my table, with your hands folded like you paid for the chair.
I've been carried across a state, I've been in a hospital, I've got a bracelet on my wrist and a note from a doctor telling me not to stand up.
So let's skip the part where you're charming. "
Cam turned his head and looked at me, and everything pleasant went off his face at once.
I have spent my whole life in rooms with men who think they're frightening.
This was not that. This was the light over the sink going thin, and the hair standing up on my arms, and something enormous and patient turning all of itself onto me at once, like a searchlight finding one window in a building —
And then Raq was between us.
I didn't see him move. He had been in the doorway behind me and then he was standing in front of my chair with his back to me, filling the whole space between me and that table, and the kitchen went so quiet I could hear the refrigerator kick.
He didn't say anything. Not one word. He just stood there in front of me, and whatever was on his face was aimed at his brother, and I watched Cam — who had let himself into a locked house, who had sat at my table for hours, who had not been afraid of one single thing all night — sit back an inch in his chair.
"Baraqiel." Cam's voice had changed too. Carefully. "I have not moved."
"No," Raq said. "You have not."
Two words. That was all of it, and they were the flattest, coldest, most frightening two words I have ever heard in that kitchen, and something went between those two men over a bowl of soup that I will be a long time forgetting.
I put my hand on Raq's back and pushed, and he let me move him, which is not the same as moving him.
I looked around his arm at the man at my table.
"What the hell do you want?"