Lorik
The priest weeps when Cas walks him out.
Not from fear anymore. From relief, I think, and maybe from grief on Brooklyn’s behalf. The good ones never get over watching a nineteen-year-old married at gunpoint, not quickly.
There’s a check folded into his coat large enough to reroof his parish and buy his silence twice over.
Cas has instructions to remind him on the drive, gently, of everything he stands to lose if his conscience ever gets loud.
He’ll keep quiet. They always do. Men of God and men of government turn out to be governed by the same calculus.
“Back by three,” Cas says at the door, shrugging into his jacket. His eyes cut up the stairs toward the closed door of my bedroom, where my wife is. “You good?”
“Go.”
He studies me a beat longer than I like, the only man alive allowed to look at me like he can see the thing I’m not saying. “She got under your skin tonight,” he says.
Not a question. A fact that was readable.
“Drive the priest home, Casimir.”
He leaves smirking, because he heard the answer in the fact that I didn’t give one.
I don’t go up. I go to my office, pour two fingers of bourbon I have no intention of drinking, and stand at the dark window looking at a city I own pieces of, waiting for the high of it to come.
The win.
Thirteen years of patience and tonight I reached into Domenico Caputo’s house and took a thing he loves and made her sign her name beside mine.
Their phones are still lighting up with the proof.
The war I’ve been building toward since I was sixteen finally has a first move on the board, and I made it.
I wait for it to feel like victory.
What comes instead is her face at the altar.
The exact moment she heard my name and understood it.
I watched the cold go through her, watched a girl who’d traded blows with me all night go pale at a word, because she knows what a Kovaci did to the head of the Irish before Ciera became a boss, before she was of age.
Even if Brooklyn doesn’t know the details, now she’s wearing the name that hurt someone she loves.
I built this whole night to make her family feel small. I didn’t account for what it would do to make her feel like the next one in a line.
And then the kiss. The way she leaned in before she remembered to hate me. The way she bit me to punish us both for it.
I set the bourbon down untouched. This is the part I never let myself look at directly, the crack in me shaped exactly like her, and I’ve been managing it for eighteen months by keeping three hundred miles between us.
There is no interval now. She’s a flight of stairs away, in my bed, my ring on her hand, and I have run out of distance to hide behind.
I give it an hour. Long enough for her to cry herself out, or drink the minibar, or fall into the dead sleep of a body that’s been through too much. Then I climb the stairs to check on her like a man checking a wound he’s afraid to look at.
The bed is empty.
For one half a second the floor drops out of me. The thought arrives whole and wild: she’s gone. My hand is already on my weapon, my pulse already a war drum, before reason catches up and reminds me there is nowhere on God’s earth for her to go.
The primary suite is on the second floor. There is no balcony. Just a wall of glass that shows her a skyline she can’t reach and a forty-foot drop she’s too smart to take. The grounds are crawling with my men. She is the most secure prisoner in the District of Columbia.
I make myself breathe. I made myself a promise once that I’d never feel that particular terror again, and she undid it in half a second without even being in the room.
Then I walk farther in, and I find her.
Tucked in the dark alcove. The same wingback the priest cowered in an hour and a half ago, except now my bride is folded into it sideways, bare legs hooked over one arm, the obscene lace gown rucked up around her thighs, and the Scotch decanter.
Not a glass, the whole decanter dangling from two fingers.
She’s taken a respectable amount out of it.
Her head lolls toward me when the floor creaks, eyes glassy, and she lifts the crystal in a loose, mocking toast.
“There he is,” she slurs. “My husband.”
I almost smile, and then I see her other hand.
She’s scratching. Slow, absent, dragging her nails up the inside of her forearm, over her collarbone, down her ribs where the lace bites in. And the skin there has gone an angry, blotching red, raised in welts everywhere the fabric touches her, and she doesn’t even seem to know she’s doing it.
Everything else falls out of me at once.
I know my wife’s body. I know it the way I know my own caseload, every allergy, every reaction, the daily pill, the foods that are safe, the foods that aren’t.
I built a dress to be seen in and I forgot the one thing I have never once let myself forget about her, because I was busy making a point to her family. I forgot that the lace would eat her alive.
I did this. Not a threat. Not theater. Actual harm, on her actual skin, with my own two hands.
The self-loathing is so total it whites out the room.
“Brooklyn.” I’m across the floor before I decide to move. “How long have you been in this?”
“S’pretty,” she informs the decanter. “Itchy. Pretty ’n’ itchy. Like me.” She squints up at me, and something shifts in her drunk, unguarded face. It’s a frown, a flicker, like she’s trying to place a song she half knows. “Why d’you look like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re—sorry.” The word comes out baffled. “Monsters don’t get sorry.”
I don’t answer that, because there’s no answer that isn’t the truth and she can’t have the truth yet.
I take the decanter out of her hand and set it on the floor, and I get an arm under her knees and one behind her back and I lift her against my chest, and she lets me.
Which tells me exactly how much she’s had and exactly how miserable she is, because a sober Brooklyn would sooner bite me again than let me carry her anywhere.
“‘M not done drinking,” she mumbles into my throat.
“You are.”
I carry her through the bathroom and into the closet and set her on her feet, keeping one hand fisted in the back of the gown so she doesn’t sway into the shelving.
With the other I pull one of my T-shirts off the stack.
It’s soft, white, washed, and one hundred percent cotton.
No dyes, nothing in the weave that can turn on her, and I grab a pair of my boxer briefs.
I keep a drawer of things like this. I have for a year. I’ve never let myself examine why.
“Arms up, wife.”
She blinks at me. “Buy a girl dinner first.”
“Arms. Up.”
She lifts them, swaying, and I take the lace in both fists and tear it off her in one long pull, and I keep my eyes on her face the entire time.
The whole time. I have spent eighteen months earning the right to look at this woman and I have not earned it yet.
I will not steal what I haven’t been given, not a glance, not an inch of her.
Because the day I take something from her she didn’t offer is the day I become the thing my family already thinks I am. The thing my brother was.
So I look at her eyes, only her eyes, and I get the cotton over her head and her arms through, then I crouch and feed her feet through the boxers and draw them up her legs, covering her, and only then do I let myself breathe again.
She’s watching me the whole time with that drunk, narrow, searching look. “You didn’t look,” she says.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because you didn’t say I could.”
Her mouth opens. Closes. Whatever she expected the monster to say, it wasn’t that.
She keeps looking at me like that, swaying, head tipped.
“You’re careful with me,” she says, and it isn’t a compliment.
It’s an accusation, like careful is a crime I’m getting away with.
“Everybody figures because I can fight, I don’t need anybody to be—” She stops.
Frowns at my collar. “There’s a guy. You don’t know him.
He’s careful with me too. Never seen his face.
” She laughs, loose and sad. “Probably never will now. You ruined that.”
Something cold and enormous moves through me. She’s describing me to my own face, and she has no idea. The man she’s already grieving is the one holding her up.
“Lucky him,” I manage.
“Mm.” Her eyes drift half shut. “You kind of sound like—” But whatever it was dissolves with the Scotch, and she leans sideways into my chest. I catch her, because catching her is apparently the only thing I know how to do anymore.
I lift her again and carry her to the bathroom and set her on the long vanity, steadying her with a hand on her hip, and that’s when she finally sees it.
Her gaze drags across the counter—and stops.
The little zip bag. The specific brand of fragrance-free everything.
The dumb pink toothbrush. The exact bottle of the exact lotion that’s the only one her skin tolerates, half used, the level of it precisely where it was the last time it sat on a sink in a brownstone in New York City.
Her things. All of them. Hers.
They were here earlier too, but clearly in her anger, she hadn’t noticed them. I watch her try to make it make sense through the drunken haze and fail.
I open one of the drawers and shake one antihistamine into my palm and fill the glass that is also hers and hold them both out. “Take it.”
She doesn’t reach for the pill. She’s still staring at the counter, at the impossible domestic fact of it, and when she lifts her eyes to mine they’ve gone clearer, like fear sobered her halfway.
“These are mine,” she says. “This is my toothbrush. This is the lotion I get from the place in Brooklyn that ships from Italy.” Her breath catches. “How—”
“Take the pill, Brooklyn.”
She takes it, because the welts are screaming and even drunk she’s not stupid, and she swallows it down with her own water from her own glass, and the whole time I am standing here in the wreckage of a wedding I orchestrated, looking, I have no doubt, exactly as ashamed as I feel—because I marked her tonight.
I, the one man on this earth who swore he never would, and I can see that the shame is the thing frightening her the most. More than the gun did. More than the name. A monster she could survive. A monster who looks sorry is something she has no map for.
“Why do you have my things?” she whispers.
I tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear, because I can’t help myself, because touching her is the only thing in my entire life that has ever quieted the noise in me, and I don’t answer her.
I can’t.
Not yet.