Brooklyn
Ilet him hold me until the sun was all the way up, and that is the most damning thing I have done since I got here.
Worse than the kiss. Worse than my own hand in the early morning hours.
You can blame a kiss on a gun and a hand on a dream, but there’s no excuse for the part where I turned my face into a kidnapper’s chest and let the steady thud of his heart put me half to sleep.
And I liked it. Too much, far too much, far too easily, and the thing I can’t let surface is that it felt far too right.
He’s gone now. Showered and suited and out the door to whatever an Albanian mob boss who is also a lawyer does with his Tuesdays, and I’m alone in the wreck of the bed with the evidence still humming under my skin, and I can’t stop thinking about the metal.
The piercings. The ladder of little steel barbells I traced up the length of him before I was awake enough to know better.
I keep coming back to it like a tongue to a sore tooth, and every time I do, my stomach drops through the floor, because the truth is I didn’t flinch when I felt them.
I didn’t think what is that. My hand knew them.
Some basic instinct part of me recognized the shape of that man under my fingers and relaxed into it like coming home.
I have spent my whole life learning to trust exactly that kind of knowing, the body’s quiet certainty a half-second ahead of the mind.
I have felt that before. I know I have. And there is only one man on this earth I have ever touched in the dark.
Stop. I sit up so fast the room tilts. Stop it, Brooklyn. Right now.
Because that road doesn’t go anywhere I can survive.
I lay it out the way I’d scout an opponent, cold, on paper, so I can see exactly how stupid I’m being.
The facts, such as they are: A man takes me.
He has my toothbrush and my lotion and the only foods I can eat.
He knows my allergies down to the milligram.
He picks a ring in the one color I’ve loved my whole life and a metal that won’t make me itch.
He kisses me like he’s been doing it for years. He flinches from his own men.
I watched a guard steady him on the stairs last night and he jerked back like the hand was a live wire.
But he leans into me like I’m the only safe thing in the building.
He won’t let anyone touch him except me, who told me, I’ll always come for you.
There is nowhere you can run that I won’t be standing in the doorway when you stop.
And there’s a faceless man three hundred miles north who knows everything about me, who never once let me put my hands where I wanted, who knew my brother’s name and my safe foods and the shape of my loneliness, who I have to bait reactions out of, who tells, You can stop talking to me anytime you want, Brooklyn. I’ll just be here when you start again.
The room is very quiet.
If I put those two columns side by side and let myself add them up, they make one man. They make one single man, and I know it, I have known it since his mouth landed on my center and my whole body said finally, yes, this is what I need before my brain could scream.
So I don’t add them up.
I take the two columns and I shove them into separate rooms in my head and I lock both doors, because here is the thing nobody tells you about being smart: being smart doesn’t save you from this. I can see the answer. I just can’t have it.
Because if Lorik Kovaci is my masked ghost then the one good thing in my life, the one person who ever made me feel chosen instead of inherited, the secret I have guarded like coal in my hands—was a hunter the whole time.
Then I wasn’t seen, I was cased. Then every soft, safe, three-in-the-morning thing I ever told someone in the dark, I told to the man who was already planning to drug me in a bathroom.
Then there is no faceless man to grieve and no husband to hate, just one monster wearing both faces, and the only love I’ve ever trusted was bait.
I can survive a kidnapper. I cannot survive that.
So: two men. The masked man is mine and good and lost. Lorik is the devil who stole me. They are not the same. They. Are. Not. I will hold that line if it kills me, and some mornings, like this one, I think it might.
There’s a knock, which is almost funny in a house where I’m a prisoner.
It’s the heavily, pretty inked one. The one he called Casimir. He leans in the doorway with my phone in his hand and gives me a once-over that has nothing leering in it, just assessment, the same way I size up an opponent.
“He left you a present,” he says. “Ten minutes. One number. No towns, no streets, no names of anyone breathing near you.” He tosses the phone onto the bed. “I’ll be standing right here, and the second you try to be clever, it ends. Clear?”
I stare at the phone like it might bite. “Why would he—”
“Because you’ve got a friend losing her mind, and a family tearing up the eastern seaboard, and a husband who’d rather they all knew you were breathing.
” He shrugs. “Also because he can’t stand the look on your face.
But he’d shoot me for saying that part, so I didn’t.
” He nods at the phone. “Nine minutes now. I’m Cas, by the way.
You can stop looking at me like you do.”
“I don’t look at you any particular way,” I lie.
“You look at me like you’re choosing which of my joints to break first.” He’s unbothered. “It’s flattering. Your husband looks at you about the same way, if it helps.”
“It doesn’t.”
“Didn’t think it would.”
Cas. I file it, because you take every name they give you.
Then I dial one of the few numbers I know by heart, and Harley answers before the first ring finishes, breathless, wrecked, like she’s been sleeping on top of her phone for days.
“Brooklyn? Brooklyn, oh my God, oh my God, is it you, is it really—”
“It’s me.” My voice cracks straight down the middle and I have to press my knuckles to my mouth. “Hi. Hi, Har. It’s me.”
She’s crying. I can hear her crying and trying to talk through it, and the whole shape of her panic comes through in pieces. Everyone’s losing it, your dad hasn’t slept, Dom’s got the whole city, there are men everywhere, the photo, Brooklyn, the photo, what did they do to you, did they—
“Nothing.” I say it fast, hard, the way you stop a bleed. “Harley, listen to me. Nobody hurt me. I’m not hurt. I’m—” Married. Falling. Losing my mind, I think, but don’t say, so I tell her, “I’m okay. I swear to you on my mom I’m okay,” instead.
“You’re not okay, you got taken—”
“How’s Antonio?” I cut across her, because I cannot listen to the end of that sentence. “My brother. Is he okay?”
She makes a frustrated, helpless sound. “Okay is not the word. He’s not scared, Brooklyn, he’s out of his mind furious.
He’s been at the heavy bag till his knuckles split, and your dad had to physically haul him off it, twice.
He packed a bag. An eleven-year-old packed himself a go-bag and set it by the front door.
” A wet, almost-laughing breath leaves me.
“He told Domenico, to his face, that if the grown-ups won’t bring you home, he’ll come do it himself. ”
Something in my chest goes tight and cold. Of course he’s not scared. He’s Sienna’s son, and Mom put her own kidnapper in the ground once and walked out of the room. And he’s Dad’s, built thick and broad and throwing punches since before he could spell his name.
My baby brother has every ounce of the family fire and not one ounce of the sense to know that fire is exactly what gets eleven-year-olds killed.
The thought of Antonio anywhere near men like the ones in this house, swinging his little fists at monsters who wouldn’t blink before they broke him, is the first thing all day that makes me truly afraid.
“I’m handling it.” I glance at Cas, who’s studying the ceiling with the patience of a man who’s done this before. “I need you to do something for me, and I need you to actually do it, not the thing where you say yes and then call my dad the second we hang up.”
A wet, furious laugh comes out of my friend. “Maybe.”
“Tell them to stand down.” My throat closes and I push through it.
“Tell my dad, tell Dom, tell all of them—do not come for me yet. Do you understand? It’s a trap.
He wants them to come. He’s not going to kill me, Har, I’d be dead already if that’s what this was about.
But the second my family walks through his gate, people I love start dying, and I will not—” My voice gives out.
I drag it back. “I will not be the reason somebody buries my dad or anyone in my family. Tell them I’m alive and I’m handling it and I need time. Promise me.”
Silence, except for her breath sitting between us.
“I hate this,” she whispers.
“I know.”
“I hate him.”
And here’s the thing I notice, the thing that scares me more than the gun ever did: there’s a half-second, one traitorous half-second, where I don’t know which him she means, and I don’t know which one I’d be defending.
“Yeah,” I say finally, and it isn’t quite a lie and isn’t quite the truth. “Me too.”
“Time’s up,” Cas says quietly, not in an unkind kind of way.
“I have to go.” I’m already crying now, silent, the way you cry when you’ve trained yourself out of the loud kind. “Tell my mom I love her. Tell Mom I’m okay, and I love her, and I’m coming home. Say it just like that, the way I always say it. Promise me you’ll tell her.”
“Brooklyn—”
I hang up before she can hear me come apart, and I hand Cas the phone with a steady hand because I have my pride if nothing else, and he takes it and looks at me for a second with something almost like sympathy, which is so much worse than cruelty, and then he leaves me alone.
I sit there a long time in the gold light, in an enemy’s bed, wearing his shirt and nothing else because I let him take the rest and never asked for it back.
The pillow beside mine still smells like him. Cedar and gun oil and cold minerals and nothing like a man who scrubs the day off three times and still doesn’t come clean. I should hate that I know his smell well enough to name it.
Instead I catch myself turning my face an inch toward it before I understand what I’m doing, and I go rigid, and I despise my own body with a completeness that scares me.
The two locked rooms in my head press against their doors, and the columns line up no matter how I scatter them, and the body that knew those piercings keeps trying to tell me the thing my heart cannot afford to hear.
I press my hands over my ears like that ever helped anyone, and I say it out loud to the empty room, low and fierce, the way you say the things you’re trying to make true.
“They are not the same man.”
The house doesn’t answer.
“They’re not.”