LORIK
She falls asleep on me in the car, and it nearly stops my heart.
One minute she’s rigid against the far door, watching the city scroll past with her arms crossed and Vance’s name still hanging in the air between us like smoke.
The next the wine and the adrenaline crash out of her all at once.
She leans sideways, and her head finds my thigh, and she’s gone.
Out cold, mouth slack, one hand curled loose on my knee, trusting me with her unconsciousness in a way her waking mind would never, ever allow.
I sit very still so I don’t wake her. I have killed men for getting closer to me than this.
And I sit here in the dark with the most dangerous family in New York City’s stolen daughter asleep on my lap, and I understand that Vance saw it tonight.
He saw the exact thing I felt the moment her weight settled against me, the thing I’ve spent almost two years and hundreds of miles of distance pretending I don’t have.
A weakness. A door. A way in.
I’m going to have to kill him. I file it away with the cold practicality of a man scheduling a deposition, and I rest my hand in her hair, and I let her sleep the last few miles home.
The car eases through the gates and up the drive. I wake her gently.
“We’re home, wife.”
She comes up blinking and embarrassed, already reassembling the armor, swatting my hand off her hair, and gathering the strappy heels she kicked off somewhere around the Beltway.
She slides out barefoot into the warm dark, heels dangling from two fingers, and pads up the front steps and inside without a backward glance.
I let her go because I assume she’s going up to bed and because Cas catches my eye over the roof of the car.
“Two minutes,” he says.
The rescue. Vance’s “discretion matter” surfaced faster than either of us expected.
There’s a girl, and a window, and it’s narrow.
We stand in the drive and I let him walk me through it, the address, the timing, the men, and the whole time some primal part of me is already counting the seconds since the door closed behind her.
Then we go in. Cas is half a step behind me, reaching back to push the heavy door shut without looking as two men step out of the dark of my own foyer with guns aimed, when a voice behind us says, “Don’t move.”
Everything in me goes to ice.
I know before I turn. I know from the way Cas freezes, from the third voice, from the small choked sound that is the worst sound I have ever heard in my life.
They have her.
The man who spoke has Brooklyn against his chest, one gloved hand crushed over her mouth, the muzzle of a pistol screwed into her temple hard enough to leave a ring.
The other two have their backs to him, weapons trained on Cas and me, and the geometry of it is perfect and total: I move, she dies. Cas moves, she dies.
There is a gun against my wife’s skull and there is not one single thing on earth I can do about it, and the helplessness is a physical thing, a straitjacket, a noose.
And I cannot breathe, I cannot move, my whole life is draining out through the barrel pressed to her head and I am powerless to stop it.
“Finally.” The man holding her is grinning; I can hear it.
“The great Lorik Kovaci. Smaller than the stories.” His hand slides down off her mouth, down her throat, and flattens on her satin covered stomach, and starts, slowly, to crawl lower, and the sound that comes out of me is not human.
“Pretty little thing you married. We’re supposed to deliver her alive.
But the man paying said nothing about clean, and a dress like this is practically an invitation, so I think I’ll sample the goods before I hand them off—”
“You’re a dead man,” I say, very quietly. “All three of you. You just don’t know it yet.”
“See, that’s the thing.” His hand keeps moving.
Brooklyn’s eyes are locked on mine, huge and dark, and she is not looking at me like a woman about to be raped and sold.
She is looking at me the way she looks at an opponent across the mat, steady, calculating, waiting, and her right hand has dropped, slow and small, to the hem of that green dress.
“We know what you really do with the shipments, Kovaci. We know who’s been bleeding the supply for three years.
Question is how your uncle reacts when he finds out the krye’s been playing savior, how your whole organization reacts—”
He never finishes the sentence, because my wife has stopped waiting for an opening and decided to make one.
It happens in less time than it takes to describe.
Her hand comes off her hem with a thin blade in it.
Not one of mine, a blade I have never seen, a blade she has had on her this entire time.
She drives it backward and up into the meat of his thigh, into the femoral, and twists.
He screams. The gun jerks off her temple.
She’s already moving, pivoting inside his arms, ripping the pistol out of his slackening grip, and the two men with their backs to her are only beginning to turn when she throws.
The blade takes the one nearest Cas in the throat.
The pistol bucks in her hands and takes the one nearest me through the eye.
Three seconds. Maybe four. Three armed men on the floor of my foyer and my nineteen-year-old wife standing in the center of them, barefoot, in a green slip of dress, the leader’s gun steady in a two-handed grip and her chest heaving and not one drop of doubt anywhere on her face.
Cas exhales a word in Albanian I haven’t heard him use since we were boys.
I can’t say anything at all.
Brooklyn snatches the blade out of the guy’s throat as my men crash through the doors too late. The house fills with shouting and movement, and I come back into my body all at once, and what comes back with me is not relief.
It’s rage. A rage so total and so cold it goes past heat into something arctic.
“How?” I don’t raise my voice. I never have to. Besnik goes gray. “Three men. Inside my house. Past my walls, past my dogs, past forty trained men, with their hands on my wife. How?”
“Sir—I don’t—we’ll find—”
“You’ll find out, and then you’ll bring me whoever opened the door, and I will do to him what I am presently restraining myself from doing to you.
” I’m already turning it over, the taunt, we know what you do with the shipments, and the cold gets colder, because someone has found the one secret that can end me.
They sent it into my house wrapped around a kidnapping.
“Get them out. All three. I want their phones, their prints, and whoever they were delivering her to, by morning.” I look at the blood on my floor, on her bare legs, and my voice drops to something that empties the room. “Go.”
They go. They take the bodies and the shouting with them, and Besnik takes Brooklyn’s borrowed pistol from her hand with the careful slowness of a man defusing a bomb, and asks for the knife too, and I say, “She keeps the knife,” without looking away from her, and then the doors close and it’s just us.
Her, and me, and the blood, and the thing roaring in my chest that I have no name for.
She has had a blade on her body since the night I took her.
I turn it over and it guts me. She’s been armed this entire time.
In my bed. Under my roof. The first night, while I slept beside her keeping my stupid vigil.
She had steel within reach the whole time and she never once used it on me.
She could have ended me a dozen times over and walked out into the dark of the night, and instead she put it through three men to keep me breathing.
“Come here,” I say. My voice does not sound like mine.
She doesn’t move. “You’re welcome.”
“Brooklyn.” My hands are shaking. I never shake. “Come. Here.”
She comes. Bare feet through the place where men died for thinking they could touch her, the knife back in her fist, her chin up, and the second she’s in range I move before I’ve decided to, the way I only ever move around her now.
I get a hand in the back of her hair and the other at her waist and I walk her backward into the wall, and I cage her there. I put my face an inch from hers and just breathe her, because two minutes ago I watched a gun against her skull and I have not yet convinced my body she’s alive.
“It’s time we finished this,” I tell her, low and ragged. “It’s time I made you my wife in every way there is.”
Her breath stutters. Her pupils blow black. But she doesn’t look away, and she doesn’t bring the knife up between us, and that’s the only thing keeping me from being a monster right now—that she could.
“If you don’t want this.” I fist the hem of her dress, drag it up her thighs, and make myself say the rest. “If you want out, out of this house, out of this marriage, out of me, then you have a blade in your hand, doll, and you know exactly where to put it. So put it there. Use it.”
I press my forehead to hers.
“But you’d better make sure you end me. Because if you don’t, if I’m still breathing when it’s done, I will come after you.
I will always come after you. There is no state or country far enough, no name clean enough, no life you can build that I won’t walk into.
You are mine, Brooklyn Kovaci. The only way out is through my heart not beating, and you’ll have to mean it. ”
For one eternal second she holds the knife against my ribs.
Then steel hits marble, and the sound of it is the sound of the last door in the world closing.
That’s all I need.
I hoist her up the wall and her legs lock around my waist and I take her mouth like I’ve been starving for it for a year, because I have.
She kisses me back fierce and furious and real, her hands fisting in my open collar, dragging me into her.
I shove the dress to her waist. I get my pants open one-handed, free myself, and reach up and tear the scrap of lace off her with a snap of my wrist, and then there’s nothing between us at all.
I pull back just far enough to look at her—and that’s when I see them.
Her breasts, bare for the first time, flushed and perfect, and through each nipple a small bar of steel that catches the low light.
Pierced. I knew. Of course I knew. I watched her walk into a shop and had it done last spring, four months after a stranger came apart in her mouth in a garden.
I have spent every day since trying not to think about what it means, about the matched set of us, about a girl who felt metal on her tongue and went and put metal of her own in her skin and never told a living soul why.
That I am the reason, that she branded herself for a masked man whose face she doesn’t know, nearly finishes me before I’m even inside her.
“Are you sure?” I get out against her skin, because I have to, because there is a line I do not cross even now, even like this.
“Tell me you’re sure. Because there’s no taking this back, wife.
I don’t wear anything. I’ve never gone bare with anyone—and I’m going to come inside you. Say it. Say you want it.”
Her hands come up and frame my face, and she looks at me. The fight in her eyes is something else now, something that scares me worse than the knife ever could.
“Fuck me, Lor,” she breathes.
Lor. The name only Cas has ever called me. In her mouth it breaks the last thing in me that was still standing.
I line up and drop her down onto me, and the heat of her, the tight clutch of her around the bare length of me, no barrier, nothing, the first time in my life I have ever felt another person with nothing between us, blanks out the world.
There’s no resistance, no break; she’s a fighter, she gave that to a mat years ago, but I have never had a single doubt that I am the first man who has ever been here, and the certainty of it makes me feral.
I pin her to the wall and I take her. Hard, deep, ruined, my forehead against hers, her nails carving into the back of my neck, the little bars of steel dragging against my chest with every thrust. I don’t last. I knew I wouldn’t.
Two years, and her, and the gun that was against her head, all of it crashing through me at once.
“I’m coming,” I warn her, and she bites my bottom lip hard enough to draw blood, and that’s it, that’s the end of me. I spill into her on a sound I’ve never made, deeper than I’ve ever been, marking her from the inside the way she marked herself for me without either of us ever saying it out loud.
For a long moment I just hold her there, both of us shaking, my face buried in her throat.
She didn’t come. I felt it. Felt her right at the edge and not over it, her body new to all of this, wrung out from a fight and a kill and a wedding she never agreed to. It’s the only failure of my life I intend to spend the rest of it correcting.
“Thank you,” I whisper into her skin, and I don’t fully understand what I’m thanking her for.
For living, for choosing, for the knife she dropped instead of the one she could have used, and I find that I cannot make myself pull out of her, cannot make myself leave the one place I have ever felt like the noise might stop for good.
So I don’t. I hold my wife against the wall of a house with her enemies’ blood drying on the floor, still inside her, still hers, and for the first time in thirteen years, I am not afraid of anything at all.