Brooklyn
Ihave stopped counting the days, and that’s how I know I’m in trouble.
There was a version of this where I scratched the count into the underside of a drawer like a prisoner in an old movie, where every sunrise was one more sunrise stolen from my real life. That version lasted about a week.
Then the days started running together into something with a shape, a rhythm, a horrible domestic kind of music, and I stopped marking them because marking them meant admitting I was somewhere instead of just away from somewhere, and somewhere is so much more dangerous than being away.
This is the shape of it now.
I wake every morning to his mouth.
That’s not a figure of speech. Lorik Kovaci, the American-Albanian krye, the most feared man in Washington, has decided that the proper way to start a day is on his knees at the foot of our bed with my thighs over his shoulders, and he does it like a man who genuinely believes he’ll be punished if he ever skips it.
I’ve stopped pretending to be asleep through it.
I’ve stopped pretending a lot of things.
I wake up coming apart in my husband’s mouth and I let myself.
Afterward he crawls up the bed and tucks me into his chest and lets me drift back down for another hour while he reads emails over my head like this is a marriage and not a kidnapping, and I let him do that too.
I sleep in his shirt. Only his shirt. I said that was about the boxers going missing. We both know it isn’t.
My family is gone. Gone because I sent them, gone because I picked the cruelest words I owned and threw them like knives so they’d run somewhere I couldn’t get them killed.
I haven’t been allowed to call Harley again; Lorik says it isn’t safe yet, after the three men in our foyer.
I’ve decided to believe him because the alternative is that I’m alone, and I am alone, and the only people left in my entire world are a killer, his terrifying best friend, and a sixty-year-old man who bakes me bread from Italy.
And the worst part, the part I will deny with my last breath, is that some days it doesn’t feel like a cage.
Some days it feels like the first place anyone ever let me put down all my weapons.
I find Drini in the kitchen most afternoons and he lets me help, lets me knead and burn things and ask him questions he mostly doesn’t answer, and it’s the closest thing to peace I’ve felt since before a needle went into my neck.
I train in the mornings in the sunroom Lorik had cleared and matted for me. For me, a fact I refuse to examine. Sometimes when I turn around he’s standing in the doorway in a thousand-dollar suit watching me throw a heavy bag around with an expression I have no name for and won’t look at too long.
We talk. God, we talk for hours. He’s funnier than a monster has any right to be.
Last night it was the senator with his name on a children’s hospital. “Guess how he paid for the wing,” he said, not looking up from his brief.
“Bake sale,” I answered. “Rubber chicken. A guilty checkbook.”
“A pension fund full of bus drivers, skimmed over four years.” He turned a page. “He cried at the ribbon-cutting. I watched the footage twice.”
“You’re disgusting.”
“I’m informed. There’s a difference.” And then he walked me through how he knew it, thread by thread, never once slowing to check whether I was keeping up. That’s the part that levels me. He doesn’t explain me to myself. He just assumes I’m already there.
He knows things about law, about history, about the rot under every famous name in that city.
He hands them to me like he’s been saving them, like he’s spent years collecting interesting things to tell me and finally has somewhere to put them.
He never once treats me like a child or a prize or a princess behind glass.
He treats me like the smartest person in the room, because, he says, I usually am.
It’s the most seductive thing anyone has ever done to me, and he isn’t even touching me when he does it.
It’s not all bread and slow mornings, though.
Some days Lorik is gone before light and back long after midnight with that particular stillness that means somebody, somewhere, is having a far worse week than I am.
Since the three men bled out in his foyer, the house has grown teeth.
More guards, faces I don’t know, Cas prowling the halls at hours when normal people sleep.
I corner him on one of those nights, because boredom in this place is its own kind of torture and Cas is at least an interesting one.
“The three I killed,” I say. “Who were they? You know by now. You know everything.”
He considers me over the rim of a glass he won’t finish.
“We know who they were delivering you to. We don’t know who sent them.
Two different questions.” He tips his head.
“Somebody learned a thing about your husband that nobody is supposed to know. Then they wrapped it around you and mailed it to our door. Lorik doesn’t rattle, Mrs. Kovaci.
I’ve known him twenty-two years. He’s rattled. ”
“What thing?”
Cas smiles, but it doesn’t touch his eyes. “Ask him. He lies to you so beautifully. It’s almost a love language.”
“You called me doll again,” I say one night, before I can stop myself.
We’re in the library, of course he has a library. He looks up from the brief he’s marking, and something careful moves behind his eyes. “I call you a lot of things. Wife, brat, love, sweetheart, mine.”
“Not like that. You said it three times today.” I set down the book I’m not reading.
“Here’s the thing that’s been bothering me.
Nobody calls me doll. Nobody. It’s not a normal nickname.
It’s not what people pick. It belongs to exactly one person on this earth.
My uncle Domenico. He’s called me doll since I was five and nobody else has ever been allowed it.
It’s his.” I watch his face and find nothing on it, which is its own kind of answer.
“So how does a man who supposedly hates my family down to his bone marrow reach in and take the one word that was only ever Dom’s? How do you even know it?”
The silence stretches a beat too long.
“It suits you,” he says finally, mildly, looking back down at his brief. “Pretty. Breakable-looking. Wildly more dangerous than it appears.” A pause. “Maybe great minds reach for the same word.”
“Maybe.” I don’t believe him. He knows I don’t believe him.
And I file it, doll, the way my ghost said it once, and the way this man says it now, into the locked room with everything else.
And I slam the door, because the box where I keep these things is getting very full and I cannot afford to open it.
“Can I ask you something,” I say instead, “and will you actually answer it for once?”
“You can always ask.”
“That’s not the same as yes.”
His mouth tips. “No. It isn’t.”
I get up. I cross the library and stand in front of him until he sets the brief down and gives me the whole black weight of his attention, because I want to watch his face when I do this.
“Why are you kind to me?”
He goes very still.
“You took me for revenge. You told me that yourself, the first night. I’m a price, I’m the means to bring my family to their knees.
You hate the people I love. You should be—” I gesture at all of it, the library, the matted sunroom, the food, his mouth at dawn.
“You should be making this hell. That’s what revenge is.
Instead you learned every thing I can eat.
You built me a gym. You washed blood off me like I’m something holy.
You hold me when the gray seeps beneath my skin and you somehow always know before I do.
” My voice does something I hate, goes thin at the edge.
“A cruel man would use all of it against me. You use it to take care of me. And I can’t make it make sense, and it’s keeping me up at night, so I’m asking you straight. Why?”
For a long moment he doesn’t say anything. The fire pops. Somewhere in the house Cas’s footsteps cross a floor and recede.
“Because cruelty would be easy,” Lorik says at last, and his voice has lost the smooth courtroom polish, gone low and rough and almost reluctant, like the truth is something he’s prying out of himself with a crowbar.
“I’m very good at cruelty. I could break you in a month.
I’ve broken harder people for worse reasons.
” He looks at me, and there’s that thing again, the starved thing, surfacing where he can’t quite shove it back down.
“But a broken thing isn’t yours. It’s just broken.
And I find I don’t want a broken you. I want—”
He stops. His jaw works.
“You want what,” I whisper.
“It doesn’t matter what I want.” He picks the brief back up, and the door in his face closes so completely it’s like watching a vault seal. “Go to bed, Brooklyn. I have calls.”
And that’s it. That’s all I get. He gives me a glimpse of the thing under the monster and then bricks it over faster than I brick over my own.
I should be relieved, and instead I stand there in his library wanting to throw the book at his perfect head, because he keeps doing this, keeps being gentle and then yanking it back.
He keeps showing me the man and then slamming the gate.
“You know what the cruelest thing you do is?” I ask from the doorway, and my voice is steady even though nothing else in me is.
“It isn’t the gun. It isn’t the locked gates.
It isn’t any of the things you think make you the villain.
” He looks up and I hold his eyes. “It’s that you keep being kind to me.
You keep handing me proof there’s a person in there, and then you take it back before I can hold it.
That’s the cruelest thing you do. And I think, somewhere in that ruined head of yours, you know it. ”
I don’t wait for an answer. I go up to our room and I lie down in his shirt on my side of a bed that stopped having sides over a week ago.
A long time later, when I’m pretending to be asleep, the mattress dips behind me and a heavy arm pulls me back into him, and a mouth I should hate presses once to the back of my neck.
“I know,” he says into the dark of our room, so quiet I almost miss it. “It’s the only kindness I’ve got left, and I’m spending all of it on you, and it’s going to get us both killed.”
I don’t answer.
But I lace my fingers through the ones splayed across my stomach.
I feel him stop breathing for a second, and neither of us says another word, and that, that silence, that surrender, that pair of monsters holding hands in the dark and pretending it isn’t happening, is the most married I have ever felt to anyone in my life.
I am in so much trouble.