25. Brooklyn
brOOKLYN
The house is too quiet without him, and I hate that I’ve noticed.
Two days, Drini said. Two days my husband is off doing whatever a krye does in the dark that he won’t tell me about.
I’ve spent the first one prowling his too-big house like a cat in an empty room, training too hard, sleeping in the middle of a bed that has no business feeling enormous, and refusing to name the thing in my chest that feels like missing him.
I don’t miss him. I refuse. He drugged me.
He owns a sex club. He told me yesterday morning that he’d murder a man for touching me and I said okay and meant it.
I miss him so much it’s embarrassing.
It’s the smell that pulls me downstairs in the late afternoon.
Something rich and unfamiliar and wrong.
Garlic and saffron and the salt-iron of seafood drifting up the staircase, and my stomach drops before my brain catches up, because Drini doesn’t cook with shellfish.
Drini never cooks with shellfish. It’s the first thing on the list, the one that put me in an ambulance at fifteen, the one Lorik measured a sedative around.
There is no version of this house where that smell exists.
Unless someone else is doing the cooking.
I come down the last of the stairs and stop in the wide arched mouth of the formal dining room, and the bottom falls out of my whole afternoon.
There’s a woman at the head of my husband’s table.
She’s older. Sixty give or take, immaculate, silver-blonde hair, draped in all black, beautiful the way something sharp is beautiful. She’s flanked by two enormous men, identical and matched, who set down their forks the instant I appear and watch me with four flat eyes.
A feast is laid out in front of them, a banquet, platters of things I half recognize and one I recognize completely.
A great steaming dish of saffron rice and mussels and crab that has filled my whole house with a smell that could kill me.
And standing against the wall, gray-faced, a serving cloth twisted in his hands, is Drini, and the look he gives me is pure helpless apology, and that’s how I know exactly how much trouble I’m in.
I have never seen her before. I don’t have to be told who stares back at me.
The way Lorik says that bitch. The kill-on-sight order at every gate that someone, somewhere, decided not to follow. The twins. The eyes that are his eyes, set in a face that has never once been kind.
His mother.
“Look who decided to join us.” Her voice is warm and her smile is colder than a grave. “The infamous bride. Come in, child, come in. You’ve kept us waiting long enough, the food is getting cold. Sit. Eat. We’re family now, you and I. Aren’t we?”
“Zonjusha.” Drini steps forward, quiet, desperate. “I made Mrs. Kovaci her own plate, in the kitchen. Her food is special, she cannot—”
“Nonsense.” Klaudia doesn’t even look at him.
She keeps her eyes on me, and beneath the fake warmth there is a hatred so total and so patient that the air in the room has gone thick with it.
“I had Drini prepare a proper Albanian welcome for my new daughter. The way I’d have welcomed any bride of my son’s, in the old country.
It would be rude to refuse it.” She gestures, graciously, at the chair to her right.
At the dish that would close my throat in fifteen seconds. “Sit. Eat. I insist.”
And I understand, all at once, with the cold clarity I get before a fight, exactly what this is.
She isn’t being a mother-in-law. She’s testing whether the allergy is real, and she’s hoping it isn’t, and if I sit at that table and take one polite bite to keep the peace, she will watch me suffocate on her son’s good china and call it an accident, a tragedy, a girl who simply didn’t know her own body.
She wants me dead. She has wanted me dead since before she knew my face. And she has walked into my husband’s house, past his men, and set a trap baited with the one thing that can kill me without anyone ever firing a shot.
So I don’t sit.
“No, thank you,” I say, and I keep my voice as pleasant as hers.
“I’m allergic to shellfish. Anaphylaxis.
The kind that ends with a tube down my throat or a body bag, depending on how fast the ambulance is.
Drini knows. Your son knows. You knew too, I think—about thirty seconds before you ordered it.
” I let her see that I see her. “I’m not going to eat at your table, Klaudia.
Not this food, not any food. I don’t break bread with people who want me in the ground. Enjoy your welcome.”
I turn to go.
I make it one step.
“Sit her down.”
She says it the way you’d ask someone to pass the salt, and one of the twins is up and around the table before I’ve finished pivoting.
Here’s the thing they don’t know, the thing nobody outside my own family ever knows until it’s too late: they think I’m a boxer’s daughter.
A pampered princess. A pretty Italian girl in a wedding dress who got herself stolen.
They don’t know I’ve been on the mats since I was five. They don’t know about any of the belts I achieved, the years of weapon training, the grandpa who started me before I could read. They don’t know that the man coming at me is about to have the worst surprise of his life.
I drop my weight and take his first grab and turn it into a throw that puts two hundred and forty pounds of muscle onto the marble flat on his back, and for one bright second I think I’ve got this.
Then the second twin is there, faster than something that size has any right to be, and I’m not fast enough. His open hand cracks across the side of my face hard enough to turn the whole world white and silent and send me off my feet entirely.
I hit the floor outside the archway, my ear ringing, my cheek already swelling as my hands skid across cold stone, and then I’m staring under an accent table against the wall.
That wall.
The one I came apart against the night three men died in this house and I gave myself to my husband for the first time. The one where a knife clattered out of my hand onto the marble while I made a choice, and slid, unnoticed, into the dark beneath this table, forgotten.
My hand closes around the hilt.
The twin is almost on me, reaching down to haul me up by the hair.
I come up off that floor with everything my family ever gave me and I bury the blade in the meat of him.
High, where it’ll hurt and bleed and stop him without killing him.
Because killing the krye’s mother’s lover in the krye’s foyer is a war even I’m not ready to start.
He howls and rears back clutching himself and that, that half-second of him reeling, is my whole entire chance.
I take it.
I’m up the stairs before Klaudia finishes shouting, taking them three at a time.
I hit the primary bedroom and slam the door and throw every lock it has, and then I drag the bench from the foot of the bed against it.
I stand there shaking in the middle of the room with a man’s blood on my hands, and I wait for the door to come down.
It doesn’t.
That’s almost worse.
Because she doesn’t send them up. She doesn’t break the door. I hear her voice float up the stairwell, unhurried, amused, and the words turn my stomach to ice.
“Take your time, daughter. We’re in no rush at all. We’ll just make ourselves comfortable down here. It’s a lovely house. I think we’ll stay a while.”
And she does.
She stays. I learn, over the next two days, exactly what kind of monster’s family I married into, because Klaudia Kovaci does not leave.
She moves into my husband’s house like she owns it, and his men, the trained men, do nothing.
Because she is the mother of the krye and somewhere in the chain of them is a man who decided that means more than Lorik’s word.
Now I am alone behind a locked door with a stabbed guard somewhere below me and a woman who wants me dead drinking my husband’s wine in my husband’s dining room and laughing.
I don’t come out.
I tell myself it’s just a strategy. I tell myself I’m waiting for the right moment.
The truth is uglier and simpler: somewhere in the second hour, the gray comes for me the way it always does after, the heavy flat nothing rolling in behind the adrenaline, and this time there’s no warm shower and no man who reads me before I read myself and no mouth at the back of my neck telling me he’s got me.
There’s just me, and a locked door, and a closet I eventually crawl into because the corner of it is the smallest, safest-feeling place in a house that has stopped being safe.
I sit with my back to the wall and the bloody knife still in my fist. I do not eat, because eating means going down, and going down means her, and I would rather starve than sit at that woman’s table.
Drini comes to the door once, on the first night, his voice low and frantic through the wood.
“Zonjusha, please, let me bring you something, she is gone to bed, the kitchen is clear.”
I want to believe him so badly it hurts, but I can’t make my body trust a single word spoken on the other side of a door in this house anymore, so I say nothing, and I press my hands over my ears, and after a while he goes away.
Two days.
I don’t sleep, not really. I don’t eat at all.
I lose track of which hour is which. The swelling on my cheek goes from white-hot to a deep purple-black I can feel pulse.
I sit in the corner of my husband’s closet with his shirts hanging over me like the only kind thing left in the world, and I breathe in cedar and gun oil off the cotton, and I hold the knife, and I wait.
I wait for the door to come down.
And somewhere in the worst of it, in the gray that manages to turn even grayer, in the dark, I stop waiting for a monster to break the door and start, praying for one, praying to hear an engine in the driveway and boots on the stairs and the only voice in this house I have decided, somewhere along the way and without ever once admitting it, that I would know anywhere.
Come home, I think, to a man I’m supposed to hate.
Please. Come home.