Lorik
We’re forty minutes from home when Cas opens the laptop.
The girl is safe. That’s the thing I’m holding onto in the back of the car as the city thins to trees.
Two days of relays and handoffs and a nun in a nondescript sedan driving north with a nineteen-year-old who gets to keep being a person, and it’s done, it worked, and the part of me that needs the noise quieted is, for once, almost quiet.
We’ve been moving the whole time, no signal, no stops we didn’t have to make.
It’s the first chance Cas has had to do the thing he does on the way home from every job: pull up the house feeds and watch the days we missed at four times speed, because a man with my enemies does not walk back into his own life blind.
He’s halfway through it, eyes flicking, when he says, idly, not looking up. “Didn’t you tell Klaudia she wasn’t welcome on the property?”
The question lands wrong. It takes a second to register why.
“Of course I did.” My whole body has gone still. “Kill-on-sight order. I’d never once let that bitch breathe the same air as my wife. Why?”
Cas doesn’t answer.
He stops scrubbing. His jaw works. And then he says, very quietly, in a voice I have heard from him exactly twice in twenty-two years and both times someone died for it, “Fuck.”
And he turns the screen to me.
I watch my mother walk into my house. I watch my own men step aside for her at the door.
Step aside, for a woman I told them to shoot in the head, because she is the mother of the krye and somewhere in my line of men there is someone who decided that the blood in her veins outranks the word out of my mouth.
I watch a feast get laid out on my table.
I watch the timestamp, and the timestamp is two days old.
Two days.
I scrub forward with a hand that has gone to ice, and I find her Brooklyn, in the arched mouth of my dining room.
I watch the whole thing play out without sound, which is somehow worse, because I know my wife and I can read every line of her body.
The cold calm, the refusal, the exact moment she turns to leave with her chin up.
I watch my mother’s mouth move. I watch the first twin come around the table.
I watch my wife put two hundred and forty pounds of him on his back like he’s nothing, and for one second something fierce and proud roars up in me.
Then I watch the second one’s open hand come across her face hard enough to lift her off her feet.
I have killed a great many men in my life.
I have never once felt the thing that happens to me in the back of that car.
It isn’t rage. Rage is hot. This is the opposite of hot.
This is everything in me going quiet and cold and very, very organized, the way water goes still before it freezes solid, and somewhere far away I hear my own voice say, perfectly level, “Tell the driver to go faster.”
I built her a fortress and then I walked out of it. I told myself the girl in Frederick couldn’t wait, and that was true. I told myself Brooklyn was safe behind a wall with my men, and that was a lie. The most expensive lie I have ever told—and I knew it was a lie even as I told it.
I felt it in a gas station at three in the morning, a hook behind my sternum, and I got back in the car anyway. There is a specific kind of man who leaves the one thing he loves to go save strangers, and tonight I get to learn whether I can live with being him.
I watch her go down. I watch her find the knife under the table.
My brave, vicious girl. A weapon stashed against the one wall in this world that means something to both of us, and I watch her put it into him, yank it back out, and run.
And I watch her vanish up the stairs into the one part of my house I have no cameras in, our bedroom, the room I keep blind on purpose so that the one place she’s ever been safe stays private even from me.
And the feed keeps rolling, and my mother does not leave.
She stays. For two days she sits in my dining room and drinks my wine and laughs while my wife barricades herself behind a door upstairs, and not one of my men removes my mother, and the cameras have no sound but they don’t need it.
I can see the laughing, and the last frame before the feed catches up to live is timestamped eleven minutes ago and shows Klaudia Kovaci pouring herself another glass of my Barolo at the head of my table like a queen.
I scrub back once, because I have to see it, and I find the old cook at the edge of the frame.
Drini, who has served this family long enough to know exactly what he was being made to cook and exactly whose throat it would close, twisting his serving cloth in his hands, helpless.
And later, on the upstairs hall camera, I find him standing at her door in the dead of night with a covered plate, talking to wood that never answers him back.
He tried. The one man in my house with no gun and no rank tried, and not one of my men who had both did anything.
I will not forget either fact for as long as I live.
“She’s been in there two days,” I say. My voice does not sound like a thing a human makes. “With my wife. And no one called me.”
“No signal,” Cas says. “We were dark for the girl. Lor—”
“I know.” I do know. It’s no one’s fault and it’s the worst thing that has ever happened to me and both of those are true at once.
I close the laptop, very gently, because if I don’t do it gently I’ll put my fist through it.
“When we get there, you take the men. Every one who stood aside for her. I want to know which one opened my door, and I want him alive when I get to him.”
“And your mother?”
I look out the window at the dark road peeling toward home, and I think about a slap, and a knife, and two days of my wife alone behind a door, with no food and praying. I know she was praying, because I know her, and she was praying for me to come.
“Leave my mother to me.”
The car has not fully stopped when I’m out of it.
I take the front steps three at a time and I hit the door without slowing.
It bangs off the wall hard enough to crack plaster.
I walk into my own foyer past the place where my wife gave herself to me and the place where she defended her own life, and I follow the sound of laughter into my dining room, and there they are.
Klaudia at the head of my table. The two twins flanking her.
One of them fine, the other gray and sweating with a field dressing strapped under his shirt where my wife opened him up.
Wineglasses. Candles. The wreck of a meal.
My mother is mid-sentence, mid-laugh, telling some story to her lovers in my house, in my chair, and she turns when I fill the doorway and her face does something almost like delight.
“Lorik! Darling. We were beginning to think you’d—”
I don’t say a word.
I draw, and I put a single round directly between the eyes of the twin who slapped my wife, because I know exactly which of them touched her.
I watched it forty minutes ago and I will watch it every night for the rest of my life.
He’s dead before the wine in his glass stops moving, slumping sideways out of the chair and onto my floor, and the candles don’t even flicker.
The remaining twin lunges and I have the gun on him before he clears the table.
“Don’t.” It comes out so quiet the word barely exists. “Sit down, or join him. I genuinely do not care which.”
He sits.
Klaudia has gone white. Not afraid, my mother doesn’t do afraid, but she is recalculating, fast, the way she recalculated thirteen years ago when the spare became the krye.
I let her look at me, and I let her see, finally and completely, the thing she made in Albania and has spent her whole life pretending she could still control.
“Here is what is going to happen,” I tell her, and I walk toward her as I say it, slow, and she does not get to rise, because the gun says she does not.
“You are going to take what’s left of your dogs, and you are going to walk out of my house, and you are never going to come within a hundred miles of it again.
And before you go, you are going to understand exactly what you have done.
You came into my home. You set a trap to choke my wife to death on my own plate.
You put a hand on her. And then you sat in my chair for two days and laughed. ”
I crouch, level with her, the muzzle resting light against the silk over her heart.
“So hear me, Mother, the way you never once heard me when I was seven and begging you not to put me on that plane. If you ever touch her again, if you send a man, a letter, or a thought in her direction, I will not kill you. Killing you is what I’d do to someone I respected.
I am going to take everything you have ever loved, the houses and the money and the name and the two pretty pets you keep.
I am going to dismantle all of it in front of you, slowly, over years, and leave you alive at the end with nothing.
In a room, alone, so you can spend whatever’s left of your life understanding that the spare you threw away is the only reason you ever had anything at all. Now get out of my house.”
For one long moment, the oldest hatred I own and the oldest hatred she owns hold each other across six inches of air.
Then Klaudia Kovaci rises, and gathers her surviving dog, and steps over the body of the other without looking down at it. She walks out of my dining room with her spine perfectly straight, because she will never, ever give me the satisfaction of seeing her hurry.
At the threshold she pauses. She doesn’t turn.
“Blood is owed, Lorik,” she says, to the door. “You’ve only made the debt larger.”
And then she’s gone.
I don’t watch her go. I’m already taking the stairs.
I hit the bedroom door and it’s locked. Locked and barricaded. I can feel the weight of something dragged against it. I say her name, but there’s no answer, and the bottom drops out of the world.
“Brooklyn.”
Nothing.
I don’t ask again. I step back and I put my whole body into it, once, twice, and on the third the frame gives with a shriek of splintering wood and the bench skids across the floor and I’m through, into our dark room, my heart a war drum, my eyes tearing the shadows apart.
“Brooklyn.”