Lorik
Icome back to the world tied to a chair in a place that smells like rust and motor oil, and the first thing I do, before I’ve remembered my own name, is try to stand up and go to my wife.
The ropes teach me I can’t. The pain that follows the trying teaches me how long I’ve been here.
Long enough that my body has already become a country of injuries, each one with its own map.
I’m in a warehouse. High windows gone amber with what might be dusk or dawn, I can’t tell which, can’t tell which day it is.
My uncle is leaning against a steel post cleaning his nails with a knife I recognize because it used to be my father’s. And my mother, she’s in a chair across from mine, in pearls, with her ankles crossed, watching me the way she’s watched me my entire life: like an investment that hasn’t matured.
She shipped me to Albania when I was seven, because Admir was the heir and a spare is only an expense. She brought me back at sixteen when the heir turned out to be a liability, the way you pull a tool out of a drawer when the job finally needs it.
I have spent my entire life being useful to this woman or being gone, and somewhere in the middle of it I decided that if I could never be loved I would at least be the most dangerous thing she ever made.
Sitting in this chair, watching her cross her ankles over my spilled blood, I finally understand I succeeded at exactly the wrong half of that.
“There you are. Finally.” Klaudia says. “My son. Awake to disappoint me again.”
I don’t waste a breath answering. I’m cataloguing instead. The way she taught me without meaning to, the survival mechanics I learned at her hand.
There are two men by the door. My uncle with his knife.
No phone in reach. My hands bound, feet bound, at least two ribs that grind when I breathe and something deeper and worse below them that I don’t have a word for yet but that my body keeps flinching away from like it’s near lit coal.
And under all of it, louder than all of it, the only thought that’s going to matter for however long this takes: Brooklyn is out there alone, and every minute I am in this chair is a minute I am not getting to her.
That’s the thing my mother wants. It takes me most of the first day to understand it. She doesn’t ask me a single question worth the name. Not where the money is, not who I answer to, not any of the things you’d torture a krye to learn. She isn’t after information.
She’s after a word.
“Say it,” she tells me, somewhere in the long red middle of it, when I’ve stopped being able to hold my head up on my own.
“Say you renounce her. The De Salvo whore. Say her blood is beneath ours and you were bewitched and you’re done, and I’ll have a doctor in this room in ten minutes.
That’s all. One sentence, Lorik, and the pain stops.
Tell me you don’t love the daughter of the man who butchered your brother. ”
And here is the thing I learn about myself in that warehouse, the thing twenty-nine years of being her cold, careful, calculating son never once let me find out: I will let them do anything to me before I will say a single false word against my wife.
Not because I’m brave. I’m not brave, I’m in agony, there are hours in here I would have told her where the bodies are buried going back a decade just to make it stop. But the word she wants isn’t information. It’s the one thing that’s still mine.
They have my body, my blood, my freedom, the hours I’m supposed to be spending saving Brooklyn. But the truth of what she is to me is the last room they can’t get into, and I will die in this chair with the door held shut before I let my mother put her hand on the only clean thing I’ve ever had.
So when she says renounce her, I say the only thing I’ve said in four days.
“She’s my wife.”
And my mother nods at my uncle, and it gets worse.
I learn things in here. I learn that the man who taught me to drive can break a finger with the tenderness of someone shelling a nut.
I learn that my mother will hum while it happens, an old song from Shkoder, the one she used to hum over my crib before she decided which son she’d keep.
I learn that the body can bleed where you can’t see it, that there’s a particular gray at the edges of everything that means you’re filling up inside with your own blood, and that I have apparently inherited my wife’s color for the place a person goes when the world becomes unsurvivable, because gray is exactly the word for where I’m living now.
And I learn what they’re really doing, because on the fifth day my mother gets bored and cruel and tells me, the way you’d tell a child a fairy tale, exactly what kind of trade she’s made.
“You think this is about Admir.” She crouches in front of me, careful of her pearls.
“This is business, my son. There’s a man, a very rich man, a powerful man, with very particular tastes, who saw your little wife on your arm at a party and decided he’d like to own her.
He came to me. He had a problem: she was guarded.
I had a problem: you. So we solved the same one. ”
She pats my cheek, and I can’t even flinch away from it.
“I keep you in this chair until it’s done.
He collects what he paid for. By the time anyone lets you out, Lorik, your wife will belong to someone who will not be kind to her the way you fool yourself you’ve been, and there will be nothing left to go home to.
That is the gift I’m giving you. I’m taking the De Salvo problem out of your veins for good. ”
If I’d had anything left in my body I’d have torn the chair out of the floor.
I don’t. All I can do is hold her eyes and let her see, in the only language she’s ever respected, that I’m going to find the senator, and I’m going to find her, and when I do there will not be a hole on this earth deep enough.
She sees it. And for the first time in my life I watch my mother look, very faintly, afraid.
Then she leaves, because she has somewhere to be, and the minutes blur, and I keep myself alive the only way I have left.
I go to Brooklyn.
Not really. I know it isn’t real, I’m not that far gone, but somewhere past the second night I stopped being able to keep her out and I stop wanting to. So while my uncle does his patient work I am somewhere else entirely.
I’m in a grappling gym watching a girl arm-bar an opponent. I’m reading two years of texts in the dark of my car. I’m on a closet floor putting bread into her hands. I’m fused to her in our bed with her heart slowing to match mine.
Don’t go, just stay, a little longer, so I stay.
I stay, I’m staying, I’m not leaving you, I’m coming, I just have to live long enough to come.
She is the rope I climb hand over hand back from the gray every time it tries to take me under for good.
My mother wanted to find the room where I keep her and burn it down.
Instead she locked me in it. It’s the only reason there’s still something alive in that chair when the wall finally comes down.
There’s a version of this where a man breaks, and I understand him now.
The man who breaks, he’s just a man who ran out of rope.
I don’t run out though. Every time I reach the end of myself there’s another fistful of her waiting.
The weight of her asleep on my chest, the sound she makes when she’s about to laugh and decides to insult me instead, the way she looked up at me on a closet floor and asked which man I was and then chose me anyway, both of me, all of me, without ever getting the answer.
I have more of her stored in my body than they have hours to spend.
That is the machine that keeps me alive, and the cruelest part is that she doesn’t even know she’s doing it.
I hear it more than see it. The door, the shots, the specific economical violence of a man I’d know blind.
Cas doesn’t shout. Cas never shouts. There’s a stutter of gunfire that drops the two by the door, and a single shot somewhere behind me that ends the sound of my uncle’s breathing for good, and then there are hands on my face, careful, and a voice I have trusted with my life saying my name like a man trying not to break.
“Lorik. Lorik, look at me. I’ve got you. I’ve got you, brother, I’m here.”
I drag my eyes open, because my face is the only part of me they didn’t touch. The warehouse is full of our men. My uncle is a shape on the floor that doesn’t move. My mother’s chair is empty.
“Klaudia,” I try to say, and it comes out as nothing, as red.
“Gone,” Cas says, and the failure in his voice tells me he understands exactly what that’s going to cost. “She wasn’t here when we came through the wall.
I’m sorry. I had your uncle and his whole crew, and she—she got out a side door.
I chose you.” His jaw works. “I will always choose you. We’ll find her. ”
He’s already cutting the ropes, already calling for the car, already a field medic running his hands over me and going very still and very quiet at what he finds below my ribs.
I hear him say we need a hospital, now, a real one, he’s bleeding inside, and I find, from somewhere, the strength to grab his wrist.
Because the math has come back to me. Five days.
Five days she’s been alone in the world believing I didn’t come.
Five days that Vance has had to collect what he paid for.
And the failure of it, the sheer unforgivable size of it, is a worse kind of pain than anything in my body—because I promised her.
I held her on a closet floor and I swore on my own life that there was no version of any night that ended with her alone, and then I drove into a trap like an amateur because I couldn’t think past my own panic, and I left her exactly, precisely alone, the one thing I told her would never happen again.
I am a liar. After everything, after all of it, I made myself the thing she already believes I am.
“Not the hospital,” I tell Cas, and my voice is wreckage but it’s iron. “Not for me. You take me to her. Wherever she is, you find her, and you take me there, and you do it now.”
“Lorik, you’ll die—”
“Then I die getting to her.” I make him look at me. “I already failed her once by being careful about myself instead of her. I will not do it twice. Find my wife, Cas. That’s the only order I’ve got left in me. Find her, and drive or fly us there.”
And because he is the only brother I have ever actually had, he swears, and he lifts me, and he gets us there.