Brooklyn
One second I’m hitting him and the next he’s folding, and the whole world narrows to the single impossible fact of my husband going down.
My uncle catches him. I don’t even see Dom move.
One breath he’s in the chair and the next he’s behind Lorik with both arms under him, taking the weight, lowering him to the floor slow and careful like he’s something breakable.
That’s the thing that finally breaks the spell of my fury, because Domenico Caputo does not gently catch the men he hates.
And then I see the blood. I’ve been pounding my fists against it for a full minute and my brain refused to read it. The black-soaked shirt, the wrongness of how he’s holding his own body, the way he hit the floor like a man whose strings were already cut.
“Lorik!” His name comes out of me in a completely different voice. The fury’s just gone, evaporated, like it was never the real thing under there at all. “Lorik—no, no, no, look at me, why are you—oh my God, that’s blood, that’s so much blood—”
I’m on my knees beside him with my hands on his ashen face, the way his hands have been on mine a hundred times as his eyes roll, unfocused, finding me and losing me. “Somebody help him! He’s bleeding, he’s— Why is nobody— HELP HIM!”
“He’s bleeding internally.” Cas is suddenly crouched across from me, his calm cracked.
He rips Lorik’s shirt open and what’s underneath makes my own father turn away.
I know it now the way you know things in a nightmare.
He presses both hands flat to my husband’s side and roars, in a voice built to be obeyed, “We are in a hospital! Get me a trauma team on this hall RIGHT NOW or I start carrying him to one myself!”
And the strangest thing happens. The room full of people who came here to kill each other becomes, for thirty seconds, one machine pointed at keeping him alive.
My uncle is barking orders in a register I’ve never heard from him. My father has a doctor, a real one, terrified, running for a gurney. Cas keeps pressure on the wound and keeps Lorik’s eyes on mine.
“Stay with her, brother, look at her, stay.”
Lorik looks at me, just at me, with what’s left of him, and then they’re lifting him onto a gurney and running and I’m running with them holding his hand until a set of double doors I’m not allowed past takes him away from me, and his hand slides out of mine, and he’s gone.
Then there’s nothing to do but stand in a hallway with his blood drying on my hands and fall apart.
Cas folds down onto a bank of plastic chairs across from me, and for a moment this terrifying inked man just puts his face in his red stained hands and breathes.
My family arranges itself around me without a word.
My father’s hand is heavy on my shoulder, mom’s arm goes around my back, Dom standing a little apart, watching the doors Lorik went through with an expression I can’t read.
And I round on the only person who has answers.
“Why is he bleeding?” My voice is shaking. “Where did he come from? He looks like— Cas, he looks like he’s been— What happened to my husband?”
Cas lifts his head. And he tells me.
He tells it flat and fast and merciless, the way you’d report it to a commander, because I think it’s the only way he can get through it without coming apart.
He tells me that the morning I left, Lorik came home, found my rings on the counter and the burner gone, and that he understood exactly what I’d found and exactly what it meant.
That he didn’t wait. That he didn’t take any men or make a plan or do a single careful thing.
He got in his car alone and drove after me because he knew home was where I’d run.
That that was the stupidest thing he has ever seen Lorik do and Cas has known him for longer than I’ve been alive.
“He never made it out of Virginia,” Cas says.
“His uncle boxed his car on a back road and ran him off it. His mother had them take him to a warehouse.” His jaw works.
“They had him for five days. Brooklyn, look at me, because you need to hear this part and you need to never forget it. She didn’t want money.
She didn’t want names. She wanted one thing.
She wanted him to say he didn’t love you.
She told him, she promised him, that the second he renounced you, the pain would stop, a doctor would walk in, it would be over.
” Cas’s voice finally cracks. “Five days. Internal bleeding by the second one. And the only sentence that man said in that chair, the only one, over and over, was your name with the word wife in front of it. He let her do that to him for five days rather than say one false word against you.”
The hallway tilts. I have to put a hand on the wall.
“I found him this morning,” Cas goes on, quieter now.
“I took his uncle and most of the crew. His mother got out a side door. I’m sorry, she’s still breathing, that’s a debt I’ll pay, and when I got the ropes off him the medic took one look and said to get him to a hospital, immediately, that he was dying. And your husband grabbed my wrist.”
Cas looks at me like he’s handing me something holy and unbearable at the same time.
“He said no and ordered me to find you and to take him to wherever you were. I told the fucker he’d die.
He said then he’d die getting to you. He said he already failed you once by being careful about himself instead of you and he would not do it twice.
” Cas spreads his bloody hands. “So I got him here. I got him here when he should have been on an operating table three hours ago because the only order left in him was to reach you. He spent the last strength in his body to walk into that room and clear those men off you and take every word you needed to throw at him. And then he let go. Because you were safe. That was the deal he made with himself. You safe first, then he could fall.”
I am going to be sick. I am going to be sick, or I am going to scream, or I am going to come apart at the actual seams. Because I stood in that room and I beat my fists on a dying man and I screamed that he was a liar, to tell me he didn’t love me, the exact words his mother tortured him for, and he wouldn’t say them.
He wouldn’t give it to her and he wouldn’t give it to me, the one truth, the only one, I will never say that, not to you, not to her, not to anyone.
I thought he meant it as a romance. He meant it as a thing he’d already bled a week for to keep locked behind his teeth, sealed in his chest.
He didn’t get tired of me. He didn’t decide I wasn’t worth the drive.
The story I built in the gray, the one that confirmed every ugly thing I’ve believed about myself since I was a child.
It isn’t just wrong, it’s the precise opposite of true.
While I lay in my childhood bed deciding I was a girl people put down, he was three hundred miles away letting his own mother break his ribs one at a time rather than unsay he loves me.
And none of that unmakes what he is. None of it unmakes the lie.
He hunted me, he wore a mask, he let me marry a stranger and fall for a ghost who was really a stalker.
And he never once told me they were the same man, and I have not forgiven a second of it and I don’t know if I can.
That war is still there. That war is real.
But it can’t be fought with a corpse. And right now, standing in a hallway with his blood going tacky between my fingers, the only thing in my entire body that I am sure of is that if those doors open and someone tells me he’s dead, the war won’t matter, nothing will matter, because I will have spent the last words I ever said to him hitting him and begging him to pretend he didn’t love me.
“He came,” I say. It’s all I’ve got. “He came, and I—” I look at my own hands. “I hit him. He was dying and I hit him.”
“He’d tell you that was his to take.” Cas says it gently, which from him is somehow worse.
“He’d tell you he earned every blow and then some, and he’d be right about the some.
” He leans forward, elbows on his knees.
“He’s not a good man, Brooklyn. I won’t stand here and sell you that.
But whatever he is, he is yours all the way to marrow of his bone, in a way I have never once in my life seen a man belong to anything.
Hate him if you need to. He’d want you to, if it’s true. Just—do it with him alive.”
Across the hall, my uncle Dom finally moves. He crosses to the wall where the terrified real doctor is being kept by two of Domenico’s men, and he says something low, and I catch only the end of it.
The one in the coat is mine, nobody touches him, he’s going to tell me about Vance.
I understand in that moment, distantly, that the place my own father brought me to, to save me, was the trap. That there was a buyer, that the smiling senator from a party a lifetime ago has been the shape under all of this, and that my family is already, silently, going to war over it.
But I can’t hold any of it yet. I sink into a plastic chair between my mother and Casimir, and I look at the doors, and I make the gray wait, because for the first time in a week there’s something on the other side of it I am not willing to lose.
I clasp my ruined hands together, and I do the only thing left.
I beg God, with all the faith inside me, to keep alive the man I’m not sure I can forgive.
Because I just got the truth I prayed for. He never stopped loving me, he never will, and I am going to lose my mind if the universe gives it to me and takes him in the same hour.