CHAPTER FIFTEEN
MINA
The second kiss is not a weapon.
That makes it more dangerous.
We are in the apartment kitchen after midnight. Gabe’s hand rests on the counter beneath mine. Coffee cools between us. Below, the funeral home is silent except for the building settling around its pipes.
I lift my face.
He does not move.
“You can kiss me,” I say.
“Do you want me to?”
“I would not have offered a permit for decorative purposes.”
“Mina.”
There it is again, my name as a stop sign. This time he is using it against himself.
“Yes,” I say. “I want you to kiss me.”
He does.
Slowly at first, one hand at my waist, the other still open on the counter. No anger to blame. No chapel full of flowers. I feel every decision he is not making for me.
I put my hands beneath his jacket and push it from his shoulders.
“Bedroom?” he asks against my mouth.
“Mine.”
“Your code.”
“I know my code.”
“I don’t.”
I pull back. “You don’t?”
“No.”
“You installed the lock.”
“Felix programmed your entry. I told him not to record it.”
The information reaches somewhere under my ribs before I can make a joke.
“Good,” I say, because it is the only word available.
He follows me down the hall. I enter the six numbers with my body blocking the keypad out of habit. Gabe looks at the opposite wall.
My room is not designed for a man his size. The bed is old iron, the nightstand crowded with work books, the dresser topped by Bianca’s ceramic dish. I turn it facedown.
Gabe notices but does not ask.
“The marriage does not mean yes,” he says.
“I wrote that clause.”
“Say it anyway.”
“Yes.”
“To what?”
The precision should annoy me. It doesn’t.
“To you. Here. Tonight.” I take his hand and place it at the hem of my sweater. “And if that changes, I will tell you in language even your attorney can interpret.”
He pulls the sweater over my head.
The ring on its chain catches against the fabric. Gabe frees it carefully, the gold warm from my skin.
“Leave it,” I say.
His fingers close around the ring for one second, then release it.
He kisses the place below it.
My body answers without dignity. I grip his shirt, opening buttons badly. One skitters under the dresser.
“You’re paying for that,” he says.
“File a claim.”
“Joint property.”
“Ninety-day depreciation.”
His laugh is quiet and startled, as if it escaped before permission. I want to hear it again. The wanting is more intimate than his mouth on my throat.
We undress each other without choreography. My elbow catches the lamp. He steadies it. His belt lands on a stack of trade journals and sends them to the floor.
“This room is hostile,” he says.
“It has standards.”
Then his hand moves between my thighs, and words become less organized.
He watches my face. Not with the triumphant focus I expected, but attention—adjusting when my breath changes, stopping when my body tenses for the wrong reason.
“Still yes?” he asks.
“Yes. Don’t turn this into a deposition.”
“Answer clearly.”
“Gabe.” I guide his fingers where I want them. “Yes.”
Pleasure builds in specific, inconvenient waves. I press my face into his shoulder to quiet myself. He moves his mouth to my ear.
“No one downstairs.”
“Thin walls.”
“Then they can learn privacy.”
I laugh, lose the sound, and come with my hand locked around the back of his neck.
He holds me through it. Not restraining. Remaining.
When I can think again, he reaches toward his discarded trousers and takes a condom from his wallet.
I raise an eyebrow.
“Operational planning?”
“Adult planning.”
“Marginally better.”
I take it from him, open it, and roll it on slowly enough to make his control show its seams.
He lies back when I press his chest.
Power moves differently when given.
I straddle him, feel the weight of his hands settle at my hips, and lower myself. The stretch makes me pause.
Gabe does not push. His eyes stay on mine.
“All right?”
“Yes.”
I move when I am ready.
He is quiet until quiet becomes impossible. His grip tightens without directing me. I learn what breaks the rhythm in his breathing, what makes his eyes close, what brings my name out of him without command attached.
When he rolls us, he waits for my nod. Then he drives deeper, one hand braced beside my head, the other holding my thigh. The bed protests against the wall.
“Standards,” he says, breath rough.
“Shut up.”
“Clear language.”
I bite his shoulder.
His next thrust makes thought optional.
The second climax takes me with him. No dramatic collapse, no transformation into another person. My body shakes. His forehead rests against mine. We breathe like people who have carried something upstairs and are unwilling to admit it was heavy.
Afterward, he disposes of the condom, retrieves the lamp, and puts the trade journals back in a stack.
“You don’t need to clean the scene,” I say.
“I knocked them over.”
“That has never stopped a Corso from leaving evidence.”
He looks at me over his shoulder.
The joke lands differently now.
“Too soon?” I ask.
“No.”
He returns to bed and lies beside me without trying to pull me against him. I move closer anyway.
His hand rests open on the sheet between us.
My phone vibrates on the nightstand.
Anika has sent the enhanced scan of Bianca’s carbon sheet and a note from the document examiner.
I open it.
Two codes previously hidden beneath the seam are now visible. One is Paolo’s R7-441C. The other is a ledger transfer dated Thursday—his day of death.
Both carry the same internal amendment code.
VS-6.
Gabe sits up beside me.
“Victor’s approval series,” he says.
My skin is still warm from him. Bianca’s ring rests against my breastbone. Paolo’s last evidence glows on the screen.
For five years, I have aimed my revenge at the man in my bed.
He has aimed his at my father.
The numbers do not absolve either family. They do something worse to certainty.
They point both graves in the same direction.
We do not sleep.
Gabe puts on his trousers. I put on his shirt because mine is beneath the bed and distance feels inefficient. We carry the tablet to the kitchen and spread the recovered records across the table.
The VS-6 amendment appears at four points: the false Antonio Greco transfer, the three-million-dollar movement, an empty sealed container, and Paolo’s Thursday load.
“Six may be user number,” I say.
“Victor’s office had five clerks.”
“Then six is Victor.”
“Or an administrator.”
“You are defending him.”
“I am building something he cannot dismiss.”
The answer is exactly what I demand from evidence and exactly what infuriates me in a person.
Gabe calls Felix, who answers with the resignation of a man who has stopped expecting nights.
“Pull every VS amendment,” Gabe says. “Not only mortuary. Seven years.”
“Do I want to know why you sound awake?”
“No.”
Felix is quiet. “Is Mina there?”
“Yes.”
“Tell her the contract prohibits strangling enthusiastic cousins.”
I lean toward the phone. “Only without written consent.”
Felix hangs up.
At three, we find a pattern in the dollar amounts. Each false load carries a fee just below the review threshold. No single payment is remarkable. Together, they form the missing thirty-two million.
“The account did not accumulate,” I say. “It was filled deliberately.”
“A reserve built from skimmed freight,” Gabe answers. “Victor could drain it only after one signatory died and the other token activated default.”
“He needed Paolo dead and Sal visible.”
“Or believed Sal would return for the marriage.”
The contract lies in Gabe’s locked office downstairs. I feel it anyway, a paper route designed for my father and perhaps for Victor.
“We gave him what he wanted,” I say.
“Proximity.”
“Access to my building. Your attention divided. Both families in one room.”
Gabe’s face hardens toward decision.
I put my hand over his.
“Do not turn this into another reason to lock me upstairs.”
“I was thinking of moving Victor.”
“Where?”
“Somewhere with fewer exits.”
“You have suspicion, not proof.”
“He had both.”
“And if you take him now, the real administrator erases everything while the captains call you compromised.”
Gabe looks at my hand over his.
“What do you suggest?”
“We keep looking. Together. You tell me before you move. I tell you before I set a trap.”
“You set traps?”
“Not tonight.”
“Mina.”
“Agreement?”
He turns his hand beneath mine until our palms meet.
“Agreement.”
At four twelve, we finally go back to bed.
This time, Gabe reaches for me only after I reach first.
We sleep for ninety minutes.
At six, the funeral-home bell rings downstairs. A family has arrived early because their grandfather died at County General and no one explained that arrangement conferences begin at nine.
I dress in the dark. Gabe wakes when I button my blouse.
“Where?”
“Downstairs.”
He sits up, instantly alert. “Who?”
“A family.”
“Cleared?”
“Grief rarely books appointments correctly.”
He gets out of bed.
“You do not need to come.”
“I know.”
The answer stops me.
“Then why are you putting on trousers?”
“Coffee.”
“For yourself?”
“For the family.”
I let him come downstairs.
The Ramirez family fills arrangement room B: widow, two adult sons, daughter on video call from Arizona, and a grandson still wearing hospital scrubs.
They speak over one another in English and Spanish, trying to decide burial versus cremation before understanding the price or their father’s written wishes.
Gabe stays in the kitchen.
He makes coffee badly but quietly. He brings a tray to the hall and gives it to Evan instead of entering the room. No one learns his name. No one owes him thanks.
For an hour, I work.
When the family leaves with a plan and three fewer decisions for today, I find Gabe washing cups by hand.
“The dishwasher works,” I say.
“These belonged to your mother.”
“One plate belonged to my mother.”
“I did not know which cups.”
“So you washed all of them.”
“Efficient risk control.”
I lean against the sink beside him. The intimacy of last night has not disappeared. It has changed into bare feet on cold tile and his shirt buttoned incorrectly because I tore one away.
“This does not mean I trust you,” I say.
“I know.”
“It means I wanted you.”
“I know.”
“You are abusing that answer again.”
He dries his hands. “What do you want me to say?”
“Something imperfect.”
He looks at the missing button. “I want last night to mean more than you are ready to let it mean. I also know wanting that can become another demand if I say it badly.”
The sentence is longer than his usual ones. He had to build it while speaking.
“That was imperfect,” I say.
“You asked.”
“And specific.”
“You prefer honesty.”
I touch the chain at my throat. Bianca’s ring rests beneath my blouse, between the evidence we found and the body that wanted him.
“Last night changed the case,” I say. “It also changed us. I do not know into what.”
“Neither do I.”
“Good.”
“Good?”
“You finally have an unanswered question and have not threatened it with counsel.”
He looks at me as if considering a kiss.
“Ask,” I say.
“May I?”
“Not in the kitchen before seven.”
His mouth changes. “Specific.”
“You like me that way.”
This time, he does not pretend otherwise.