Chapter 13
Thirteen
Onyx
Ican't sleep.
It's not the nightmares this time. Those have faded since I started sleeping in Kon's arms, replaced by a quiet that used to terrify me and now feels dangerously close to peace.
Tonight it's the scars. The ridged lines of damaged tissue beneath the barbed wire ink on his arms, his chest, his ribs.
The way his heartbeat stayed steady when I asked him to tell me about them, even as his arm tightened around me. Tomorrow. Promise.
Tomorrow. He promised. And I believe him because this man, this infuriating, dangerous, impossibly tender man, doesn't make promises he can't keep. He told me that himself. It's why he makes so few.
But my brain won't shut off. The journalist never truly sleeps, even when the woman is exhausted. So I slip out of bed, careful not to wake him, and pad barefoot through The Foundry in nothing but his t-shirt, letting the quiet settle over me.
The building is different at night. Moonlight cuts through the tall windows in silver bars, striping the polished concrete floor and turning the exposed brick from warm to cool and ancient.
The ventilation hums its low, mechanical lullaby.
I trail my fingers along the spines of books on the hallway shelves as I pass, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and Sun Tzu, the reading habits of a man who wages war with his hands and philosophy with his mind.
I pause at one of his typewriters. The narrow table against the wall holds the machine and a half-finished page still curled in the carriage, the same one I noticed days ago and never had the chance to read.
My fingers itch to pull the page free and examine it, but I leave it.
Some things are private, and I'm learning to respect the boundaries of a man who has so few soft places left.
Instead, I think about what Persia said.
The door was never locked. I think about the contract I signed, the promise I made that I'm not here to damage his family.
And I meant it. Every word, every clause, every stroke of the pen.
These people have shown me more genuine warmth in two weeks than my own blood showed me in twenty-five years.
I wander toward his office. The door is open, unlocked, because he trusts me. The realization settles warmly in my soul like a small glow in the quiet dark. I signed a contract promising I wasn't here to blow a hole in his operations, and he responded by leaving every door in his life open to me.
I don't deserve that trust. Not with the file on my laptop. The thought stings and I push it away, filing it under problems for tomorrow where it's been sitting for days.
His office smells the way it always does, leather and old paper and the cedar undertone that has become shorthand in my brain for him. Moonlight pools across the desk, illuminating the silver flask with its Cyrillic script, the stack of books, the neat alignment of folders.
And there, in the corner near the window, another typewriter.
This one is different from the others. Older. The keys are worn smooth, the metal body darkened with age and use. A page sits in the carriage like the other one, and from across the room I can see lines of text, dense and deliberate. Not a letter. Not a report. Something personal.
I cross the room, curiosity pulling me forward, and lean in to read the words on the page. The typeface is small, the ink slightly faded, and I bend closer, tilting my head to catch the moonlight.
My hip catches the edge of his desk.
The impact is sharp and sudden, a jolt that sends a stack of folders sliding sideways. I grab for them but my fingers close on air as the stack topples, manila folders fanning across the concrete in a cascade of paper and cardboard that sounds obscenely loud in the silent room.
"Shit." I drop to my knees and start gathering pages, my heart hammering with the irrational fear that the noise has woken him. Papers scatter in every direction, some face down, some face up, and I'm scooping them into messy piles when a name catches my eye.
CATHERINE MALONE (DECEASED).
My hands stop moving as I read over my mother's name again.
The blood drains from my face so fast the room tilts, the moonlight smearing across my vision before it steadies.
My fingers go numb around the page's edge.
My knees press into the cold concrete, papers spreading around me in a slow fan, and I can't move.
Can't breathe. Can't do anything except stare at my mother's name reduced to a subject heading.
I should gather these pages and put them back. Slide the folders into the drawer and walk back to that warm bed and pretend I never saw this.
My hands are already pulling more pages toward me.
The folder's tab comes into view, labeled in neat block letters: MALONE FAMILY - COMPLETE DOSSIER.
My throat closes. I sit back on my heels, the concrete biting into my knees, and start reading from the floor where I kneel, surrounded by the scattered remains of my family's secrets.
The first section is Seamus. Pages and pages of documentation, shipping routes mapped in colored ink, financial transfers traced through shell companies I spent months trying to untangle.
Body counts. Witness statements. The trafficking operation documented in brutal, clinical detail that makes my own research look like a high school project.
Everything I gathered in six months of dangerous work, and more. So much more.
My hands start trembling. I grip the pages tighter and keep reading.
The second section is my father. Declan Malone. Financial records spanning decades. Communications with Seamus, transcribed from wiretaps I didn't know existed. His complicity laid out in black and white, every blind eye documented, every silent approval cataloged.
My stomach lurches. I swallow hard against the bile rising in my throat.
Then I find my own section and the ground drops out from under me entirely.
ONYX ROSE MALONE - COMPLETE PROFILE.
My journalism degree from Columbia. My thesis on organized crime in American cities.
Every job application I submitted to every newspaper and magazine in New York.
Every rejection, with handwritten notes explaining why: Malone influence, see attached.
Editors I trusted, editors I begged for a chance, turned me down because my family's reach extended further than I ever knew.
My mother's death certificate. My therapist's name and office address. My favorite coffee shop on West 4th Street in Greenwich Village, the one with the crooked awning where I wrote most of my freelance pitches.
They know everything. They've known from the beginning.
Before the auction. Before the wish. Before Kon volunteered to buy me and brought me to The Foundry and cooked me eggs and showed me his roses on his roof and held me while I cried and whispered Russian endearments into my hair.
He knew who I was. What I was. What I was worth to them.
The trembling in my hands spreads to my arms, my shoulders, my jaw. I clench my teeth until my molars ache and shuffle through the scattered pages until I find my mother's section again.
Medical records. Prescription history documenting an escalating reliance on sedatives and anti-anxiety medication over the final two years of her life.
Therapy notes I've never seen. A documented decline from a vibrant woman who sang in the car and made grilled cheese with three kinds of cheese into a hollow shell who couldn't leave her bedroom.
I always thought grief killed her. Depression. The slow erosion of living with a man who valued his empire more than his wife.
I was wrong.
Six months before her death, Seamus made a move against a rival family. The retaliation was bloody. Catherine witnessed a meeting she was never supposed to see. What she heard, what she saw, the documents don't detail. But the aftermath is documented in excruciating detail from her therapist.
Seamus didn't silence her with a bullet.
He was smarter than that. Subtler. He used threats.
Isolation. Cutting her off from friends, from family, from anyone who might listen.
He turned her own home into a prison and let the walls crush her slowly, day by day, until there was nothing left of the woman who used to laugh too loud and dance in the rain.
The therapist's notes fill in the details Catherine never spoke aloud.
Seamus moved her to the east wing of the house, away from the main living areas, away from staff, away from me.
He had her phone line disconnected and told her friends she was receiving treatment at a private facility and didn't want visitors.
He intercepted her mail. Controlled her medication.
Reduced her world to four walls and a window she wasn't allowed to open.
And then the final entry, dated three weeks before her death, written in the therapist's careful hand:
Patient disclosed that S.M. threatened harm to her daughter if patient attempted to contact authorities or outside parties.
Patient stated she would "endure anything" to keep her child safe.
Patient shows signs of severe psychological deterioration.
Recommend immediate intervention. Note: patient refused, citing above threat.
She didn't break because she was weak.
She broke because she was strong enough to let Seamus destroy her rather than risk him touching me.
My mother didn't die of a broken heart. She died protecting mine.
I read over the therapist notes again. How did Kon get his hands on these? On any of this information?
The sob that tears out of my chest is an ugly, animal sound. I press my fist against my mouth to muffle it, pages shaking in my other hand. My mother was all alone and no one helped her.
There's more. I don't want to read more, but I can’t help it.