We killed the handler. We burned the cell. The pipeline stops here, at least this branch of it, at least for now. The women and girls on that transport manifest, the ones scheduled to arrive in four days, they won't arrive. Not at that facility. Not through that route. That's real. That matters.
But Kreiss was right about one thing. He was middle management, and the people above him don't stop because you kill their employees.
I take one last look at the body on the floor and walk out of the room and down the stairs and out into the Baltimore night where the air is cold and the dog is still barking two blocks over and ten men from two families that have been trying to destroy each other for two years stand on a quiet street and share a silence that means more than any alliance agreement ever could.
Carmelo walks up beside me with a shit-eating grin on his face. "Done," he says.
I clap him on the back and take a picture of Kreiss before heading down the stairs.
Chapter Twelve: Savannah
I'mawakewhenEmiliogets home just after four. I've been sitting on his bed since midnight in one of his t-shirts and my underwear with the bottle cap in my hand, just waiting for him to open the damn door.
I hear his boots in the corridor. I know his walk now, the rhythm of it, heavier on the left foot, faster than most people because Emilio doesn't stroll anywhere. He moves through the world at a pace that matches the speed of his brain, which is to say too fast and without brakes.
The door opens, and there he stands in the frame, somehow looking both terrifying and extremely fucking attractive.
"Hey, asshole" I say. “You’re home late.”
"My apologies, vixen, putting down the local rabid dog was a bit time consuming."
"How did it go?"
"Dead."
"Good… come here."
He stands in the doorway for another second, then walks in and closes the door and sits on the edge of the bed next to me, putting his head in his hands. He doesn't cry. He doesn't shake. He just sits there with his elbows on his knees and his fingers in his hair and breathes, and I put my hand on his back between his shoulder blades, and rub. I don't say anything because there's nothing to say when a man comes home from doing what he did tonight.
After a while he lifts his head. His eyes are tired and old and not the eyes of a twenty-eight-year-old man who makes jokes and bounces his knee and calls me vixen. These are the eyes that Kreiss saw before he died.
"He had a manifest," Emilio says. "In the briefcase on the boat. Names and ages. Girls. The youngest was fourteen."
My hand grips the fabric of his shirt. I don't respond because the words fourteen and girls don't belong in the same sentence as manifest and trafficking and there is no response that meets the size of what he's telling me.
"I shot him," he says. "He told me I was killing middle management, and the system would replace him inside a week." He pauses. "He was probably right."
"He's still dead."
"Yeah. He's still dead." Emilio straightens up. Rolls his shoulders. Reaches over and takes the bottle cap out of my hand and holds it between his fingers the way I hold it, pressing his thumb into the center, testing the feel. Then he hands it back. "I need a shower, and a drink. And about fourteen hours of sleep."
"Shower first. You smell like a grave."
"Always in with the sweetest compliments."
"Dumbass, I’m trying not to gag."
He almost laughs. The sound gets halfway out before it dies, but even half a laugh is better than the blank face he walked in with, and I'll take it.
He goes to shower, while I sit on the bed and listen to the water and roll the bottle cap and think. I think about the fact that the world contains men who abuse children and men who stop them, and how those things exist at the same time and always has and always will.
Gigi would say something about this. Something about how the cruelty doesn't stop, it just changes addresses, and the best you can do is stand in front of it when it shows up at yours.
Emilio comes out in shorts with wet hair, but his eyes are brighter now, and he’s got a little smirk on his face when he catches me checking him out. He gets into bed beside me and I curl against him and his arm goes around me. We don't talk, we don't fuck and we don't do anything except exist in the same bed while the world goes quiet around us.
He falls asleep first. I feel his breathing even out and his arm go heavy and his body relax into the mattress in a way it hasn't since I've known him. The mission is over. Kreiss is dead. The pipeline… this branch of it, anyway, is severed.
I don't sleep yet because I just want to live in this moment, right here, where everything is peaceful and no one is dying or being kidnapped or out on missions. I lie there with my head on his chest and my hand over his heart and count the beats because his heartbeat is the best sound in this building and I'm not ready to stop listening to it.
