"Agreed." No hesitation. He holds my eyes while he says it.
"Lex." I need to feel it land, not just hear it.
He doesn't look away. "Yes."
I blow out a breath, and my chest stays tight around it, the way it has stayed tight for longer than I’d like to admit now. Almost like a fist that does not open. "Tell me about Nikolai."
He does. He tells me what I already know and three things I do not. The three things I do not know are: that Nikolai Reznikov is the cousin of the man Nico Konstantinos killed twelve months ago, that the contract on me is a blood vendetta dressed in a financial wrapper, and that the federal prosecutor I have been working with is on a list Petrov found in a Bratva-adjacent network in October as a person of operational interest.
The federal prosecutor has not been compromised. The federal prosecutor is being watched by people who would compromise her if they got the chance.
"My federal prosecutor is on a list."
"Yes."
"For Christ's sake." The words come out thin. I have been holding a very specific belief together with both hands — that if I just do the testimony, just walk through the one door the federal government built for me, my daughter and I come out the other side into something like a life. I feel that belief go soft in my hands.
"Maeve."
"How am I supposed to testify safely if they can get to a federal prosecutor? If they can reach her, they can reach the Marshals. The safe house. Whoever decides where I sleep. It means someone on the inside is already theirs, and I won't know which one until it's too late." My voice does not rise. I am proud, distantly, that my voice does not rise. Inside, the floor I have been standing on for all these weeks is gone, and I am holding very still so that he does not see me fall.
"You testify because we make sure she's not being watched on the day you do it. That is what the time until the grand juryis for. The architecture goes around her, around you, around Nora. You walk into the grand jury. You walk out. Nikolai goes to federal prison. The Bratva East Coast operation is materially crippled. We re-evaluate at the end."
"And in the meantime?"
"In the meantime, you sleep at night because there is a man on your couch who has been doing this for fifteen years and who would die before letting anyone touch you or your daughter."
He says it without raising his voice, the same flat, operational way he said the line at the door a few minutes ago. It is not a voice I know yet. It is a voice I am already learning to read, and what it is telling me, in its total absence of drama, is that he means it the way other people mean their own names.
I have no idea what my face does. I know I am tired in a way that has gone past the body and into something structural. And I know there is a man across from me who I made a child with three years ago and walked away from, and that man is in my living room, saying he'll die for the daughter he's never met. I do not have anywhere safe to put a sentence like that, so I put it where I put everything, which is behind my ribs, with the rest of it.
I drink the tea.
Lex doesn't move. Lex waits. By this point, he is one of the most patient men in Boston.
The doorman calls.
It is eleven fifty-eight. The intercom in my kitchen rings the small mechanical ring, and I get up to answer it. Lex stands at the same time. He doesn't stop me. He follows me. He stands at my shoulder while I press the talk button.
"Ms. Callahan, there's a package for you at the desk. No courier. It was hand-placed."
Lex's hand comes down on mine on the talk button.
"Stay here," he says, low. "I'll go down. Do not open this door for anyone but me."
"You don't even know what apartment number we are in."
"I know what apartment number we are in."
He's memorized it. Of course, he has. A man like him would have clocked the apartment number in the elevator on the way up, the way he clearly clocked my living room in the thirty seconds he stood in it.
"Go," I say.
He does.
I stand in my kitchen with my back against the counter until he comes back. I don't count the seconds. I just feel them stack up. I leave the kettle alone. I keep my hands flat on the counter behind me because they need somewhere to be. I don't go check on Nora. If I see her asleep with Brontos jammed under her arm, I'll start crying, and crying is a door I cannot open right now, because I am not sure anymore that I would be able to close it.
The knock comes. Three measured raps. The pattern he gave me on the way up, which I don’t recall learning and must have absorbed without realizing, the way you absorb the rhythm of a song from the next room.
