“Feed me. Touch me.” I step back, putting the island between us. “Any of it.”
“Any of it.” He repeats the words slowly. “That’s a broad restriction.”
“I never wanted this. The dress, the penthouse, your protection?—”
“And yet here you are.”
“Because Nico’s men showed up at my workplace. Because you nearly killed someone in front of me. Because you dragged me here without asking.”
“I asked.”
“You didn’t.”
“I offered you the bus. You declined.”
“That’s not?—”
“There’s always a choice, Bea.” He stalks around the island, closing the distance I tried to create. “You could have fought harder. Could have screamed. Could have run when those men showed up instead of standing there, backed against a wall, waiting.”
“I wasn’t waiting for?—”
“You were.” Softer now, but no less dangerous. “You looked for me in that office. The same way you looked for me when Lorenzo got too close. The same way you looked for me tonight when I described myself and you couldn’t keep your composure.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“No?” he says. “I know about the debt. The loans you’ll be paying until you’re forty. The apartment you can barely afford, in a neighborhood where the locks don’t work and the elevator hasn’t run in months.”
“You had no right?—”
“I know about your grandmother.”
Ice sweeps through me.
“Sunrise Senior Care. Three months behind on payments.” He studies my face. “They were going to transfer her to a state facility. Somewhere cheaper. Somewhere that would have killed her inside of a year.”
“How do you?—”
“Or she was. Paid in full. Six years in advance. Private room. Full-time care. Everything she needs.”
The floor shifts under my feet. I reach for the counter to steady myself.
“When—how?—”
“I made a call.”
He says it so casually. It was just a call. Just another thing to be handled, fixed.
And he could undo it just as easily.
“You— You had no right. I didn’t ask you to?—”
“No. You didn’t.” He reaches out. Tucks a strand of hair behind my ear—almost gentle, if I didn’t know better. “But I did it anyway.”
“I don’t want your charity.”
“Then don’t call it that.”
“Then what should I call it?”
