“Need the bathroom,” he said.
“Yes,” I agreed and hovered while he went then tried not to hover when he came back.
He got back into bed, closed his eyes. “My face hurts.”
“I know.”
“My ribs hurt more.”
“I know that too.”
He was quiet for a moment. His hand moved to his cheek, found the swelling, and moved away again.
“You’re still here.”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t have to—”
“We covered this,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”
He made a sound that might have been agreement or might have been something else and turned his face toward the pillow, and within two minutes, the rhythm of his breathing had evened back out.
I reset the alarm and returned to the chair. I could have called Cinder at this point, but I didn’t.
The second check was the one where he talked.
I’d been expecting sleep again—the same brief surfacing, the same protocol questions, the same return to the deep. What I got instead was Dante Russo at three-forty in the morning, halfway between awake and not, with whatever filter he’d been running for two months temporarily offline.
“I used to be good at this,” he said, to the ceiling, before I’d asked him anything, and I sat down on the edge of the bed.
“At what.”
“Reading people.” His voice had the slow, slightly slurred tenor of deep fatigue—not slurred the way a head injury slurred, which I was careful to notice, but the slur of a man whose defenses had gone to sleep before he had. “Antoine. I thought I was good at it. I thought I could tell when someone was—” He stopped. His hand moved, a small gesture that didn’t finish. “I was twenty-two. I thought I was smart.”
I said nothing.
“He was the first person who ever looked at me like I was worth—” He stopped again. Swallowed. “I kept the secret. Everything he asked. The whole time. I kept it.”
There was something underneath the words that I recognized without wanting to—a specific kind of pain, the kind that came from having done everything right inside a situation that was wrong from the beginning. I’d seen it before.
“He told them I went after their partners,” I said. “Their wives. Girlfriends.”
He closed his eyes.
“It wasn’t true,” he mumbled. Not defensive. Just the fact of it, laid down flat. “None of it was true. But Martinez and Brown would have backed him up. I never—”
“He mattered to you,” I said. “And he used that.”
“Yeah. I should’ve—” he started, then sighed and ran out of steam.
I became aware of my change in position incrementally—the mattress had a different feeling than the chair. The lamp was still on, a low amber presence at the edge of my perception. The room had that sort of deep-night silence, the hour just before dawn when even a city the size of Chicago ran out of things to say.
And there was warmth.
Specific, located warmth, the kind that came from proximity rather than bedding—a point of contact along my left side that had not been present when I’d last been conscious of my own position in the room. I held very still. Took inventory without moving.
The third check. That had been at—I glanced at my phone on the nightstand without moving my arm—four-twenty. He’d been fine. Pupils responsive, answers coherent if drowsy. I’d asked him the protocol questions, and he’d answered them, and then he’d said, with the directness of someone who’d lost track of what they weren’t supposed to say: “You don’t have to sit in that chair all night.”
