I arranged it. All of it. The study, the call I half staged, the drawer I left fractionally open, the empty corridor, the compound that appeared unguarded. I wanted to see how far she would go. I texted the guards before I sat down beside her and told them to pull back into the shadows, and I stood outside the gate in a car and watched her come over that crumbling wall, with a gunbetween her teeth. I felt something that I did not immediately have a word for.
Renzo wanted her gone from the beginning. There are easier ways to pressure Phillip, he argued. Ways that don't involve keeping a woman in the building and everything that comes with that. He had been right, professionally speaking. He is usually right, professionally speaking. But this stopped being about Phillip some time ago and I haven't said that out loud and I won't, not yet, possibly not ever.
She keeps reminding me of someone.
I stand, walk to the wardrobe, and open it.
It hangs between two dark suits, slightly incongruous, a small pale thing that has no business being there. I have moved it three times across three cities over ten years and it has come with me each time without me knowing why.
Two years ago I was newly positioned to take the title of the Don and the families who didn't want me to have it had moved early. One of my own men, bought and turned, put something in my drink at a dinner in New York and I passed in the back of a car on the way back to the hotel and by some combination of will and adrenaline, I managed to get myself into a parking garage before I lost the ability to manage anything at all.
And then there was a car. And a woman.
I was in and out of consciousness throughout most of it. I remember the door opening and I remember getting in and I remember the in between, her voice, her hands, something pressed against my chest, the bright temporary pain of the bullet coming out. I heard sirens and I knew with the animal clarity of someone running entirely on instinct that I needed to move and I got out and got into the bushes and called Renzo and that was the last thing I remembered until I woke up in a hospital bed twenty hours later.
I took the bra from the car because I had nothing else. It was not a considered decision. I was barely conscious and she had been the only reason I was alive and I wanted something to remember her by and it was there.
I went back a year later. Bought the parking garage and the club nearby, and walked every street in that radius for three weeks. I never found her. I look at the bra hanging between my suits for a long moment.
Then I close the wardrobe and get into the bed beside Nathalie and lie on my back in the dark and look at the ceiling. She shifts in her sleep and her hand finds my arm and stays there.
I don't move it.
Chapter Eight
Nathalie
"No — no?—"
I wake up gasping. My hands are out in front of me and my heart is going so fast it hurts and I sit there in the dark trying to remember where I am and what is real and then I see the glow of a cigarette and I follow it up to his face.
He is sitting beside the bed, shirtless, watching me with those pale eyes through thin smoke. The bandaging at his chest is white against his skin, stark and clean against the tattoos that cover most of the rest of him.
My shoulders drop.
"You're okay," I breathe in relief.
"Are you disappointed?" he replies, and brings the cigarette to his mouth.
I look at him and I don't answer because I don't trust what comes out if I do. I remember the knife going in. I remember the way he had looked at me in that half-second before he fell, that strange, unguarded expression, and I remember the bottom dropping out of my chest and not being able to explain it, not to Renzo's men who were grabbing my arms, not to myself, not to anyone.
I am not disappointed. That is its own problem.
I try to swing my legs off the bed and find I can't. I look down. A chain runs from my left ankle to the bed frame, light but sturdy, enough length to stand and move but not enough to go anywhere meaningful.
I look up at him.
He lifts one shoulder, unrepentant. "I can't have you running again, princess." The cigarette hangs from the corner of his mouth in a way that has no right to look the way it looks. "You might actually kill me next time."
He stubs the cigarette out and reaches for the tray on the nightstand. There is food on it and before I can reach for it myself he takes the fork and holds it out toward me.
I look at it. Then at him.
"I can feed myself."
"I know," he replies, and waits.
I open my mouth. He feeds me and I eat because I am hungry. Arguing about it costs more than it's worth this morning. He gives me water and then he wipes my mouth with a cloth and his fingers stay at my lips a minute longer than necessary and his eyes come up to mine.
