Louis went, satisfied, and the door clicked shut behind him.
MINUTES LATER, VALERIOLe Sabre walked back toward the stairs, rolling his shoulders once inside a suit that had declined to wrinkle. His knuckles were split and painted red, and none of the blood was his, and on his way to the steps he stepped over the unconscious body on the landing with the mild attention of a man avoiding a hose left on a lawn.
Upstairs, the door flew open before he reached it, and the two of them were on him at once, both crying, both trying to check him for damage in overlapping layers, small hands and smaller hands, and he stood in the doorway of the worst apartment he'd ever seen and let the two best things in the world pat him down like airport security.
"I'm alright," he said. "No one will ever hurt you again."
"But you won't go to prison?" Louis asked, tears still on his face and logistics already back online.
Valerio almost smiled. This was really his son. "No, I won't go to prison."
"But what about the landlord?"
"Don't worry about him."
And while Aislinn pressed her face against his ruined knuckles and Louis relocated the one-eared rabbit to the safety of his backpack, Valerio stood very still and replayed, behind his eyes, the last few minutes on the landing. The part they hadn't seen. The part where the man had stopped being able to stand, and Valerio had crouched down to his level, taken a fistful of his collar, and asked the only question that mattered.
"Did anyone ask you to do this?"
"No."
He'd watched the answer come out of what was left of the man, too broken for invention, and he'd seen that it was true, and he'd hit him once more anyway, and the landlord had gone out like a cheap bulb.
No conspiracy, then. No one behind it. That was the thing about bullies that no one wanted to believe. They didn't need instructions. They simply knew who to target, always, with a nose for it, and they chose one of two kinds. The ones who reminded them of their old selves.
Or their complete opposites. The kind they could never be.
Aislinn Tyndale had spent eight years surrounded by people who would never, in any life, be anything like her.
Inside his jacket, folded once against his heart, Louis's list had four names left on it.
Chapter Eight
THEY CAME DOWN THEstairs in family formation, Louis in the lead with his backpack and his rabbit, and that was when the door of the next unit banged open and Mrs. Kimberly came out of it at a pace Aislinn had never once seen her achieve, not even on rent day.
The older woman took one look at the three of them and went down the steps like the building was on fire.
"Good evening, Mrs. Kimberly," Louis called after her, respectful as always, because Aislinn had raised him to greet his elders whether or not the elders had ever earned it.
The greeting had a remarkable effect. Mrs. Kimberly stumbled, caught the railing, made a sound like a kettle taken off the heat too late, and ran faster.
Louis looked up at his mother, curious. "Is something wrong with Mrs. Kimberly?"
"I'm not quite sure." Aislinn leaned over the railing. "Mrs. Kimberly? Are you alright—"
Mrs. Kimberly achieved a speed.
"We should go." Valerio was already herding the two of them toward the limousine with one hand at each of their backs, and something in his lack of surprise snagged at Aislinn's attention and then lost it again, because the day had been very long and her arms were full of Louis's spare clothes in a grocery bag, which Minna received into the spotless limousine with acompletely straight face, and which Aislinn loved her a little bit for.
An hour later, Aislinn was standing in the middle of a living room the size of her entire building, trying to remember how to close her mouth.
"This is one of your homes," she said.
"Yes."
"One of. Of many."
"Yes."
