Her body trembles. “But he’ll know.”
“I’m going to tell you exactly how to deliver it so that when it reaches Ed, it looks like it came from you. From an old boyfriend, a side gig, a loan you took, your mother, anything except me. He’ll have no reason to connect it to my name, Lena.”
She’s looking at the envelope. Her jaw is tight. She whispers, “He’ll know.”
“He’s a blowhard. Don’t let him rattle you.”
“He’s not,” she says immediately. Her voice is quiet but certain, and she looks up at me with something in her eyes that I haven’t seen directed at me in a very long time. Real fear. Not for herself, I realize. For me.
“Trust me?—”
“I’ve known Ed for two years, Dario. He’s serious. He meant what he said. If he thinks you’re moving against him, he’ll—” She stops. She collects herself. “He’ll hurt you. Or he’ll try. And I—” She stops again, and this time what crosses her face before she can control it is naked and unguarded and fierce.
I understand with the sudden, complete clarity of a man who has just stepped off a ledge that he didn’t see that she’s terrified of something happening to me. Not to the arrangement. To me.
I sit with that for a moment. The full weight of it.
Nobody has looked at me like that in—I run the calculation, and I can’t find a number that doesn’t feel inadequate. Nobody has been afraid for me in a way that wasn’t tactical, wasn’t about losing an asset or a contact or a useful piece of infrastructure. Not since my parents died.
She’s afraid for me because I matter to her, and that’s it, that’s the whole reason, and the simplicity of it hits me somewhere I didn’t know was unguarded.
“Hey.” My voice comes out differently than I intended—quieter, stripped of some layer I usually keep on.
She looks at me.
“I’ve been doing this a long time. Ed Esposito is not the most serious person I’ve handled. He’s not in the top ten, and he’s definitely not the man who gets me. I need you to trust me on that.”
“It’s not about whether you can handle him. It’s—” She stops. She looks at the table. “I didn’t expect to care this much,” she says, and it comes out slightly wrecked, like she’s confessing something she’s been arguing with herself about. “I want you to know that I know that’s not what we agreed to. But I do. I care what happens to you.”
My stomach does a thing that mimics nausea, but it’s not that. Whatever the fuck it is, it’s visceral as hell, and it won’t go away until I say what’s on my mind.
“I care what happens to you too.”
She holds my gaze for a moment. Then she reaches across the table, and I take her hand.
We stay like that for a little while. The apartment around us is quiet, Opal asleep, the city outside doing its indifferent thing. The envelope is on the table between us—this slightly absurd object, full of cash, next to a cold cup of tea and two people who have arrived somewhere neither of them planned to be.
This is the lever. She is the lever. Opal and her crayon drawing that saysmy family. Ed Esposito found it without even trying, just by paying attention, and that information sits somewhere in Marco’s world now, noted and filed, waiting.
I know all of this. I have known it for weeks. I’m holding her hand anyway.
The debt will be cleared. Ed will be handled.
But right now I’m not thinking about Ed.
I bring her hand to my mouth and press my lips to her knuckles, and I feel her exhale like someone who has been holding something for hours and is finally setting it down.
She needs to get out of her head. The truth is, so do I.
Because if I think about the fact that little shit isn’t afraid of me, I will go nuclear the next time I see his ugly face. Might to need to remind a few assholes who I am, just to keep them on their toes.
But tonight, Lena.
I take her hand and lead her to my room. She’s been sleeping here more lately anyway, but it’s not sleep that I want.
As soon as the door closes, I lunge against her, pressing my forearm to her throat. “Do you want to play tonight, pet? Spend some time outside that pretty head of yours?”
Her breath comes in hot pants against my face. Pupils blown. Lips rosy from the flush of heat in her body. “Yes.”
