When I came back, they were still there. Still alive. Still okay.
Opal didn’t run. She didn’t hide. She threw everything she could reach at an armed man in the dark, and she screamed for me.
And Lena… fuck. She took it all, fought tooth and nail, and she survived without me. I’m so fucking proud of her that it hurts.
I run a suture, and the thought hits my chest and breaks my heart. I keep working, and my heart reforms, and then I hear Opal’s shattered voice in my mind—Dario! Dario!—and it breaks again.
I keep working. It keeps happening.
“You sure that’s tight, doc?” Ed says, through his teeth.
“I know what I’m doing.”
The O’Learys are an Irish family Marco uses to filter kids in and out of the adoption system. They don’t ask questions. He pays them well. He’s never liked killing kids, and if they’re young enough, he doesn’t.
And Opal saw everything.
I work faster.
Ed is a good patient, to his credit. He doesn’t fuss. He takes the pain as information rather than an insult, asks a few clarifying questions about the repair, and accepts the answers. I work steadily, and I tell him what he needs to know about aftercare and what he needs to avoid in the next forty-eight hours.
When I’m done, I set the instruments aside, and I look at him. “You remember what I said?”
“Every word, boss. The story for the kid?”
“A prank that went wrong. No details. Just that you and Lena go way back, and you thought it would be funny to surprise her. She already saw you in the park, so she knows you know each other. She won’t ask too many questions. You need to seem genuinely apologetic without over-explaining. Can you handle that?”
“Yeah. I got it.”
“Good. Hold still.” I give him an iron shot. “That’ll help your recovery.”
“One more thing,” he says, when I’ve finished.
“Yes?”
“The organization.” He meets my eyes. “It sounds like you got bigger plans than surviving the night, and Marco ain’t gonna be fucking happy that you did. So what happens next?”
“You’re smarter than you look. Or act. Marco underestimated you. I haven’t. You’ll learn my bigger plans when I decide you can. Not yet.”
He holds my gaze for a moment. He nods. “Whatever you say, boss.”
Boss. That’s what everyone called my father.
The smarter ones called my mother that too.
I find I rather like hearing it again.
TWENTY-FIVE
LENA
Opal isin my lap on the couch. This is where we are, and this is where we’re staying for now—both my arms around her, both her arms around me, her head against my collarbone, the warm weight of her against me the most important thing in the room right now.
My hands still shake underneath her arms, where she can’t see them. But she feels it. I know she does. I’ve been holding my face together with the kind of concentrated effort that leaves marks. My cheeks might bruise from the effort.
One already is. I can feel it. Ed’s fist did that.
It takes a while before the office door opens.
