Opal deserves a safe and stable life. I’m her mother. I owe her that.
I owe her everything.
When I hear his key in the lock and see him walk in, I’m going to have to look at him and say the thing I don’t want to say.
What Dario is—what his life is—isn’t something that happened to him or that he stumbled into. No one stumbles into the life. My uncle proved that to me over and over. Dario’s parents were in it, made him go to medical school. He could have left it all behind. But he didn’t.
It’s what he chose, and what he maintains, and what he’s very good at. The clean office is not an accident. Tonight was not an accident. Tonight was the world Dario lives in colliding with our lives.
Opal deserves better.
She needs a world where the office doesn’t clean itself up. Where the people who love her don’t have other people who want to use her as leverage.
If Ed had threatened her instead of me, tonight would have gone very fucking differently for him. I would have done whatever he wanted.
And he knew that. And he didn’t do it. He came after me directly.
That realization throws a wrinkle into my hatred for him. It doesn’t end my hatred of him—but it adds texture. He’s an evil piece of shit, but even he has lines he doesn’t want to cross.
Weird.
Not that it matters now. Dario probably slit his throat once he got him somewhere private. Good riddance and all that, but still I wonder who Ed would have been if he hadn’t joined the organization.
I make a cup of tea to calm my nerves. Should be vodka, though. I’ll need some courage when I talk to Dario. I know what I’m going to say when he comes home. I’ve known it since I stood in the doorway of that clean room and understood what it meant.
Breaking up is the right thing. It’s also the hardest thing I’ve decided in a long time, maybe ever.
TWENTY-SIX
DARIO
Gettinginto Marco’s compound is not the hard part. It’s still dark, and I’ve been inside it enough times to know which camera angles the guards have stopped watching carefully. The patrol routes have drifted from their original intervals in the way all patrol routes drift when nothing bad has happened for a long time, and complacency settles in like sediment. The perimeter has soft spots that I’ve mapped over the years and never had reason to use.
Tonight I have reason.
The hard part is knowing what waits at the end of this and choosing to go toward it anyway. I’ve been making that choice since Marco decided I’m his enemy.
He’s finally right about that.
Maybe he’s been right about that all along.
Marco’s bedroom is on the second floor, east side, overlooking the garden. Shit placement for the man’s bedroom, from a security perspective.
The window has old hardware—single-pane, original latch, the window of a man whose security lives at the perimeter, not inside his walls. I’m through it in thirty seconds. The room smells like old wood and something medicinal.
Marco’s health is something he’s never let me attend. He outsources his personal doctoring. I asked him about it once, but he shut me down with, “It’s better this way.”
The medicinal smell is camphor of some kind, with an undercurrent of death. I don’t know if he knows it’s coming.
But he doesn’t know it’s here.
The floor doesn’t squeak as I creep to his bed. He wakes when I sit on the edge. His hand goes immediately for whatever is under the mattress. I have his wrist before he finds it, and in my other hand, my knife.
“Marco.”
He feels the blade at his throat and goes very still. His eyes find my face. He’s afraid—genuinely, underneath the layers—but Marco has been performing composure since before I was born. He does it now with the reflexive skill of a man for whom the performance has become indistinguishable from the man himself.
“Dario.” Raspy. Needs water.
