She's doing it across from me right now.
She's scared.
She's not going to let me see it.
Something moves in my chest that I don't have a name for and don't want one. It's adjacent to the thing that wanted to put that third intruder through a wall three hours from now, except he doesn't exist yet and she hasn't been touched and nothing has happened.
I am reacting to a woman counting her own breaths in the back of my car like she already belongs to me.
I shouldn't.
I am.
I think about what it would take to make her stop counting. Not sex — not yet, not right now, not when she's still cataloging exits and has blood on her sleeve. Just a hand over hers. The smallest contact. Enough to tell her she can stop running the math on her own survival because I'm running it for her now.
I don't move.
If I move, she'll flinch. And I will feel that flinch for the rest of the night.
So I sit with my hands where they are and my eyes out the window and I count with her, silently, across three feet of leather upholstery and a Virelli-Moretti war neither of us started.
She never knows I did it.
That might be the problem.
1:50a.m.
I hand her off to Kosta at the door and watch her walk inside without looking back — head up, spine straight, like she's checking into a hotel of her own choosing instead of a Moretti safehouse under armed guard.
The door closes.
I stand there longer than I need to.
The brownstone is locked down. Kosta has the interior. Three of my men on the perimeter. Two more on the block. She's as safe as anyone can be in a city that suddenly has a line of people willing to pay for her.
And I still don't want to leave.
That's the problem. Not that leaving is hard. That not leaving is starting to feel like the actual option.
I make myself walk to the car.
There's a meeting I can't move. Enzo wants a face-to-face before dawn, which in Enzo-language meanscome explain why you didn't do what I told you to do— and the longer I wait, the worse the conversation gets. If I don't show up, he sends men. If he sends men, they come here. And if they come here, every careful thing I've built in the last two hours — her inside that door, my people on this block, Giovanni shut out — collapses.
So I go. Because protecting her means sitting across from a seventy-eight-year-old man who would happily trade her for a favor, and smiling through it.
I get back in the car.
"Long route," I tell Ren.
He pulls out without a word. I close the partition and sit in the dark.
She keeps surfacing.
Every version of her from the last two hours on repeat. Calm in the trauma bay. Furious in the stairwell. Flushed and breathing hard in the back of this car with her hands on my chest.
The way she saiddon'tlike it was a full sentence. Like she meant the opposite and hated herself for it.
Her hands.Christ.Covered in blood and moving with that certainty. That focus.
