"Iris, love, sit, you'll fall down." Ma's hands, steering me toward a chair. "Grace, the soup. Katya, bread. She's 10 pounds lighter, look at her."
"Ma, I need to—"
"Eat. You need to eat." The plate is already in front of me, and Lorcan has materialized against my side asking if I saw any volcanoes because his da said Sicily has a real one, and Mila is being lowered onto my lap by Grace with the solemnity of a coronation. Tanya is asking if I can even believe how big she's gotten, and somewhere behind me Killian and Aidan have started arguing about whether the airfield was watched, and the kitchen does what my family's kitchen has done my entire life.
It sweeps me away.
I answer Lorcan about the volcano, trying to make it sound like I was on a holiday. I kiss Mila's head, the memory of her smothered in strawberries returning sharp and fast. I eat three spoons of soup under Ma's supervision, and laugh at something Grace says. The machinery of being Iris comes back online all by itself, automatic, easy. Even as it happens I can feel that it's different now, that I'm doing it and watching myself do it at the same time, from a small quiet distance that came home from the island with me.
And from that distance, I keep my eyes on the door.
He's still there. The relief of it hits me every time I look. Ma passes near him once with the kettle and slows. Something crosses her face that I can't name, a stillness, like a woman hearing her own name in a crowd. Then Nikolai starts wailing and Katya's chair scrapes and the moment is gone before I can study it.
The next time I look, Yakob's eyes are already on me. They always are.
The kitchen is a wall of sound between us. Five brothers, four babies, one kettle beginning to whistle. There's no crossing it, not yet, not for another hour at least, and I can see in the set of his shoulders that he doesn't have an hour. He has minutes. He's already leaving. He's been leaving since the boat.
So I do the only thing I can do across my roaring, blessed, oblivious family.
I mouth it.Don’t go.
Something happens in his face. Nobody else in this kitchen would even see it, but I've had several days of intensive study, and I watch the words hit somewhere that hurts him. He holds my eyes for one second.
"Iris! Iris, the lace." Ma is suddenly in front of me, holding it up out of nowhere, palest cream and impossibly fine, tissue paper and all. "Antonelli found it and brought it straight to us. He knew something was wrong. He said—" and her voice fails her, my unbreakable mother, and I'm up and out of the chair and holding her while she shakes, this woman who held all six of us through everything. I close my eyes and see Mila's dress, the summer, the whole sweet ordinary future that got handed back to me by a man standing beside the door.
We hold each other for a minute.
When I look up, the spot by the door is empty.
I scan the kitchen the way he taught me without meaning to, corners first, then exits. Nothing. No one. The door to the courtyard stands open on the blue evening, and the gravel outside is silent, and there's no car engine, no footsteps, nothing at all. Ghosts don't make sounds. It's the entire point of them.
The kitchen roars on around me, laughing and crying and feeding itself, every single person I love inside one warm bright room, and something in my chest that survived a kidnapping, a gunfight, and hiding on an island cracks open along a seam I didn't know I had.
He was real. I know he was real. Liam's fist closed around the proof of what happened.
I stand in the middle of my mother's kitchen, home, safe, surrounded. I stare at the empty doorway, and for the second time in my life I understand exactly what it is to be alone.
Yakob
The gravel doesn't sound under my feet. It never has. Twenty years of walking away from a completed task, and the only thing different about this one is that it's the first time it has cost me anything.
Don't go.
She didn't say it. She aimed it, across five brothers and several babies and a kettle being pulled off the heat. I felt her words physically and I left anyway. Those two facts are going to live side by side in me for a long time.
The car is where I left it, facing the house, the keys in my pocket. I sit behind the wheel in the fading afternoon light with the Orlov estate glowing behind me like something out of a story told to children, all that warmth packed inside stone, but I don't start the engine.
This is what I know how to do. Deliver, collect, vanish. Be a rumor by morning. I've made this exit after every job for twenty years, and every version of it ended the same way, with a road and the dark and the quiet satisfaction of a thing completed. I keep waiting for the quiet satisfaction to arrive.
What arrives instead is her face. The way it changed when she saw the empty doorway. I didn't see it, I was likely already half a courtyard away, but I don't need to have seen it. I've learned that face the way I used to learn floor plans, and it plays for me nowin the dark of the car, in full detail, and I understand that I've done something tonight that can't be likened to any job I've ever done before.
I didn't leave because I wanted to.
I left because it was the right thing to do for her.
She deserves a man who can stand in that room beside her with her whole family around them. And more than that, more than any of it, she deserves a world that has been made safe for her, and the world isn’t safe. Not yet. The world is full of men who still have to pay for their part in Iris Orlov’s abduction.
Somewhere out there is everyone who had a hand in it. The ones who watched her, reported on her movements, took her, held her captive. Some of them I've already met at the vineyard. But a thing like Iris’s abduction is never just a dozen men in a compound. It's a chain, and a chain has links in offices and harbors and back rooms, and every link is still out there believing it survived.
