Page 181 of Pucked Around and Found Out

I have to make a choice.

Not the kind of choice I'm used to making. Not strategy or force or whose blood gets spilled to protect what's mine. The Cosa Nostra has been my life since I was old enough to understand what it meant and it will still exist when I am gone. I have run it with one hand tied behind my back. I have run it from a hospital waiting room and a beach parking lot at three in the morning. I have run it these past three weeks, while falling apart in ways I wouldn't admit to anyone.

I think about Carnage. The last time I saw him, that look on his face that was equal parts challenge and something softer underneath. Make your choice. He said it, I chose not to hear it and I've spent three weeks running from what it meant.

I think about Andrade, who has run ops for me since I took over and who has never once put a foot wrong. I think about Carnage, who I would have killed six months ago and who has been the one standing between Toren and everything trying to reach her every day since. I think about the letter Alex left, the one I finally opened two weeks ago, sitting on the sand at two in the morning. What it said about the university enrollment and the roster spot and the scouts who saw what I did against Somerset and want me and are prepared to wait.

I think about Cas, who already knows all of this, who left a browser tab open on the kitchen counter and walked away and hasn't said a word since, because Cas understands better than anyone that I have to arrive at things myself or I won't stay arrived.

I think about the Cosa Nostra running itself while I was at Stormsend University and my father rotting. It didn't collapse. It adapted. Because the people I have around me are not the kind of people who need to be held together. They need to be trusted, and trusting people is the thing I have spent the most energy in my life avoiding.

I look at Toren at the counter, in her three-week-old life in Colorado and I think about the crib frame still in the box and the books with broken spines and the coffee she remembered to finish here, in this space, because she was comfortable.

She built this for her. For the baby. For a future she decided to start without waiting for me to figure myself out.

I'm not going to make her build it alone.

She sets a mug down on the small table, pulls out a chair and looks at me, patient in the way she's learned to be, which is a kind of patience with teeth in it, not passive but waiting. Waiting to see what I'll do with the space she's given me.

I sit down across from her.

She wraps both hands around her mug and watches me. I hold her gaze and say it the only way I know how to say things, which is without preamble and without softening it because she has never needed me to soften anything for her.

“I'm staying.”

She goes still.

“Colorado.” I hold her gaze. “The enrollment Alex set up. The roster spot.” A pause. “I'm taking them.”

I watch her process it. Watch the careful, practiced control she's built over the past three weeks to keep her face from doing everything it wants to do. She's gotten better at this since I first knew her. Toren used to be an open book. She's not anymore and I made her that way. That's another thing I'm going to have to live with.

“The Cosa Nostra⁠—"

“Alex. Andrade and… Carnage.” I say it flatly. I hate that I’ve admitted that the cunt is of any use. Carnage is a piece of shit but he’s good at what he does. “They're capable. I'm not the only one who can run it and it's past time I stopped acting like I am.” My jaw tightens. “I'll still be a part of it. I'm not walking away from my responsibility, that's not what this is. But I can do that from here. I can do that while also—” The sentence resists me briefly. I push through it. “While also being here.”

“Here,” she repeats. Quiet. Testing the word.

“Here.” I hold her gaze. “With you. With—” I don't say the baby the way I've been saying it, with the distance in it that I put there on purpose. “With our baby.”

The word our sits between us. Small. Enormous. I watch it land on her face and watch something in her eyes go glassy before she blinks it back.

“You're sure,” she says. Not a question. A reckoning, the same one she leveled at me in the coffee shop, the same voice she uses when she needs to know I'm not going to take it back when it gets uncomfortable.

“No.” I hold her gaze. “But I'm here anyway.”

She looks at me for a long time. Searches my face the way she has always searched it, past the surface and the mask and all the layers I maintain as a matter of survival, down to whatever it is she's always been able to find underneath. I've never understood what she sees there. I used to resent her for looking.

I don't anymore.

She nods once. Small. Final. Then she picks up her coffee and holds my gaze over the rim of it and says, like it's the simplest thing.

“The crib needs building.”

I look at her. At the ghost of something that is almost a smile at the corner of her mouth. At the gold pendant resting at her sternum and the three weeks of life arranged around her and this city she chose that is now going to be ours. “I'll build the crib.”

“Good.” She holds my gaze over the rim of her mug. “Then we'll talk.”

I sit back in the chair, let the Colorado morning carry on outside the window and I let the silence be the kind that doesn't need filling. I don't examine the feeling in my chest too closely because I know what it is and it isn't going anywhere. I am done, at last, done fighting it.