Page 122 of Mafia King’s Dangerous Vow

I cannot look away.

Anna adjusts his scarf with one hand, still holding her folders with the other. He tolerates it for three seconds, then ducks away, impatient. She says something. He says something back. She laughs. I can barely hear the sound over traffic and children and the hiss of the heat lamp above us, but I see it. I see how she knows him. How she reaches before he drops the folder. How he leans toward her while pretending not to. How her hand hovers near his shoulder in that unconscious parental orbit around a child’s body.

Not ownership.

Habit.

Love made ordinary by repetition.

Something in me cracks so quietly no one else could hear it.

Ivan starts toward the pickup line, then stops abruptly and pats his coat pockets. His face changes. Alarm, small and immediate. He looks back toward the school, then at her.

“Mama, wait. I left my music folder.”

The word strikes me through the chest.

Mama.

Just a word thrown over his shoulder because he knows she will answer.

Mama.

My chair moves.

Barely.

One scrape of metal against stone. One stupid, animal movement. My body beginning before any civilized part of me can stop it. My fingers tighten on the table. My knees shift. For one blind second, I am not at a café, not beside Aleksander, not across the street from a school full of witnesses.

I am a mother hearing her child call someone else by my name.

“Tamara.”

Aleksander’s voice is low. Quiet enough that no one else turns. It reaches me because he doesn’t make it a command.

I freeze.

Across the street, Anna leans down and says something to Ivan, then turns with him toward the door. Her hand rests briefly between his shoulder blades, guiding but not pushing. He looks up at her, still talking. Already recovered. Already safe.

He is safe.

The words arrive in Aleksander’s voice, though he has not said them.

He is safe right now.

I sit back slowly.

My hand remains on the table because if I move it, I don’t know what else I will do.

Aleksander’s hand is still there, close to mine.

Available.

This time, I take it.

My fingers close around two of his fingers, hard enough that I might hurt him if he were a man who showed pain. He doesn’t react except to turn his hand beneath mine and hold on.

Across the street, Ivan and Anna disappear back inside.