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“There was nobody else, and you’d have bled out before we got you to a real hospital’s waiting room.” She comes into focus, standing over me, still in clothes stiff with somebody’s blood, probably mine. Her eyes are red too.
“Ma—”
“She will be fine. Some lacerations, probably a broken hip, but with surgery, she will be fine.”
I reach for her, or at least, I try to. But my arms aren’t great at it yet. “Thank you.”
“Don’t.” The word smacks the air. “Do not thank me. I’m not finished being furious with you.”
“Understood.”
“You keep saying that. Understood. Agreed. As if agreeing costs you something.” She checks the bandage without looking at my face. “You agreed to every one of my terms the first day too. Ten times my salary, medical authority, all of it, instant. I should have known then—a man who never counters is a man who’s already decided he can afford you.”
“I couldn’t afford you. That’s why I stole you.”
“Stop being quotable. You’re concussed and shot, and I’m still angry.”
Fair enough. There’s no argument in me that would change her mind. I hear it in her voice.
The room comes together in my vision. The safe house. Nick asleep, sitting up in a chair by the door with a gun in his lap. Beyond a partition, my mother is arguing with someone about a pillow in the register she reserves for people she intends to outlive.
That makes me smile. “She’s gonna make it.”
“That’s what I told Sarah about you an hour ago, so try not to make a liar of me.”
“Sarah knows?”
“Sarah’s at the estate, safe, and does not know her father was shot or her stepmother left. One catastrophe at a time.” A muscle works in her jaw. “She knows you had an accident and we’re getting you medical treatment. That’s all. You don’t get to die and make me explain any of this to her.”
“I’ll do what I can, doc.”
She pulls a stool to the table and sits, close, clinical, checking the line in my arm without asking. “Your pressure’s back up. You had two units of somebody’s carefully stockpiled O-neg while I debated whether to keep trying to save you. Don’t read anything into the results.”
“I wouldn’t dare.”
“You would. You read everything into everything. It’s exhausting.” But her hands are gentle on the line even as her voice isn’t. “Now stay still and listen, because I need to show you something, and I need to watch your face when I do.”
She takes out her phone, and something in the set of her shoulders warns me. My stomach knows before my head does. “You’re going to want to explain, and I want you to look at it first. Before you say one word.”
“You got it.”
She holds the screen where I can see it. Her city’s paper, Boston, her own face above the headline. I read it twice. The second time, the words rearrange into a weapon.
Allegra’s knife.
“They’ve made me a criminal,” Veda says, and her voice does the thing it does when she’s past fury into something colder. “Read it. All of it. A vanished doctor, a hasty marriage, irregular payments, and photographs—the one of Allegra and me at the café, the one she took sitting right beside me, for exactly this. Career, license, name, gone in a news cycle.”
She sets the phone on my chest, over the bandage, so I have to hold it. “I’m dead, Lupo. Professionally, legally, dead. And you did that. Your world did that the second I stepped into it, and it followed me all the way to a warehouse to finish the job.”
“Veda—”
“You told me I was free to go.” The cold splinters in her throat. “But that’s not true anymore. There is nowhere to go. That’s what she did—she didn’t just lie about me. She took the door you opened and welded it shut. Now I’m a woman who can’t go home, because home will swallow me whole. What’s left of me, anyway.”
I make myself read the whole thing, every insinuating line, and I recognize the architecture of it completely. Between Matteo and Allegra, they tried to end my house and my wife in the same night. One with lead and one with ink, both just as deadly.
Through gritted teeth, I mutter, “You want to know the worst part? She didn’t have to invent a thing.”
“I noticed.”
