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15
Aria paced the apartment, lit only by the lights of the city beyond the big windows. It had been dark when she’d finally arrived home after pacing the city, Damian Cavallo’s words echoing in her mind.
He set fire to a women and children’s shelter last night.
She didn’t want to believe it. Had told herself she didn’t believe it.
But that was in the heat of the moment, the accusation fresh, the image of a burning building filled with women and children unformed in her mind. Hours walking had negated both of those things, the accusation seeming less far-fetched as the night wore on, the image replaying with horrifying clarity over and over again in her mind.
She’d used her phone to look up details of the fire, had read every article she could find on it, some of them twice. No one had been killed.
But they could have been.
There had been no mention of Damian in any of the articles, but more than one had cited a benefactor as having moved the women and children to an alternate location.
It had to be him.
The shelter is a bit of a… pet project of mine.
There had been that briefest of hesitations, like he was trying to find an innocuous word to describe an interest that was obviously very personal to him. It was a mystery she would have to come back to later. Right now there was only Primo and the words she’d rehearsed in her mind as she’d walked the streets. Words that would force him to answer the question of whether he’d been involved in the fire at the shelter.
There was a possibility Malcolm would be with him. But while part of her felt anxious at the thought — the memory of his teeth sinking into her flesh, the bulge of his erection insinuating itself against her stomach — another part was almost looking forward to a confrontation.
She would order him to leave if she had to. This was her house. Hers and Primo’s. Most of the time she accepted the reality of the situation, understood that treading lightly around Primo was necessary for her survival.
More was at stake now, namely the survival of women and children already traumatized by abuse. Primo would answer for that to her. If it set him off, so be it.
The jangle of keys at the door pulled her attention away from the city spread out below. She turned her back to the window, watching a sliver of light leak into the foyer from the hall, listening as the door shut and Primo’s footsteps came closer.
He stopped at the entrance to the living room and flipped on the light, then blinked in surprise when he saw she’d been standing there the whole time.
“Ari, what are you doing in the dark?” he asked, moving toward the bar.
She’d been ready to face down Malcolm. Now she was almost sorry he wasn’t there. There would be no preamble. No warm-up to the question she would have to ask Primo.
“Did you do it?” she asked.
He walked to the bar against one wall, poured himself a drink. “Do what?”
“The fire at the Franklin Street shelter,” she said. “Did you do it?”
She had no expectations for his response. He could just as easily throw his glass across the room as he might answer her question calmly and rationally.
He did neither of those things. Instead he gazed at her dispassionately, like she was an equation he was trying to calculate.
A problem he couldn’t solve.
Finally he downed the drink and walked farther into the room, tracing his fingers along the back of the couch as he went.
“You’ve been a busy little bee, haven’t you, Ari?” he asked.
“I don’t have time for your games. Just tell me.”
Her voice was calm and she was glad she’d had time to down a couple drinks of her own before he’d gotten home.
“How would you know anything about anything?” He continued his patrol of the room, picking things up, studying them as if he’d never seen them before, putting them down. It set her on edge, and she held her breath with each object, wondering if this would be the one he would hurl in her direction.
“I know things, Primo,” she said. “Don’t let the fact that I keep quiet make you think I’m stupid.”
