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“What do you like about it?”
“Everything!” She waved her arms enthusiastically. “I mean, look at it. So much color and noise. So many smells and people talking and shouting in different languages. It’s…”
“Life,” he finished.
She stared up at him in surprise. “Exactly. It’s life, heightened and poured into a few streets in the city.”
“So what are we celebrating?” he asked.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“You said you come here with your family to celebrate,” he said. “What are we celebrating?”
He held her gaze, and she felt something move between them, something powerful that made her feel like her world was about to tilt on its axis.
Or like it already had.
It wasn’t what she’d expected when she’d woken up that morning, when she’d gotten Olivia ready for school, hugging her daughter tight, knowing it was Wednesday and Olivia would be picked up by Adam for his night with her.
She smiled up at Roman. “Life. We’re celebrating life.”
13
ROMAN
He was entranced, could feel himself falling under her spell.
It wasn’t a spell of seduction, of flirtatious glances and accidental brushes under the table. It was a spell of honesty, of halting stories that grew increasingly verbose on both sides.
The restaurant she’d chosen was called Great N.Y. Noodletown, and he loved that she waxed poetic about the place even though it could have been one of a hundred restaurants in Chinatown.
Cooked duck, pork, and chicken hung in the front window, an aproned butcher cutting the meat rapid-fire as customers waited for a table or their bags of takeout.
Roman had slipped the host a hundred-dollar bill to seat them against a wall at the back of the noisy restaurant, and they’d settled into a small wooden table, the walls tiled like a morgue.
The light was too bright, the murmur of other diners too close and too loud, for the dinner to be at all romantic, but he couldn’t take his eyes off her as she dug into plates of salt-baked shrimp, sweet roasted pork, and Cantonese duck with ginger and scallion sauce, delicate noodles artfully topped with an array of seafood, and lobster in black bean sauce.
The tables next to them were cleared of diners, reseated, and cleared again as she told him about her marriage to Adam, how young she’d been when they met, how desperate for comfort and safety.
He tried not to show how much the stories pained him, but they were even more poignant since Sam had come back with the background on Ruby (he’d known her last name but had been forced to ask in the car to get it out of the way). She’d mentioned that her mother had died when she was young, but Roman hadn’t connected the last name with the bratva hit gone wrong fifteen years earlier.
He hadn’t realized Ruby’s mother wasthatAngela Bishop.
He’d been twenty — a lowly soldier — when the hit on an Italian rival had gone sideways, the mother of two daughters killed in the cross fire. It didn’t happen often — hadn’t happened for two decades before that and hadn’t happened since.
But it had happened then, and it had happened to Ruby’s mother.
To Ruby and her whole family.
And his business, his way of life, was at fault.
He felt guilty listening to the story, like he didn’t deserve to be privy to her pain, and he was almost glad when she moved on to her marriage to Adam.
He had to clench his fists under the table when she told him about the first time Adam had hit her, had forced his expression — he hoped — into one of mild compassion instead of the rage that flooded his body and made him want to tear limb from limb the man who’d dared to hurt the extraordinary woman sitting across from him.
She’d told him about her daughter and how she’d left Adam because of her, because she didn’t want Olivia to think it was okay for a man to hurt her, how Ruby had only realized later that she should have wanted to leave for herself, that she didn’t deserve what was happening to her.
And then, the police department. The gazes that slid away from her face when she showed up at department parties with bruises she couldn’t hide, Adam’s partner, Deon, the only one who’d ever pulled her aside and asked if she needed help.
