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I nodded my head. “Thank you. You’re right.”
“You’re all covered here,” she said, leaning in closer like she was whispering. “There’s nothing to worry about.” There was a certainty in her blue eyes, a certainty I felt I could trust.
“Thank you,” I reiterated. “Both for this and for the other night.”
She smiled brightly. “No worries,amica.”
Friend.
I hadn’t even realized how starved I’d been for that, for that kind of connection to another person. I’d had colleagues, mentors, sexual partners. Not friends. And not whatever it was that had developed between Amadeo and me that was dragging me deeper into a criminal world filled with… friends.
“Deo needed help; that’s kind of what we do,” she continued.
I shook my head. “No, not for that. I mean, yes, of course that. But also…” I huffed a frustrated breath.
Maybe you should stop talking while you’re ahead, Heidi-girl, my father teased me from the back of my head.
“You were exceptionally understandingthatnight,” I persisted despite his nonexistent teasing. “I appreciated it.”
Raven’s smile brightened even more. “Any time,” she said as she winked at me and threw open the curtains.
And it turned out, when Raven said there was nothing to worry about, she’d meant it. I saw no mention of missing narcotics all morning, no lips flapping about a boy who vanished from the hospital in the middle of the night. Somehow, she—or Amadeo—had covered it up.
There were no more terrifying words whirling about in my head by the time I grabbed a sandwich from the cafeteria at lunch and headed toward the hospital’s entrance. It wasn’t by conscious effort. My feet gravitated toward it of their own volition. Out the door, across the concrete walk to the bench. Toourbench—mine and Aurelio’s.
I hadn’t spoken to him since seeing him in that terrible room, had pretty much boarded myself up for four days, only moving back and forth between Grayson’s room and Amadeo’s. But there he was, leaning back comfortably with his legs crossed at his ankles and his hands resting in his cardigan pockets.
My brain hesitated, but my feet had a mind of their own, it seemed, and they kept moving until I was standing in front of the bench.
Aurelio smiled at me as I perched myself next to him and set the plastic-wrapped sandwich down between us.
He didn’t look like a killer, like a man who could torture a human being without breaking a sweat. Amadeo did. It wasn’t his stature or the weapons he carried, but rather the way he could stand cold, like stone, no matter what was going on beneath the surface. But Aurelio? Cardigans and kind smiles?
When I could think of nothing to say, I stared at the plastic wrap, following the wrinkles and folds like capillaries.
“Go ahead,” he said; I caught the movement of his lips out the corner of my eye.
I frowned. I wasn’t quite certain with what I was to “go ahead”.
“You have questions,cara mia; I can see them in your eyes.”
I did. I had many questions, but one stood out most prominently.
“How can you do what you did?” I asked.
He nodded like I’d asked the question he’d been expecting. “I imagine very much the same way you do,” he replied.
“What?” Surely, I’d read his lips wrong.
“When you cut a man open, you don’t see a man, do you?” he asked. “You see a problem,” he went on without pausing. “And you do whatever must be done to fix it.”
That was the simplified version, yes. “But you’re not fixing—”
“Am I not?” he asked. The way he looked at me, it was like he was urging me to think harder, to look deeper.
And so, I did. Or at least, I tried.
“That man was going to kill Grayson Thomas,” I said, thinking out loud. “You stopped him.” That was the reason the man was dead, I supposed, though, it didn’t explain the disturbing scene I’d stumbled upon.
