“It’ll be all right,” I hear myself say, and the sentence tastes like a lie, but the lie is the only thing I have to give her right now. I tell myself it’s true in the small, stubborn corner of me that still believes I can fix things. I tell her because if I don’t say it, the silence will let the night creep back in and show me exactly how useless I really am.
She looks at me then, properly, not sideways; it’s a guarded glance, but it’s directed right at me. Her eyes are gray-green, clear, and sharp. For a second the world narrows to the two of us—the leather under my hand, the magazine warm in my pocket, the engine’s distant murmur—and I understand something so simple it almost hurts: she’s fucked up, yes, but she’s also here, in front of me, and I’d lose more than pride if anything happened to her.
Admitting it is like stepping off a cliff. I have told myself a hundred times I am a tool. I have told myself I am nothing that matters outside of orders. But that doctrine fractures now. I feel it. It's a fierce, stupid, protective thing that crawls out of the hollow I’ve been guarding my whole life. She means more to me than a job. More than an assignment. More than the patch on my chest. She means something I don’t have words for and have no right to want.
I don’t say that. I don’t need to. My hands do the talking. I pick up her chin with two fingers—gentle because the rest of me still knows how to be careful—and bring her face to mine. Up close, the tear glitters, and her pupils are huge, dark wells that answer me with need and fear braided together. There’s a widening there, a longing that makes my blood sing in a way I’ve never let it before.
Something in me that’s been starving snaps awake. Desire is a thing I’ve buried under utility and silence; tonight, it claws straight through. I want to protect her, yes, but I also want to keep her, to press her into the hollow she opened with a look and fill it with her. It’s messy and wrong in every code I’ve swallowed, and I don’t care.
I kiss her.
It’s not tidy. It’s not the polite, testing kiss you give a stranger. It’s the kind that drags the breath out of you, urgent, claiming, a sharp and delicious knot in my chest. The taste of her is copper and sweat and something sweet that isn’t perfume, and it makes my heart go soft in a way I've never felt before. She answers me with her hands grabbing my shirt and pulling me in tighter—tentative, then sure. The world thins to a single, awful, beautiful point.
When we break, it’s with a ragged laugh that’s half relief and half apology. Her eyes search my face, and in them I see the same ruined map I’m holding: fear, gratitude, and the blurry possibility of something else.
Slowly, reality slips back in. The reality of who she is, who I am—the canyon between our worlds.
And I tell her the biggest lie of my life. "I apologize. I shouldn't have done that."
My mouthstill tastes like him, metal and heat and the stupid, sweet tang of something I never knew could be more than a wish. My body is humming from the kiss, like someone struck a tuning fork inside my ribs and left it ringing. Everything I ever let myself imagine—every secret, ridiculous, forbidden thing—is there in that bruise of a kiss, and it’s so much more. I want more. I want to climb inside that single steady certainty I felt when his hand closed over mine. I open my mouth to tell him exactly that, to tell him off for apologizing, to tell him he has no right to be sorry for saving us, when?—
The SUV’s brakes whine, and the world shifts. The door slams. Angelo’s voice erupts, all heat and fists of words. He yanks me out by the elbow, cursing like a man who’s already decided what I owe him. Raffael gets out behind me, all coiled anger, ready to answer.
Angelo looks him over like he’s an insect under a thumb. “You’ve done your job,” he says, cold as a slab. “You’ll have our gratitude. This is between me and my sister. Get out of here.”
Raffael takes a step forward. His hand lifts, as if to argue, to put a hand on Angelo’s shoulder. He looks ready to trade the lot of them a single death if Angelo even thinks about touching me.
I see him about to make a mistake, a brave, stupid mistake that would get him broken because that’s how our world works. My body is still on fire from the kiss, and my lungs are full of air I don’t trust. I latch on to the only weapon I have that might keep him alive: my face.
I turn to him slowly, my expression hard, and make my voice a shard. “Go,” I say. “Now.”
It sounds small, but there’s an edge to it that surprises both of us. He blinks. Hurt and confusion, and something like pleading, flicker across his face. I want to tell him it’s not for him to take, that I’ll explain, that he can stay if he wants, but staying would get him killed. I force the rest down like a weight.
“I’m sorry. I was stupid. I made a mistake, but I’m with Angelo now. He’s my family. You’re not. Walk away before you make this yours.”
He stares for a beat that stretches like wire. Angelo’s hand is a fist waiting to strike; the other men are watching. Raffael’s chest rises and falls. I can see the calculation,the thing he’s weighing: his code against my command. My command. I swallow the tiny, traitorous ache that wants to beg him to disobey, and I make myself look like I mean something again.
“Save your apologies,” I add. “You'll get your reward for saving me.”
It’s cruel. It’s a lie. It should feel like betrayal to send him away, but the truth is louder than any of that: if he stays, they’ll take him the way men take anything in our world—fast, only to kill him slow, and public. I’d rather he live with the memory of my coldness than be remembered in the ledger of their brutality.
Raffael’s jaw works. For a second, his eyes find mine, and there is a storm there — hurt, something that looks dangerously like not listening to me. He swallows. He gives me one last look, half question, half plea, then steps back. Without another word, he turns, the movement practiced and efficient, and walks down the path that leads to the parking lot for the employees.
"I don't like the way he looked at you." Angelo snarls, staring after Raffael, and a new worry gnaws at my stomach. Without another word, he grabs me by the arm to haul me toward the house like I’m a thing to be returned to inventory. He spatters apologies and curses into his phone, presumably talking to our father, before I can get out a word. I let him, my jaw is tight, and my hands are shaking from the storm churning inside me.A mistake. He called our kiss a mistake. I should be petrified of whatDaddy Dearest and Angelo will do to me; instead, all I can think about is the kiss. A man doesn't kiss a mistake like that, does he?
I don't have any experience. None. I've never been kissed before, but deep down, Iknownobody kisses someone like that if they don't have feelings. I might be naïve to think so. But there it is.
"Are you even fucking listening to me?" Angelo fumes, and I notice we're in our father's study. Thank God he's gone for the weekend. Dealing with Angelo will be hard enough, but both of them?
“I’m sorry, Angelo. I won’t do anything like this ever again,” I say, and I mean it so hard my chest hurts.
He laughs, a wet, contemptuous sound that makes my skin crawl. “Sorry?” he spits. “You think sorry fixes anything? You think asorryputs the family back together? You’re a child who wanted to play at being dangerous and nearly got herself sold into the gutter. Do you have any idea how stupid you look? How embarrassing?”
He steps closer until the scent of him—expensive cologne and old smoke—fills my nose. His hand flicks through my hair like I’m a stray; the motion is casual and full of the way he’s learned to handle things he owns.
“You’re nothing but a liability,” he says. “A pretty liability, but a liability. You’ll be lucky if we don’t make an example of you.” The words land like a promise. “We could send you somewhere you’d learn obedience. Or wecould marry you off so fast your head would spin, and your pride would be ground into dust. Maybe I’ll let someone break you, so you never forget who you belong to.”
He’s smiling now, that slow, cruel smile that plays at his mouth when he thinks he’s clever. He waves his hand like I’m a stain on his sleeve. “Father will decide what to do with you, but this stupidity of yours will be punished. I never thought you were that smart to begin with, but this? This is the dumbest, most reckless thing you could have done.”
