My men step in now. They do not rush. The first two check the corners. The third confirms what I already know. Dead. The floor manager appears in the crack with a face like a curtain drawn to the side. The DJ lifts the bass because people do not need to know they heard a murder.
I look at Mina. She meets me without blinking and zips my trousers. I’d forgotten they were open. Her dress is smoothed back into place as if it had never been moved.
She presses her palm to my forearm above the graze. Her touch is steady. Her eyes are the only place in the room where the dead cannot get in. “You’re hurt.”
“I’m fine.”
She gives me a look that says she does not like that answer and will accept it for now. She steps in and sets her forehead to mine for a breath.
I turn to my men, already occupied by what I’m about to say. “Clean this up.”
I walk to the door and push the panel. Outside my throne room, people return to their drinks and their rituals. Staff do the dancethat turns catastrophe into a story told differently tomorrow. I signal the team and they move with the quiet speed I pay for.
This is not the first death Rope has seen, and it probably won’t be the last. But it’s the first that meant something to me.
It means my family is safe.
Someone hands Mina a first aid kit, and she wraps my forearm with clean gauze and tape that does not pull hair. She cleans the groove the bullet dug, and I don’t feel it. I only feel her touch. Her warmth.
“Call Leon Valivov,” I tell one of the men at the door. “Tell him the storm has passed and left a fallen tree.”
“Understood,” the man says. He steps into the hall with a phone for the call.
I’d make the call myself, but my head is too empty to talk to someone who might want a conversation.
Can’t focus on that. Next steps are all that matters. Reflection, emotions, all of that bullshit will wait. There are more important matters than the gnawing pain in my chest.
My first boy is dead. Flashes of his life spring to mind unbidden, no matter how I try to shut them down. Bridgette’s round stomach. The day he was born. The baby he was—cool and calm, no matter the chaos around him. I had naively thought that meant he would weather the storm of the life he was due to inherit.
But then he became a boy. A cruel, sinister boy who hurt the helpless. And then, he grew into a man who was worse.
That gnawing pain eats away at my heart, despite knowing all of this. He was my first boy, but my son died years ago.
Tonight, I laid him to rest.
Mina leans in. “What now?”
“Now we find the people he tried to take from us.”
29
MINA
Outside blurs into streetlights.Roman sits beside me with his bandaged forearm on his thigh and his other hand open, palm up. I stare at the white edge of the gauze I placed. He is calm. The calm disturbs me because a part of me wanted him to shake the way I am shaking inside.
We leave the alley behind the club and join the river of traffic. One SUV takes the lead. Another hangs back. A voice murmurs in the radio and then goes quiet. The city moves around us, full of people who are unaware of how a life can change in one breath.
He killed his son. When the moment came there was no tremor in his face. Something in me wants to be relieved by that. Something in me wants to run from it. But that part of me gets smaller by the moment.
He shifts and that small motion steadies the air in the car. He does not speak until I do.
“I can hardly believe you did it.” I sound like I am standing far from my mouth. “You look so calm.”
“It felt right. It felt like justice.”
He’s right about that. There are fourteen bodies on that island that will never be tucked in. The number is a weight that keeps changing because it’s incomplete until we have his total body count. That won’t happen until we find out about the retreat.
I breathe until the breath is mine again.
