He lowers his phone without looking away from the night beyond the glass. He doesn’t pace. He just stands there, one hand loose at his side, the other grasping his phone as if the device might disappear if he puts it down. The bandage under his shirt pulls when he shifts his weight. The pull registers in the small dip at the corner of his mouth. I file the information away the way I’ve started filing all the small things about him.
“Tell me what happens now if Archer was actually honest with you,” I say, because the silence feels like a cliff and I don’t know how long I can stand with my toes hanging over the edge. “Real words, not… code.” I hear the way that comes out and wince. “I mean, I know your men are there, in position, I just?—”
“You want to be inside it with them,” he says, turning his head toward me.
“Yes.” The honesty surprises me because it’s not pretty.
“Here’s what happens next,” Dominik says. He glances at the time on the phone’s screen then looks back up at me. “If this all blows up in our faces and we don’t manage to recover the guns, then I’ll pay the price before it gets to you. I don’t want you to worry about that.”
As if worry is a switch I can flip just because he tells me to.
Still, his words land warm and terrible in my chest. “I’m not worried,” I lie. “And you shouldn’t make promises you can’t keep.”
“I’m not,” he replies, and that’s worse, somehow.
I start to tell him that I’m not worth it and stop myself. Instead, I wrap my arms around my waist, wishing I wasn’t putting him in this position, but not that we hadn’t ever met.
The phone vibrates once and I startle. Dominik doesn’t comment on my reaction. He slides his thumb over the screen and listens. His mouth curves into something so slight I’d miss it if I blinked before he ends the call.
“What?” I ask.
“Everything is going as planned, just the way we want it. The other day was…an anomaly. I learn from my mistakes.”
I shake my head, a physical attempt to push out the feeling that I’m in a class I didn’t even sign up for but now I can’t afford to fail. “You like all this,” I say before I can stop the thought from becoming sound. “Figuring them out. Not just winning. Understanding where they’ll make mistakes.”
His eyes find mine. “It’s what I’ve been trained to do my entire life; keep a cool head and make smarter decisions than the enemy.”
It sounds like he was trained to be a statue holding a shield, forbidden from feeling anything that might put a chink in his armor.
Dominik says, “The bikers think their patches are made of steel. But they’re just flimsy pieces of fabric stitched onto leather. And bullets pierce leather just fine.”
“I hate that I’m starting to understand you when you talk like that,” I tell him.
His phone vibrates yet again. Dominik reads the screen silently then shows me a message from an unknown contact and the words sent.
UNKNOWN: Alina, are you safe?
“It’s Archer.”
Dominik doesn’t bother answering since it’s obvious. I can seethe image of my nervous brother in those four words and the absence of him too. I see a boy in a hallway outside our mother’s door, counting to ten every time she cried, and a teenager counting cash in a car outside a party, and a man counting a debt wrong on purpose. I don’t know which version is texting, worried about me now. Maybe they all share the same fingers.
Dominik types backYesand nothing else.
He then lays the phone where we can both watch the screen. The dots appear then disappear again and again, almost frantically.
ARCHER:Don’t fall for any of his pretty lies or bullshit.
I almost want to laugh. Archer doesn’t want me to fall for anyone’s lies and bullshit but his. My brother is so damn selfish. When did he become that way? Did I miss the shift? Or have I always been naïve to his selfish ways?
Dominik picks up the phone. He reads it and sets it back down as if it’s just another object and not a small knife meant to cut me. “His concern for you is too little, too late,” he says. “He’s angry at himself. Warning you to be careful now makes him feel like less of an asshole.”
“Have you lied to me?” I ask, because I hate that I’m starting to trust my captor more than my own brother.
“No, I haven’t lied to you,” Dominik says simply, a fact laid on the table between us. “Keeping you close is the biggest risk I’ve ever taken, but it’s the only version of this world that makes sense to me now.”
The ground shifts underneath me at those words.
Dominik’s phone barely vibrates before he answers.
