“Where did you go?”
He gives me that steady look. A soldier’s look. “You know where I went.”
“No, when you left. After Couch bombed my room. It was Couch, right?”
It’s weird I haven’t given it much thought. Like a deeper part of me knows Mal’s made sure I don’t have to.
He sets his phone on the chest of drawers. Like me, his gaze skates over the untouched bowl, but he leaves it be and heaves the kind of sigh that upends the earth. “It was him. Stupid cunt did what he said he would. Threw cash at some melter to burn the place down. Might’ve panned out for him if I’d been asleep.”
“Or somewhere else.”
“Eh.” Mal tugs his shirt over his head. Don’t know why. Just that it’s a one-armed, fluid movement that has no business being so attractive. “I’m just thankfulyouwere somewhere else. If you’d been hurt…Jack or Sol. Put it this way, I wouldn’t be done killing him yet.”
“You didn’t kill him, though…right?”
“No, but I really fucking wanted to.”
“What stopped you?”
Mal seems to remember his bedroom door is wide open. Moves to shut it. Changes his mind and glances at the window.
He needs to breathe.
Maybe he can teach me how.
“Open the window.”
“What?”
“The window.” I jerk my head as a savage wind hurls rain drops against the glass. “I like storms. Don’t you?”
“I like what comes after.”
I’ve never got that far.
Mal cracks the window, pushing it open just enough to let the air in without a deluge of rain. Then he comes back to me and kneels by the bed with another orange bottle.
I drink.
He says nothing.
Until he does, and his voice is so low and measured I know something under it is still frayed and burning. “I had him…Couch and his dickshite son, the one I haven’t already maimed to fuck. Could’ve ended them right there and no one could’ve stopped me, not even Vinnie.”
He finds my hand again, just one this time, and laces our fingers together. For a man like Mal it’s obscenely sweet, even with so much lingering violence coiled tight in his hard body, and it makes his next words easier to hear. “I didn’t do it because I wasn’t sure I could stop. I was so angry, but not just with them—it was this…noisein my head and I knew I didn’t have it in me to end them cleanly. It would’ve been a fucking massacre, and that’s not who I am.”
“Who are you?”
“A soldier. Not a murderer. It’s a thinner line than most people think and I’d cross it for you, for Jack and Sol, a hundredtimes, but if I do, I’m gone forever from this place—from this fucking town—and that’s not what you need from me, is it?”
His words land like a fallen tree.
Heavy.
Honest.
True.
And his gaze is lighter now, as if my answer won’t change his path. So I don’t give him one. Because his hard-earned epiphany isn’t mine.
