The pattern that means stop pretending and move. I take the call in the next room.
She’s awake when I stand. The gray light turns her green eyes into something that reaches through my chest and closes a hand around the part of me that still believes.
“I have to go,” I say. “I’m needed. I’m always needed.”
“Work.”
I button my shirt. I slide on the watch. I think of home and the old men who love the city more than their wives. I think of the week on the calendar with the red heart around it and the Commission’s clean handwriting. I think of a feud with a name we never say in the house and how it lives in the walls anyway.
“Yes,” I say. “Stay in my bed. I’ll be here one more day.”
Already planning to make it happen, I kiss her once, slow and certain. I leave her in my room.
Staff move with the kind of silence that comes from training and fear. I step around a tray someone left by a door. I note a camera where there wasn’t one yesterday.I observe the fellow near the elevator attempting to appear as a visitor and not succeeding.
Not my people.
Not a problem today.
The lobby smells like money and sugar. The driver takes me to the pier because I want the water first. The boat cuts a clean line, but it can wait. The horizon grows gold along its seam. My phone fills with messages. I read and file. I return only one.
“Tomorrow,” I type.
I return to my room only to find a note. Sitting on the edge of the bed, I bring the note up and inhale. Shoving it in my pocket, I pack.
Back home, the city rises around me, and the old rhythm takes hold. Shower. Suit. Eggs eaten standing. A call to a captain who wants permission to do a thing he should do without asking. A call I don’t return from a man who’ll take offense and hide it. A note from the Commission about moving the truce meeting by a handful of hours because one of their own wants to make a party of it.
A reply from the manager on the island, a number. Money buys discretion and light.
The map room later with my uncle and the consigliere.
The balcony for air.
In a quiet minute, I call the number I’m not supposed to have. It rings. Sera doesn’t answer. I let it ring until the voicemail will eat my voice and then hang up. It’s a generic recording. You’ve reached a number.
I try again at noon.
I try again near sunset.
Silence.
She said yes to the call.
She didn’t promise when.
I fight the urge to search her number for a name, a betrayal.
Two days slide by the way they do when I’m counting knives. The truce location comes through with a diagram of exits. I redraw my seat by a hand’s length to improve the sight line and send it back. The old men debate routes they’ll never drive and guns they’ll never fire. The week’s truce has never been broken. But I let them talk and keep my hands still.
This year, for the first time, their new heir, Isabella Valentine, takes her seat at the table. Our rivals would be fools to put her in danger. Valentines are not fools.
The night the doors open, the room wears its best manners. A long table. Too many cameras. The scent ofexpensive cologne over old wood. I enter last, glance upward, and face a piercing sensation beneath my ribs.
The Valentine heir sits opposite, eyes that know exactly how dark a city can get.
Green eyes that could cut a sea of sapphire.
A room where men pretend to be civilized turns to the island. The stranger from my bed has a name that hits the air out of my lungs like a hammer.
