Hers answers. I feel it in her wrist when she slides her fingers down to my pulse like it’s a habit now. A small ritual we have built out of survival.
“What are happy endings?” she asks in a whisper.
“Same as lullabies,” I say.
She tilts her head and kisses me.
Not desperate.
Nothungry first.
Certain.
Her mouth is warm, tasting of bitter coffee. My hands settle at her waist, not to claim. To hold. I’ve learned the difference. I’m still learning.
When she pulls back, her green eyes are dark with something that has nothing to do with fear.
“We have a day,” she says.
“A day,” I repeat.
It feels like a gift and a trap.
We have time, but time is when men who hide behind other men move their pieces. Time is when hired hands get briefed and paid. Time is when someone decides distance is cleaner than courage.
I don’t tell her that.
She already knows.
This is why she is here, in my shirt, in a room that smells like starch, reading the clause she just wrote like it’s scripture. She knows the cost of daylight. She knows how to count.
She takes my hand and pulls me toward the table. She points to the page.
“Here,” she says. “The language about targeting. It needs a trigger that can’t be called an accident.”
I sit. I take the pen. We work through the afternoon like that. Two people at a table, rewriting a world that wants to kill them. Isabella marks phrases. I cross out weak words and replace them with stronger ones. She watches my hand move and says nothing, but her gaze follows the strokes like she’s memorizing the way I commit.
Every so often, the tailor’s bell rings downstairs when someone walks in.
A small sound.
A reminder.
Of the island. Of the city. It keeps moving. Men keep buying suits. Women keep paying for hems. Life keeps pretending it’s just life.
She closes the folder and exhales.
“Enough,” she says. “My head is starting to swim.”
“Food,” I answer.
“You cook?” she asks, amused.
“I survive,” I say.
She laughs. It’s a quiet laugh, and it punches straight through me. Not because it’s pretty. Because it’s rare. Because she has spent too long being a woman who can’t afford softness.
I go to the kitchenette. There isn’t much. A loaf of bread that’s hard like cardboard, a jar of cheap sauce, pasta, two eggs, a lemon that looks like it’s seen war. When I spy the parmesan turning green at the edges, I know I can scrape it off and make what I can. Something warm. Something that smells like home even though neither of us has one that isn’t trying to swallow us.
