“It is,” I answer. “If you’ll have it.”
She doesn’t answer right away. She looks toward the window, where snow drifts down like quiet. The city is still out there. Her father is still her father. My uncle is still my uncle. The Commission is still hungry. A man behind the voice is still out there, hidden inside clean rooms, until we force him to stand.
She turns back to me.
“I’ll have it,” she says. “But we do it on our terms.”
“My favorite terms,” I say, and kiss her brow.
We spend the rest of the day like that. Slow. Domestic in a way that feels almost obscene after the last week. She steals my clothes and throws them in the washer.
Naked, I take her braid apart and redo it because my hands need something gentle to do that isn’t violence. She laughs when I get it wrong and fixes it, fingers quick, competent.
We talk.
We talk about the people who will help tomorrow. Clara and the ledger. The dock boy with the bell for a few dollars. The union rep who pretends he isn’t afraid. My cousins. Nino on the fence. Smokestack on the catwalk. The florist with the cooler that hides more than lilies. The courier kid with fake invoices and real courage.
We talk about the people we lost.
Her mother. My father. Her brother.
We don’t romanticize the river. We let it be what it is. A witness. A thief. A line that runs through this city like a wound.
At one point, Isabella rests her head on my shoulder and says, almost to herself, “Adrian thought he could remove me.”
“He still thinks that,” I say.
“Then we teach him,” she replies.
The sunlight fades early. Snow makes the world dim fast. The alley becomes blue and quiet. Somewhere down the street, a siren wails and then fades. Not for us. Not today.
When the evening comes, I make another meal out of nothing. She pretends to critique it like she’s reviewing a restaurant, and I pretend not to enjoy watching her act like a normal woman. Like someone who hasn’t spent her whole life being managed.
She eats anyway.
After, we sit on the bed with the folder between us.
The clause.
The rule.
The spine.
Isabella rests her hand on it.
“This is what they died for,” she says. “Not the Vendetta. Not the song. The chance for their heirs to live long enough to become people.”
I cover her hand with mine.
“We finish it,” I say.
She looks at me.
“And tomorrow?” she asks.
“Tomorrow we go to the port,” I answer. “We plant the ear. We let the men who think they’re safe talk too freely. We catch what they give us and make it too expensive to pretend it was an accident.”
“And if they try to turn it into blood anyway,” she says, eyes narrowing.
