The room becomes a theater of small noises: the kettle in the corner, the city far below, and the thud of my pulse in my ears. The photograph might have been just evidence, professional and dry, if it hadn’t been the kind of thing that rearranges you. Xavier’s arm around Elias’s shoulder is casual, the way boys promise each other a future with the softness of touch. The image is a pulse in my throat, a thing I didn’t want to see because it is the sort of intimacy that rearranges a man’s insides.
“You’re sure?” I ask, though I already know. Hartford’s a good man. He tells me things the city doesn’t want known because he’s paid to. He pulls layers back like a surgeon.
“Yes,” Hartford says. “We pulled footage. Plates. Long stepped out of a car on Pearl. Witness says he was by himself, but he met someone beforehand.”
My jaw tightens. The folder slides across the desk and lands with a soft slap. I want to hear more as punctuation than fact. I pick up the photo again, and the image of Elias and the laughter at the cinema is an ache in a line of bone. He looks happy there. He looks… safe. The world does not tolerate safety for long.
“Xavier Long,” I say aloud. The name clings to the room like smoke. “Is he—was he someone Elias dated?”
Hartford clears his throat. “From what we pulled, yes. On and off. Nothing too serious, but an old flame. Long’s got a temper. They’ve had him on petty charges—harassment, a couple fights, unpaid tabs. He’s nothing we’d thought could escalate this far.”
The door behind me is glass; the reflection shows my hand tightening on the edge of the photograph. I am aware of how uneven my breathing has become. I am a man who keeps a ledger and whose mind inventories threats the moment they appear. Jealousy is pragmatic in our world: who has reason to shoot at me tends to be someone who can’t separate me from what I claim. But the image of Elias, my Elias, with this Xavier complicates the equation. It scratches at things I kept carefully boxed away.
“He was here,” Hartford adds, lowering his voice. “Two nights ago, someone saw Long near the offices but didn’t get a plate. Could have been a drop-off. Could have been him checking.”
I shove the photograph back into the folder with a motion that sounds too practiced, and I don’t mean for the despondent little laugh that leaves my mouth to be real. “Bring me everything on Long. His family, his debts, any associates. Find out if it was Moretti or someone else who hired him.”
Hartford nods. He knows me. He rises, gives the little report I need—discreet, quick—and leaves before I can ask the question on my tongue.
The question I don’t want to ask: Did he target me or did he target what I took? Did he target Elias?
I stand. The room tilts for a second like a vessel touched by an earthquake. The city’s lights are sharp and cold and I am aware of a sound in my skull I can’t fix—a sound like a match struck and then snuffed. Jealousy has a way of turning a clever man into something reckless. I will not have some upstart boy,some ex with a chip on his shoulder, make a claim on the small, dangerous thing that is mine.
I go home.
The drive is a blur. The evening dissolves into a series of precise actions—shoes taken off at the entry, Riley’s men given brief instructions, the house put in the kind of soft-check that says the man of the house is in and means business. I am a man with anger tuned into a single string. I want answers. I want an explanation. I want Elias to tell me that he’s mine in a way that feels irreproachable.
Elias is in my room, standing by the window, hands clenched, jaw working. He looks like a thing that has been cut and held together with spit and stubbornness.
When he sees me, a smile blooms that makes me want to forget everything. “I was starting to get worried. You didn’t call to say that you were going to miss dinner.”
“I got stuck at the office,” I say dryly.
His eyebrows scrunch at my tone, and he approaches me. Cold fingertips trace against my cheekbone. “Are you alright, Luc?”
“You know him,” I say. My voice is calm but the words are a blade.
The color in his face is a dangerous thing—red, then paler, then a look that twists between hurt and anger. “Know who?”
I set the photograph on the dresser between us, face up. The flash of his laughter—Elias and Xavier casual and unbothered—belongs to a different life. “The man who shot me.”
His fingers tighten on the sill until his knuckles blanch. “That’s… that’s from…” he begins, taking a step toward me that is both defiant and fragile. “You had me followed?”
“Hartford did.”
Elias face relaxes. “Lucian, it didn’t mean anything. He’s an ex-boyfriend, and I happened to run into him at the movies.”
“Didn’t mean anything?” The heat in my chest is a furnace. I hear love for him in the way my voice edges, even as I try to keep it sharp. “So he’s just been following you for the past month for no reason?”
“I didn’t tell him where I’d be!” His hand comes up, palms open like an accusation.
I should believe him because he swears with a ferocity that looks like truth. Maybe it’s the angle of his mouth, the way he refuses to bat an eye, the way his hands stay still as if pleading with his own body to stay steady. Maybe I’m a fool for wanting the proof shaped like a confession. Jealousy is a poor advisor. It fuels all the worst versions of me.
“Did you sleep with him recently?” I demand. The question is ugly but practical.
“No!” he says. The word is a stone. “We dated last year. It didn’t work. He was—Xavier was messy, Lucian. He was jealous and small and violent. I left him.”
“You left him?” I repeat, tasting how the past is always double-edged. “Was he coming back to you?”
