I played the first eight bars, and he listened the way he always listened. Completely, nothing held back, like he had all the time in the world and there was nothing else worth doing with it.
Then I stopped, the words flowing out of my mouth like the music flowed from my fingers.
"I was the leak."
He was perfectly still beside me.
"I did have a contact," I said. "I was collecting information against the Bratva nearly the entire time I was there." I kept my hands on the keys and let them anchor me to the present tense. "It was me. I've been feeding the FBI."
Still nothing.
I kept going because stopping meant thinking about what his face was doing and I couldn't take that right now.
"My father built The Silver Table. He put his whole life into it. Then the accident happened, and the Bratva moved in. He died in a car accident because a man was drunk and terrified at two in the afternoon, and I was left without my eyesight, and without the only family I'd ever known."
A breath.
"My caretaker told me who'd taken over my father's restaurant, and I went back to the piano because nobody watches the blind girl. Nobody thinks she's paying attention. Nobody considers that a woman who can't see might be the most dangerous person in the room because everyone around her forgets she has ears." My jaw tightened. "The contact's name is Christy from the Austin field office. I gave her fourteen months of intelligence from the most surveilled piano bench in Texas. Every meeting, every name, every shipment they discussed within earshot when they thought I couldn't tell the difference between a dinner order and a logistics plan."
My finger pressed one key, not hard enough to make a sound. Just pressure.
"Every time I saidI'm not feeding anyone to the Feds," The words tasted like ash, "I was lying. Right to your face." The irony caught in my throat, bitter and sharp. "I performed for you the same way I performed for everyone else, and you were never supposed to be—" I stopped. Swallowed. "You weren't supposed to be real. I didn't plan for you."
He was so quiet, I could barely hear him breathing.
I turned toward him. Toward the warmth of him. "Please say something."
"I know."
Two simple words placed down the way he placed everything, without ceremony, without softening, with the unnerving finality of a man who'd already made his peace with it.
I turned back to the piano.
"What?"
"I know," he said again. Same register. No different emphasis. Just the words, sitting there, immovable.
The air went out of my lungs. "You—" My voice came out wrong. Too tight. I cleared my throat. "You knew."
"Not all of it." I felt him shift, heard the slow exhale of a man choosing his words with the same precision he applied to everything else. "Not the contact, or the method. But the information that kept surfacing, the way you phrased certain things. A pause. "You were too careful."
My hands had gone still on the keys.
"So I ran it backwards," he said. "The way I'd run a crime scene. I looked at what I knew about you and I looked at what kept happening, and the math only worked one way."
"And you still?—"
"Yes."
There was no hesitation in his answer.
I pressed my palms flat against the keys and the piano let out a discordant, muffled protest.
My eyes burned. My throat closed around the feeling and I swallowed hard, jaw clamping down, everything in me that knew how to perform composure rising up and doing its job.
Except it didn't work.
The first sound that escaped was so small I almost didn't recognize it as coming from me. A fractured exhale, barely audible, the kind that happens when you've been holding something compressed for so long that when the pressure finally releases, the body doesn't know how to let it go gracefully.
