My throat tightened. I traced the letters, slow, careful, feeling each one.
Lock your door. — M
Three words. Not a love note. Not a confession. An order disguised as concern, wrapped in the same protective aggression that had driven him to kill a man for following me.
And he'd written it in a way I could read without help. Without a screen reader, without an app, without asking anyone. He'd thought about how I experienced the world, and he'd met me there.
Nobody did that.
I folded the note and pressed it against my sternum, over the bruise he'd left on my breast.
Then I got dressed and made my way to the door.
I twisted the lock shut. The click echoed in the quiet apartment.
***
That night, I dressed for war.
Not the metaphorical kind. The practical kind. The version of war I'd been waging for over a year behind a piano in a room full of men who thought I was as noticeable as the wallpaper.
I bypassed the high necklines. The modest cuts. The safe, respectable dresses that made me invisible from the collarbones down. Instead, my fingers found the one I almost never wore—black silk, thin straps, a neckline that dipped low enough to bare the bite mark on my throat and the bruise curving over my collarbone. The fabric skimmed every handprint on my hips like it had been cut to frame them. No wrap. No scarf. No concealer I couldn't see to apply and wouldn't have used anyway.
Let them look. Let them wonder who'd put his mouth on the blind girl.
I made tea, then stood at the counter and drank it while my mind organized this chaos of feelings into something I could use.
Milo.
I knew the shape of his jaw. The architecture of his cheekbones. The exact texture of his stubble. I knew the way his breathing went shallow when I touched him and how it went ragged when he was inside me. I knew the sound he made when he came—a low, guttural noise ripped from somewhere deeper than his throat, like something tearing loose in his soul.
I knew he'd killed a man last night and come to my door with steady hands and a racing heart. I knew he somehow worked for the same organization that had taken my father's restaurant and turned it into a laundry machine for blood money.
I knew he was dangerous.
I sipped my tea.
The same skill that had made last night what it was—this compulsive need to absorb, to catalog, to file every sensation until I could replay it at will—was the same skill that had builtthe thing I hadn't told him about. The same ears that tracked his breathing in bed tracked Viktor's breathing in the back booth. The same mind that memorized the exact pressure of his hands memorized shipping routes and dollar amounts and names spoken in Russian at two in the morning.
The real question wasn't whether I cared about the danger. I didn't. That answer had been settled somewhere between the night I stepped in the blood and the second kiss, and examining it further was a waste of time.
The real question was what I was going to do about the thing Ihadn'ttold him.
I'd given him enough to have leverage against the Russians. Viktor. The judge. The Galveston shipments.
But I'd held back the rest.
The deeper architecture. The voices that didn't belong to Viktor's local crew, with accents I'd filed by phoneme, conversations in languages I couldn't translate but had stored whole, waiting for the day context gave them meaning. The patterns in Viktor's phone calls. The way certain numbers recurred on certain nights, suggesting a rotation I was still piecing together. A name I'd caught fragments of, never the whole thing, that made Viktor's voice do something I'd never heard it do anywhere else: go careful. Measured. The vocal equivalent of a dog rolling onto its back. I didn't know what the name meant yet. I just knew it changed Viktor's breathing every time it surfaced, and I'd filed that reaction alongside everything else.
I had more than names and dates. I had the power structure mapped in detail. Who deferred to whom. Who interrupted. Who went silent when certain topics surfaced. The hierarchyof an organization, charted not by surveillance photos and wiretaps, but by the invisible language of breath and silence and the weight that certain words carried when spoken ten feet from a woman no one thought was listening.
I had the scaffolding of something larger than a local operation. The suggestion of a network, sketched in half-heard phone calls and the particular quiet that fell over the back booth when subjects were raised that made even Viktor lower his voice. I knew who held power over who. And who acted like they had power but had none.
I should tell Milo.
There was no reason not to. He'd proven himself. He'd watched me absorb information all this time and hadn't breathed a word to Viktor. He'd kissed me instead. Killed for me instead.
But.
