My hesitation was barely noticeable. "Okay. I'll go now."
He nodded and settled back. Patient. Comfortable. A man pulling up a chair for a show. "Dmitri will drive. He's waiting in the car."
My jaw ached like a mother fucker. I was going to need dental work when this was all over.
I don't think I'd relaxed since I'd left her apartment in the gray morning light with her scent still on my skin and her voice still in my head telling me she loved me too. Not with the knowledge that in less than twenty-four hours I was going to break every promise those words contained.
The drive to The Silver Table took about fifty-six minutes with the traffic, and I used every single one of them to kill what was left of the man she'd said those words to.
Not the mask. The mask was fine. The mask was always fine—shaggy hair and dead eyes and a California drawl that made people think I was harmless. The mask could do this. The mask could do anything.
It was the thing underneath that had to go. The thing she'd found. The thing that had no business existing in a man who'd spent over two decades teaching himself not to feel.
I pulled into the restaurant lot and sat in the car for ten seconds.
I love you, little bird.
Then I buried it. Deeper than the bodies I'd dissolved. Deeper than the boy in his father's van. I shoved it down into the black and locked it there and walked into The Silver Table wearing the face of a man who didn't have a heart left to break.
She was playing my favorite song. The one where the whole room goes quiet because even men who've killed people can recognize something beautiful when they hear it.
I stopped at the edge of the platform. Close enough to smell the scent I'd fallen asleep breathing and woken up craving and would carry in my lungs for the rest of whatever was left of my life.
Her fingers paused on the keys. Barely. A hesitation so small the room wouldn't have noticed it, but I noticed, because I noticed everything about this woman. Always. And that was the whole fucking problem.
She knew I was there. And she knew something was wrong. Raven could read me from across a room without seeing me, and right now she was reading the void where my warmth used to be.
"Time to go," I said.
"My set isn't finished."
Jesus Christ, don't do this to me.
She was defiant. Even now. Even sensing what she did, her chin lifted and her voice steady, because even blind, Raven Oakley did not go quietly into anything.
"It is now." I grabbed her arm.
"Milo—"
"Don't," I said when she started to speak. "Get up. Don't make a scene." She reached for her cane and I stopped her. "Leave the cane."
"What?"
I knew what I was doing. I knew exactly what taking her cane meant. It meant stripping away her independence, her orientation, her ability to navigate the world on her own terms. It meant making her dependent on me for every step, every turn, every inch of space between here and the warehouse where Viktor sat smoking and waiting.
I did it anyway, because Viktor was going to watch me do much worse.
I pulled her off the bench too fast. Her hip caught the edge of the piano, and the sound she made—a small, sharp intake of breath—went through me like a blade.
"You're hurting me."
The people sitting closest to us were starting to notice, but I didn't slow down or respond as I dragged her through the restaurant. Her shoulder clipped a wall. Her shin hit a table leg and she stumbled. And through it all, I kept my grip and my pace and I didn't adjust, didn't murmur directions, didn't do any of the things that had become as automatic as breathing over the last few weeks.
Because this story that had to be airtight if I was going to survive: Milo Scott dragged a woman to her death without mercy, without hesitation, without the slightest tremor in his hands to suggest he'd ever pressed his mouth to her throat and whispered her name like it was the only word he knew.
Outside, I got her into the car without helping her, feeling nothing when she hit her head on the frame.
The drive took close to an hour. She tried to talk to me twice. Asked where we were going. Asked me to talk to her. Asked who was driving.
