"Coffee."
A beat. Then the sound of him moving. Cabinet opening. A clean mug pulled down. Coffee poured. He set it on the counter near my left hand, close enough that my fingers found it without searching.
I took a sip. The coffee was bitter and lukewarm and it was the best thing I'd ever tasted because it meant I was alive to taste it.
"This is awful." I took another sip, then set my cup down on the counter, both hands wrapped around it to feel the warmth. "I need to ask you something," I said.
"Okay."
He'd moved away and I turned my head in that direction. "When you were—" I stopped. Tried again. "When you were asking methose questions. My fingers tightened around the mug. "Did you believe it? Did you think I was the leak?"
The silence that followed was different from the others. A man choosing his words carefully.
"I think," he said slowly, "that you're one of the smartest people I've ever met. And I think that smart people are capable of things that other people can't imagine."
That wasn't an answer. "That's not what I asked."
"I know what you asked."
"Then answer it."
Another pause. I listened to him breathe. Counted the beats between inhales as I raised my cup to my lips.
"It doesn't matter," he said finally. "Whether I believed it or not doesn't change what I did. Or the way I feel about you."
I set the mug down. My hand was shaking. Just a little.
The fact that this man would destroy his entire life to save mine regardless of whether I deserved saving sat in my stomach like a stone.
He'd saved me.
He'd saved me…
And I was the leak.
Every accusation, every suspicion, every piece of intelligence that had surfaced on the outside and sent the Bratva scrambling—that was me. I'd collected information from a piano bench for over a year. Carefully, methodically, with the operationaldiscipline of a woman who'd been trained by grief and rage to dismantle the organization that stole everything her father built.
The guilt sat heavier than the bruises.
It lived in a different part of my body, somewhere deeper. Somewhere I couldn't reach. It just sat there. Throbbing. A sustained low note that colored everything else.
I should tell him.
The thought surfaced and I pushed it back down immediately. Not now. Not yet. Not when I was broken and confused and the drugs were still leaving my system and I couldn't tell the difference between clarity and delirium. Not when the man who'd saved me was sitting across the room, waiting for me to forgive him for something he'd done to protect me from a truth he didn't even fully know.
This was not the moment for confession.
But the weight of it. God, the weight.
"I want to clean up," I said instead. "Can you show me the bathroom?"
He stood and walked toward me. "This way." He still didn't touch me. Walking ahead of me, close enough that I could track his movement and follow, he led me down the short hallway to a door on the right I'd missed somehow when I came to the kitchen. He opened it.
"Walk in shower is straight ahead, about five or six steps. Toilet to the left. Sink to the right. Towels are on a shelf above the toilet. Soap and shampoo are in the shower, hanging from the shower head."
I stepped inside. Yes, the room was small. The acoustics told me everything. The sound bounced tight and fast, close walls, low ceiling. I found the shower and reached in, searching for the shower knob.
"To your left," he said from the doorway. "I put some things in here for you. A toothbrush and toothpaste on the sink to the right. A change of clothes on the shelf above the towels."
