I'm shaking. I can't stop. The tremor runs through my whole body, from my shoulders to my hands to my knees. It's not cold. It's the adrenaline and the relief and the crash of weeks of holding myself together finally letting go.
Dom's hand finds mine on the seat between us. He doesn't squeeze. He just holds it. His thumb presses against my pulse point and I can feel my own heartbeat hammering against his skin.
"Your feet are bleeding," he says.
I look down. He's right. The gravel cut them. I can see dark smears on the floor mat.
"I'll live."
"You will." He says with his usual surety.
We drive in silence for a while. The dark countryside moves past the windows. Fields, hedgerows, the occasional light of a farmhouse in the distance. Viktor drives fast and steady and doesn't speak.
Dom's hand is still holding mine. His thumb is still on my pulse. I can feel his scent filling the car, mixing with the leather and the metallic tang of my own fear-sweat.
His hand tightens on mine, just slightly, and then loosens again.
"There are things I need to say to you," he says. "Not now. When we're home. When you've eaten and slept and seen a doctor."
"Okay."
I look at him. I look at his hand holding mine. I look at the dark road ahead and the dashboard glow and the back of Viktor's head.
His hand stays on mine. The baby kicks. Dom's thumb is still on my pulse. And for the first time in weeks, I relax.
22. Theo
Nikolai Novikov drives the way he does everything else with absolute surety that he owns the road. The other drivers are simply a nuisance that are in his way.
He drives a black Mercedes that smells like leather polish and aftershave. The aftershave is old-fashioned, something with sandalwood, and it fills the car without overwhelming it. Everything about Nikolai is like that.
I've been in a car with him for eleven minutes and I already understand Dom better than I did after months in his penthouse.
"You're staring," Nikolai says.
"Sorry."
"Don't be sorry. Be less obvious about it."
He takes a left without indicating. The city moves past the windows. It's been a week since the field and the dark.
I'm still getting used to a lot of things again. The bed, for one. Dom gave me the bedroom. He sleeps on the sofa now, the same sofa I slept on for a month, and he hasn't said a word about it. The ankle monitor is gone. The keycard for the front door is on the kitchen counter, where he put it the morning after I came back, and he hasn't moved it and neither have I.
I haven't left the building. Not because I can't but because I haven't wanted to yet. That distinction is new and I'm still turning it over in my head.
Today is the exception.
"He'll be there already," Nikolai says. "Dominic is always early. He gets that from his mother."
It's the first personal thing he's said since I got in the car. I file it away. Nikolai doesn't waste words. If he's telling me something about Dom's mother, it's because he wants me to know it.
"Dom told me she died when he was young."
"She did."
He doesn't elaborate. I don't push. There's a boundary there and I can feel it the way you feel the edge of a table in the dark.
The restaurant is in midtown. Cipriani's. Dom told me about it: neutral territory, owned by a Sicilian beta who pays tribute to nobody. The kind of place where men like Nikolai and men like Bert Castellano can sit across a table without someone getting shot.
