“You must care a lot about her,” he says, “if you are willing to deny yourself just to keep her untouched by all that.”
The word sits badly with me.
Care.
A clean word. A soft one. A luxury item I cannot afford. Possibly, the only one.
I look at the Uber and say, “Care is a privilege for people in the light. Our side does not care. Our side destroys.”
Leone’s gaze flicks to me again in the mirror.
“Always?”
“Always.”
He does not argue. He knows I am right.
We follow the Uber into a quieter part of the Bronx, and when it finally slows, I feel that familiar tightening in my chest.
It is not nerves. I outgrew nerves a very long time ago. It is something sharper and more useless than that. Anticipation, maybe. Or punishment. There is a thin line between the two, and I cross it every night.
Izzy steps out onto the sidewalk.
Even from this distance, in the wash of streetlight and headlights, she is beautiful.
Not polished the way women in my world often try to be, not armored in jewels or status or the deliberate perfection that money buys. Her beauty has always had something more alive in it than that. The first night I met her, seven years ago, she was all wildfire. Young, fierce, reckless enough to laugh at me and then look at me like I was something she might dare anyway. She had a kind of freedom in her then that I had almost forgotten existed. She moved like the world had not yet taught her to shrink for it.
Now, she keeps that wilderness reined in.
Life has seen to that.
You can tell from the way she carries herself. The control. The caution. The constant awareness of what needs doing next. She is still fierce, but it has gone inward, become discipline, composure. Most people would call that maturity. They would say she has settled.
They would be wrong.
I can still see it under her skin, that old wildness. It rises every time that asshole Donald says the wrong thing to her. Every time someone underestimates her. Every time she is forced to bite her tongue instead of setting the room on fire the way she clearly wants to.
I have not yet stepped in. If all goes according to plan, I never will.
A last resort. That is what I am supposed to be.
Nothing else.
She reaches the building entrance and disappears inside. For a few moments, I keep my eyes on the door after it closes behind her.
That night seven years ago needs to stay what it is. A memory. A good one. The best goddamn thing that has ever happened to me, if I’m honest enough to call it by its name.
But nothing more.
Because my side destroys people.
Because everything I am was decided before I was old enough to object.
Because men like me do not step into the light and come away without staining it.
And because whatever else I might allow myself to do in this life, whatever blood I might spill or sins I might stack up one on top of another until they reach heaven and punch a hole through it, there is one thing I will not do.
I will not destroy Izzy.
