“No idea.”
“I have whatever that is.”
“You fear open spaces?”
“Not so much the openness, but that there’s nothing to hold on to. It’s like being dropped in the middle of the ocean with no anchor. You’re just lost in all directions and at the mercy of the tides.” Amelia studied the courtyard for a moment then added, “This is an anchor space.”
Emory shifted nearer to her, both intrigued and bemused at the paradoxical places where she sought solace. He admired her up close—the faint freckles that dusted her cheeks, the way one auburn brow arched more than the other, the crease in her bottom lip he was dying to kiss.
He shook his head with a soft chuckle. Amelia laughed too, a rarity he’d come to cherish. He could stay there forever just to soak up the sound.
“You know,” he said, “Arizona is about as wide open as it gets.”
Amelia mulled it over with her eyes to the terrace below. The pool’s murky glow didn’t quite reach the table where she first met him in the dark. That past seemed so distant.
“Arizona was about escape. I was feral for freedom. From Oregon, my dad, the internship. My mom used to tell me not towish time away. Burt was always good to me. I feel bad that I wished away my time with him, with everything.”
She stood from the railing to face him, and Emory did the same.
“You were right, and I was wrong not to tell you,” she said. “There was a folder, and I saw what was inside. If it could’ve prevented what happened to Gio?—”
“Amelia, this wasn’t your fault. I brought you with me today. That’s on me, not you.”
“And it’s me they came for, whatever they think I know.” She laughed again, this time without amusement. “The irony is it’s nothing. You could’ve asked me at the party, and I would’ve told you, and you would’ve said, ‘That’s basically worthless,’ and we would’ve gone our separate ways, and this never would’ve happened.”
Her take on their imagined conversation endeared. In reality, she might’ve sidled up to him, and he might’ve done the same, but it would’ve been over before it began, as soon as Emory told her his name. When he was a street soldier, women readily dismissed his sins. As a captain, that task grew harder. As chief, his role was too big to overcome.
Amelia chewed her lip and looked as though one weight lifted from her shoulders while another piled on.
“Today in the car,” Emory said, “you reacted to my brother’s name. Did you see it in the folder?”
Amelia nodded. “It’s uncommon enough that it stood out, but it was just a name. I didn’t know who he was or how he fit into anything.”
“No reason why you would.”
Emory drew a hand over his face and through the length of his hair. Tendrils of unease spread as the worries and what-ifs amassed. They didn’t pay him the dignity of an orderly onslaught but came in an unrelenting barrage. War was war, but that was the bright line he’d be a blind fool not to see. Ivan had crawled from a shallow grave and was comfortably seated at the top of the Velascos.
Leaned against the railing, Amelia’s gaze skimmed his forearms, tracing the ink there with heavy interest.
“Nothing I saw in the folder made sense to me, except…”
“Except what?”
“You,” she quietly confessed, and even amongst the shadows that shrouded them, Emory discerned the blush painting her cheeks. “Your picture was in the folder and details about you. The places you go, the people you’re close to. I knew who you were at Richard’s party. I knew the things you’ve done.”
A part of Emory wanted to believe her and invest in a fairytale where their paths crossed one fated night and, behind her soft touch and sultry gaze, she understood him in his totality. Emory couldn’t keep with that narrative, though. Amelia didn’t know the extent of his crimes, the ones that earned him his reputation. In his world, no one rose to the top without blood-soaked hands.
“What else did you see?”
“They want to kill you,” she said on a worried hush as if to let him down easy.
Emory laughed, the revelation hardly a surprise, but the irony too good to ignore. Her secret laid bare was hardly a secret at all.
“Somethings never change. Anything else?”
“No. I didn’t make it past you.”
Amelia peered up at him through her lashes, and the corner of her mouth lifted in a smile. Though she said nothing else, Emory understood that that was her ultimate confession, the one she’d safeguarded so fiercely.
