He blinks. Barely. A micro-movement that tells me he expected more resistance. An argument, maybe. Tears. Questions. The things normal people do when a man covered in someone else's blood tells them to leave everything behind and follow him into the dark.
But I'm not normal people. I've done this before. And the fact that he doesn't know that yet is the only card I've got left.
I pick up my coat and walk past him into the corridor. I don't look at the walls. I don't look at the floor. I learned a long time ago that you don't look at the evidence of violence when you're walking through it, because looking makes it real and real makes you freeze and freezing gets you killed.
I look forward. I walk fast. I don't run, because running attracts attention, and attention is the enemy of women who are leaving.
Claudio falls into step behind me. Close. Not touching, but close enough that I can feel the heat of him against my back, and the weight of his presence is both a threat and a shield, and I haven't decided which one I need more.
The garage is underground. Cold, oil-stained concrete, fluorescent lighting that buzzes at a frequency that reverberates in my skull. Four black vehicles. A man leaning against one of them.
I see him and my step falters for half a second.
Same face. Same jaw, same cheekbones, same height. But everything else is different. This man is looser, warmer, wearing a hoodie and sweats like he rolled out of bed and came straight here. His hair is messy. His posture is open. He's watching Claudio with an expression that has no business being on the face of a man in a mafia garage at three in the morning.
Worry. Real, naked, unfiltered worry.
A twin. I saw him my first night here, loud and laughing in a corridor, and I'd filed the face away. Same genetics, completely different animal. Claudio is a closed fist. This one is an open hand.
They talk. Low voices, not meant for me, but the garage echoes and I catch pieces.Cash. Burners. Safe houses.Emilio hands Claudio a duffel bag and a leather jacket. Claudio puts the jacket on, and the look on his face when he does is the first real expression I've seen him wear. Not anger, not calculation.Discomfort. The specific discomfort of a man accepting something soft from someone he loves and not knowing where to put the feeling.
Emilio looks at me. Once. Brief. His eyes are the same pale green as Claudio's, but warmer. There's a question in them that he doesn't ask out loud, and I don't know what the question is, but I hold his gaze until he nods. Not at me. To himself. Like he's confirming something he already suspected.
Then he grips Claudio's shoulder, says something I can't hear, and walks back into the dark.
Claudio opens the passenger door. I get in. The seat is cold leather, and the car smells new and, faintly, the cologne from the jacket Emilio gave him. Claudio throws the bags in the trunk, slides behind the wheel, and starts the engine without a word.
We pull out of the garage. Through a gate, past guards who don't ask questions, onto a road that feeds into the highway. The compound shrinks in the side mirror until it's just a cluster of lights behind us, and then it's gone.
I watch the road. Strip malls and gas stations and the amber blur of passing headlights. The highway is empty at this hour, just us and the truckers and the occasional taxi heading somewhere that matters more than where we're going.
I count the exits. I can't help it. Every off-ramp is a possibility, a direction, a way out. I've been counting exits since the night I left. Seventeen exits between the apartment and the bus station. I counted every singly fucking one because counting gave me something to focus on besides the split in my lip and the bruise on my ribs and the shaking in my hands that didn't stop until I was two hundred miles away.
I'm counting again.
Claudio glances at me. I feel it more than see it, the brief turn of his head, the weight of his attention.
"You're counting," he says.
I go still.
"Exits," he says.
My throat tightens. Nobody has ever noticed that. Nobody has ever watched me closely enough to see the pattern, the way my eyes track each green sign, the small movement of my lips as I log the number. Nobody has ever looked at me and seen the thing underneath the thing.
"Habit," I say.
He doesn't push. He turns back to the road. His hands are steady on the wheel, ten and two, and the cut on his lip has stopped bleeding but the blood is still there, dried dark at the corner of his mouth.
Miles pass. Ten. Twenty. The city falls away and the road opens up and the dark gets bigger. I roll down the window an inch and the air that comes in is cold and clean and smells like nothing. Like empty space. Like the absence of walls.
I pull my cigarette from behind my ear.
Claudio reaches into the center console without looking. Pulls out a lighter. Cheap yellow Bic, the kind you buy in packs from a gas station. He holds it out with his eyes on the road.
I take it. Our fingers don't touch, but the space between them is small. An inch, maybe less. Close enough that I can feel the warmth coming off his hand, close enough that if either of us moved a fraction, skin would meet skin.
Neither of us moves.
