"Could you?"
"Haven't tried." She pushes the bottle toward me. "Sit. Drink. Commiserate."
I pour myself a glass and drop into the chair across from her. The whiskey burns going down, cheap and harsh, exactly what we deserve. The kind of whiskey you drink when you want to feel more than grief.
"Kira's taking it hard," Marlee says. "She… uh… she said watching his eyes dim was the worst thing she’s ever had to see. Held his hand while he..." She stops. Takes a drink. "She keeps saying she should have done more. Kept pressure on the wound. Found a way to move him. Carried him on her back if she had to."
"There was nothing she could have done. Gut wound like that, no medevac, no surgeon. He was dead the moment the bullet hit. We both know that."
"I know. She knows too, somewhere deep down. But knowing doesn't help." Marlee's fingers tighten on the glass, knuckles going white. "Fifteen years I knew that man. Fifteen years of watching each other's backs, pulling each other out of shit situations, building something that looked almost like a life. He taught me how to read opponents. Taught me how to survive when everything in me wanted to give up. And now he's in the ground and I'm drinking bad whiskey in a stranger's kitchen, trying to figure out how to keep going without him."
"Marlee..."
"Don't." Her voice is sharp, but her eyes are glassy. "Don't apologize. Don't explain. Don't tell me you made the right choice or that Dom wanted it this way or any of that bullshit people say at funerals. I know all of it already. Doesn't make it hurt less."
"I wasn't going to say any of that."
"Then what?"
I stare at the amber liquid in my glass. Watch it catch the light from the single bulb overhead. The shadows in the kitchen are deep, pressing in from all sides.
"I was going to say that I miss him too. And that I don't know how to do this without him. He was the one who always knewwhat to say. Who could look at a situation and see the angles nobody else saw. I've been running on instinct for years, and half of those instincts are things he taught me."
Marlee is quiet. The kitchen settles around us, old wood creaking, pipes humming, the distant sound of wind against the windows. Somewhere upstairs, someone coughs. Thiago, probably, still recovering from his shoulder wound.
"He talked about you, you know. All the time." Her voice has softened, the edges worn down by whiskey and exhaustion. "When we were in the pits, when things got bad, he'd tell stories about this kid he'd taken under his wing. How stubborn you were. How you never knew when to quit. How you were going to be something someday, if you could just survive long enough to figure out what."
"He said that?"
"Every time you won a fight. Every time you did something stupid and lived anyway." A ghost of a smile crosses her face, there and gone. "He was proud of you, Asher. Proud of the man you became. Proud of how you built yourself after the pits, found people to fight for, found a reason to keep going. And he would have hated seeing you tear yourself apart over his death."
"Hard not to. I left him there. I walked away while he was still breathing."
"You let him go. There's a difference." She leans forward, elbows on the table, eyes finding mine in the dim light. "Dom knewthe risk. He always knew the risk, better than any of us. When that bullet hit, he started calculating. How long he had. What he could do with the time remaining. And he decided that the best use of his last minutes was making sure you didn't throw away your life trying to save someone who couldn't be saved."
"He told me to go to Jinx."
"Because he saw what you couldn't. That you'd found something worth living for. Something worth fighting for beyond just survival." Marlee drains her glass, pours another. The bottle is getting low. "I didn't like it. Still don't, if I'm honest. The Harrison kid almost killed you. Part of me wants to put a knife in his throat every time I look at him. Finish what he started in that pit, make him pay for all the blood he spilled."
"But?"
"But Dom believed in you. Believed in what you two could be. Believed it enough to die for it." She shrugs, a tired roll of her shoulders. "And I trusted Dom more than I trust my own judgment. So if he thought Jinx was worth dying for, maybe there's something there I'm not seeing. Maybe you found something real in all this mess."
"There is."
"Yeah." She studies me over the rim of her glass. "I'm starting to figure that out. The way he looks at you when he thinks no one's watching. Like you're the only solid thing in a world madeof smoke. The way he took that bullet without hesitating, didn't even think about it, just moved. That's not nothing."
"It's everything."
"Don't get sappy on me, Madden. I've had enough emotions for one lifetime." But her voice is lighter now, some of the weight lifted. "Just... don't waste it. What Dom gave you. Don't let guilt eat you alive when you could be building something instead. Honor his memory by living, not by drowning in regret."
"I'm trying, Marls, but I also want to kill shit. Revenge is too sweet for what they’ve done, but I’m trying."
She stands, takes the bottle with her. "I'm going to finish this on the porch and pretend the stars give a shit about our problems. You should go back to bed. Your boy's probably wondering where you are."
She's gone before I can respond, the kitchen door swinging shut behind her.
I sit alone in the quiet, turning her words over in my mind.
