I will kill you for this.
I believed her.
IshouldhavecalledDante.
That was the protocol. Someone breaches the house, you call the boss, you call a clean-up crew, you find out who sent them and you make the sending expensive.
Simple. Clean.
The kind of process that existed so men like me didn't have to think — just follow the steps, let the system handle the parts that required judgment and nuance and all the other things I wasn't built for.
My phone was in my back pocket. Dante's number was first on speed dial. But I didn’t do it.
I knelt there instead.
My body was giving me a full report: head throbbing where the bookend had landed, a low bass note of pain that pulsed with my heartbeat. Right forearm bleeding from the bite, the marks of her teeth already darkening into a crescent that would bruise purple by tomorrow. Left side ruined again — the stitches gonefor the second time today, the wound open and seeping through saturated gauze, blood running warm down my hip and into the waistband of my pants. Three points of damage. All hers. All earned.
I looked at her.
She was slight. Mid-twenties, maybe younger—it was hard to tell with the hair in her face and the blood on her cheekbone and the particular agelessness that came from a certain kind of life, the kind that aged you in some places and froze you in others. Her clothes were cheap. The jacket I'd grabbed—nylon, dark, the zipper missing two teeth—was the kind of thing you found at a resale shop on Milwaukee Avenue or pulled from a donation bin. Her jeans were worn thin at the knees, not fashionably, just worn, the denim going white at the stress points from bending and kneeling and doing whatever it was she did with her days. A long-sleeved shirt underneath the jacket, dark grey, cotton, the collar stretched.
Her boots were different.
They were good—leather, quality construction, the kind of sole that was built for actual use rather than appearance. But they were also loved in a way the rest of her clothes weren't. Cleaned recently. The leather worked with something, conditioned, the scuffs rubbed down. Someone had spent time on these boots. Someone who understood that good boots mattered more than good anything else, which was the understanding of a person who did a lot of walking.
Expensive once. Thrift-store now.
And then her hands.
I was still holding her wrists — both of them, gathered together in my right hand against the small of her back. Her hands were beneath mine. I could feel the bones of her wrists, thin, the tendons standing taut against my grip. But it was the knuckles I saw.
Scarred. Both hands. The skin across her knuckles was a terrain of scar tissue—white lines over brown, ridges of healed splits that had opened and closed and opened again so many times the skin had given up trying to recover properly and had just... layered. Built up. Become something harder than what it started as. The pattern wasn't even — it concentrated across the first two knuckles of each hand, the impact points, the places that met resistance first.
I knew those scars. I carried the same ones.
“So,” I finally said, “what are we going to do with you?”
Chapter 4
Cora
Theziptieswerethe cheap kind, the white plastic ones you could buy in bulk at any hardware store, the kind that dug in harder the more you pulled. I knew this because I'd pulled. Twice. The second time drew blood, a thin line of it running warm down the inside of my left wrist and pooling in my palm like something waiting to be read.
The scarf between my teeth tasted like copper. Blood. His. I'd bitten him hard enough to break the skin, hard enough to feel the give of muscle beneath my jaw, and the taste of it was still there—metallic, warm, intimate in a way that made my stomach turn.
He was gone. Had left the study five minutes ago—or ten, or three. Time had gone elastic the way it did when the adrenaline crashed and the body started cataloging damage it had been too busy to notice. My cheekbone throbbed where I'd hit the floor. A deep, slow pulse that synced with my heartbeat and sent smallbright reports up into my left eye socket every few seconds, like a signal fire nobody was going to answer.
The study was dark except for the hallway light bleeding through the open door. I could see the shapes of furniture—the desk, a bookshelf, the chair I was sitting in. On the desk, arranged with the careful deliberation of evidence at a crime scene, sat the laptop and the velvet pouch.
I had had it. All of it.
The laptop had been in my bag. The jewelry—rings, a necklace, something wrapped in tissue that felt like a brooch—had been in my jacket pocket, nestled against my ribs where Midge usually rode. I was at the window. The window that I'd spent forty minutes identifying, testing, easing open with a flathead screwdriver I'd taped to the inside of my boot. Second floor, eight-foot drop to soft ground, a clear line through the side yard to the property wall. I'd mapped it. I'd timed it. I was good.
I was seconds from gone.
And I stopped.
The anger I felt was not directed at him. Not at the zip ties or the chair or the locked house or the fact that I was trapped in Oak Brook with no phone and no weapon and no way out. The anger was for me. For the seven-year-old idiot who still lived somewhere behind my sternum and made decisions that the twenty-seven-year-old had to deal with.
