The house is too quiet.
After the noise of the event, the music, the voices, and the human density, the silence of the entrance hall when Dante brings me home lands like a held breath.
I stand there for a moment after the door closes.
Dante has already disappeared somewhere to make calls.
I go to the living room off the main corridor and sit down and do not turn on the television and do not pour a drink and do not do any of the things a normal person might do while waiting, because I am not waiting. I am thinking.
The northern transport run.
Dante said it in the car, just those words, clipped and flat, not for my benefit but not hidden either. And the thing that is sitting in my chest right now, cold and specific and getting colder, is the memory of what I typed into the burner phone two days ago.
I sit with my hands in my lap and I look at the wall, I think about my father, Killian O'Rourke and what they needed that information for, and the answer that arrives is not complicated, but it sits in my stomach like something swallowed wrong.
That was me.
Whoever planned tonight needed to know the exact width of that gap and I handed it to them while Rafael slept forty feet away.
I betrayed him.
I press my fingers to my mouth, breathe through my nose and stay very still until the room stops spinning.
Laura. I think about Laura because that's the only thought that has ever made any of this livable. Her face. The nightlight she won't admit she needs. The way she grips the seat edge when she's scared. I think about the footage my father showed me and I make myself remember every second of it.
It doesn't help as much as it used to.
I hear the car before I see the lights. Then voices in the entrance hall—Enzo's first, and then another that I feel in my sternumbefore I've consciously registered it as Rafael's. I'm on my feet before I've decided to be and I'm in the entrance hall doorway when they come through the front door.
Enzo has one hand at Rafael's back. Rafael is upright, moving under his own power, but his left hand is pressed flat against his side and his shirt is bloody.
My heart does something I don't have time to examine.
"What happened—" I start.
"It's handled," Rafael says, and his eyes move over me with the flat assessment of a man taking inventory, checking I'm present and undamaged. Nothing in his face that resembles relief at finding me here. Nothing that resembles anything.
"You're bleeding!" I gasp.
"I'm aware."
Enzo looks between us. "He needs it cleaned."
"I know where the kit is," I say.
Rafael looks at me. "I don't need?—"
"Sit down," I say. "Please."
I see he wants to argue or something in that line, but Enzo puts a hand on his shoulder and says something in his ear that I don't catch. Rafael's jaw tightens and he moves toward the sitting room without another word.
I rush to get the kit.
When I come back he's in the chair nearest the window, shirt pulled away from the wound. He's examining it himself with the detached interest of a man assessing damage to something he owns, not particularly bothered. Actually unbothered, which is somehow more unsettling.
Enzo takes one look at the scene, at me with the kit, at Rafael in the chair, and makes a decision. "I'll be in the kitchen," he says. He leaves. The door doesn't fully close behind him.
I pull the low table in front of Rafael's chair and sit on the edge of it and open the kit.
