Patient. Gentle. Everything I don't deserve.
"The senator," I say finally. "Walsh. His people were asking questions."
"About what happened?"
"About where he went. About my building." I stare at the wall, unable to look at her. "It's handled now. It won't come back on you."
"I wasn't worried about me."
"You should be." My voice is harsher than I intend. "I killed a man in front of you. I've killed hundreds of men. Today I—" I stop. Breathe. "Today I killed someone else. To protect this. To protect you."
She's quiet for a moment. Then: "Who?"
"No one important. A doorman who saw too much." I laugh, and it sounds wrong. Hollow. "That's what I do, Lily. I solve problems. Quietly. Permanently."
"I know who you are."
"Do you?" I finally look at her. She's watching me with those green eyes, calm and steady, no fear in them. "Do you know who you're lying next to every night? The things I've done? The things I'm capable of?"
"Yes."
"I don't think you do." I pull away from her, stand, pace to the window. The harbor stretches out below, gray and endless. "You see the man who cooks you breakfast and holds you through your nightmares. You don't see the monster."
"You're not a monster."
"I am." I press my palm against the cold glass. "I've been a monster since I was twelve years old."
Silence.
I shouldn't say more. Should lock this down, bury it, keep the walls intact. But she's broken something in me. Cracked me open in ways I don't know how to fix.
And part of me doesn't want to fix it.
"What happened when you were twelve?" she asks softly.
I close my eyes.
"My parents."
The words come slowly. Dragged up from a place I've kept locked for thirty-eight years.
"My father was Bratva. Low-level, but connected. He fell in love with my mother when he was twenty—she was a schoolteacher, gentle, kind, everything he wasn't. They had me a year later."
I can feel her watching me. Don't turn around.
"He was obsessed with her. Possessive. Couldn't stand the thought of anyone else even looking at her." My hand curls into a fist against the glass. "And she loved him. That was the worst part. She loved him completely, even when he was cruel. Even when he hurt her."
"Leonid..."
"One night, when I was twelve, he came home convinced she was cheating on him. She wasn't—she never would have—but he'd worked himself into a rage. I heard them arguing from my bedroom. Heard her crying. Heard him accusing her of things that weren't true."
My voice is flat. Detached. The only way I can say this.
"Then I heard the gunshot."
Lily makes a small sound. I keep going.
"I ran to their room. My mother was on the floor. There was blood—" I stop. Breathe. "So much blood. My father was standing over her with the gun in his hand. He looked at me. Said,This is what love does. Remember that, Leonid. Love destroys everything it touches."
