That was the problem with the body, the analyst said, with something almost like sympathy, almost like a hand on my shoulder. The body did not understand right and wrong, good and bad. The body understood warm and cold, fed and starving, touched and not-touched, and the body had, in the last six hours, been touched in a way that was not violent for the first time in two years, and the body did not have the moral vocabulary to file that experience correctly. The body wanted to go back to where the warm thing was. The brain had to walk the body to the bus station, because the body, left to itself, would have walked back to the club.
I crossed an empty intersection.
The bus station was in front of me now, a low concrete building with the lights on inside, the kind of harsh fluorescence that made everyone in it look like a fugitive. There was a vagrant asleep against the wall outside, wrapped in a sleeping bag I recognized as the kind they handed out at the Catholic place on Wabash. I clocked him. I clocked the entrance. I clocked the man behind the glass at the counter, who was on his phone and not looking up.
I had to disappear again.
I had done it before.
I could do it again.
But he didn’t let me.
He stepped out of a doorway half a block from the station.
I stopped walking before I had registered who it was. The man from the club.
He stood in the half-light with both hands open and lifted to chest height, the way you lifted hands at a dog you did not know, and he held very still. My pulse relocated to my throat.
“You’re safe,” he said.
His voice was lower than it had been in the alley. Quieter, somehow, in the empty street than it had been over the music. The Sicilian was there, soft, threaded under the English, like silk under wool.
I did not say anything.
He kept his hands where I could see them. He did not step out of the doorway. Everything about him was non-threatening in the most calculated way.
“My name is Pietro,” he said.
The name went into me like a coin into a slot.
Pietro.
For a moment, I looked at him. Under the streetlight, gently watching me.
He was beautiful. Not in the way of models or actors, that flat dimension of veiny arms and symmetrical smiles, but in the way of the gunmetal Ferraris I used to see outside the Loop: tight lines, engineered aggression, a kind of raw grace that made your mouth dry and your hands itch. He was so fucking beautiful it pissed me off. The coat was black, tailored, and fell just long enough to look expensive in a way that was hard to put a number to. The collar was turned up, not for style but because it was cold, and the cold made his face sharper, brought the bones to the front and set his eyes deeper in their sockets. The eyes were black in the streetlight, the color of espresso before you stirred the crema in, but they were lit from behind, alive, and whenhe looked at me now it felt less like eye contact and more like stepping under a bright lamp at a crime scene.
The mouth was there, too. The mouth I’d spent an hour pretending not to think about. It was a contradiction—soft, pink, resting almost gently, but anchored at both corners by the suggestion of something harder. When he spoke, the lower lip caught for just a second on the top row of teeth, and I remembered how it had looked when he’d been smiling at the bar, that half-crooked thing that showed you all the secrets he wasn’t going to tell.
He waited. No hurry, no push. Said nothing more.
My heart pounded.
Why was danger always so compelling?
“We have them,” he said. Quiet. Careful. He spoke the way you spoke to an animal that you knew could outrun you if it decided to. “There were two of them. We have them both.”
I did not answer.
“We’re going to question them tonight.” A pause, a beat, the small attention of a man who was not going to fill the silence for me. “Do you want to be there? You have the right, if you choose.”
I shook my head. I did not trust my voice.
He absorbed it. He absorbed it the way he had absorbed the bite—without complaint, without commentary, like a man for whom an answer was an answer.
“All right,” he said.
He did not move.
