I tried work, whiskey, and the numbness of physical confrontation and none of it had put a dent in the pain in the left side of my chest that had taken up residence the morning I watched her walk out of my New York property and hadn't moved since.
Renzo comes out of the factory and he looks at me and he asks, "Home?"
"Drink first," I tell him.
He nods and he reaches into his jacket as he comes around to the driver's side and he holds something out across the roof of the car, it's an envelope.
I take it, get in and I open it under the interior light and I look at the wedding invitation. I sit with it for a moment and then I laugh.
Nathalie was marrying Hartley Jr. after all.
"She says she wants you there," Renzo says, pulling out onto the road. "She said you owe it to her."
I look at the invitation.
"I've been meaning to ask you something," I say, keeping my voice level and my eyes on the card. "Our tech team ran an unusual access request through the New York servers about three weeks ago." I pause. "And you've made quite a few trips to New York in the last month."
Renzo is quiet.
"You're helping her," I say.
"I didn't want to hide it from you," he answers carefully. "But she was very?—"
"Is she safe?" The question comes before I think it. "Is she alright?"
"She's alright." He pauses. "She had me send some of our people over to her. Disguised as maids for the wedding."
I look out the window.
I want to ask if she has mentioned me but I stop myself.
I don't deserve the answer to any of those questions.
My father sat across a table from her father and made an arrangement that put her mother in the ground and I had kept that information for years and only told her when I no longer had a choice. I had used her before I knew her and continued using her.
And now she was marrying a man whose legs I had broken while she was unconscious and somewhere in the sequence of events that constituted our acquaintance I had managed to fall for her so completely that a wedding invitation to watch her marry someone else felt like a stab.
I turn the invitation over in my hands.
"Stai scherzando con me?" I ask Renzo. Are you mocking me?
"No."
"It's better if I stay away from her," I tell him. "From all of it. I've done enough damage to her life. Keller seems to have stopped stirring up the families. It's better this way."
Was it? I tell myself that it is. Keller suddenly stopped reaching out to the families, immediately she returned. I want to tell myself that's all I care about. Peace.
Renzo drives for a moment without speaking and then he says quietly, "She gathered evidence. Her father's crimes, years of them. She had me access the records and wipe everything that connected us to Phillip's operations." He pauses. "The rest I handed to her. I think she's planning to use it."
I look at the invitation. Her wedding was in a week.
"She's going after him," I say.
"That's what I think," Renzo replies. "Which means she's walking into something dangerous with five of our people disguised as maids and whatever plan she has put together, alone, and nobody who knows what they're doing standing close enough to be useful."
I don't deserve her. That is simply true, I know it and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
But I can stand between her and what's coming.
