“Two days,” she echoes, covering my hand with hers. “And then we figure out what comes after.”
I don’t answer. I just hold her tighter and listen to the night settle around the little stone house.
For the first time in twenty years, the dark doesn’t feel empty. It feels full of her.
And whatever comes after Sicily; her brothers, my contracts, the world that wants to pull us apart…I already know I won’t let it.
She is mine now.
And I’m hers.
After she falls asleep, I sit in the chair by the window with the pistol on my knee and the night arranges itself into the oldest job I know. A door. A principal. A man between them.
Except it’s different now, and I spend the dark hours studying how.
I’ve guarded people I was paid to guard and I felt nothing. I sat outside a minister's bedroom for nine nights once and couldn’t have told you the color of his eyes. I know the color of hers in four different lights. I know the sound she makes when she surfaces from sleep, half a syllable, like a question. I know that she is too calm, that she has been too calm since the compound, that a week of terror is packed away inside her the way I packed twenty years into a vault, and that vaults don’t hold. Mine didn't. Hers won't. And when hers fails, when the storm she is holdingoff finally makes landfall, I intend to be standing in it with her, and that intention isn’t professional.
This can't happen. I run the assessment anyway, out of discipline, the way you check a weapon you already know is loaded. She is an Orlov. The only sister, the center of a family that could quite possibly have me erased with a phone call. A woman whose world is a warm kitchen with singing in it. I’m the thing families like hers hire and then wash their hands of. I have a body count instead of a biography.
But she touched every scar I have and asked for the story instead of the exit. She says my name like it’s worth something, like it’s a place she has decided to live.Yakob, stay with me, on a vineyard in Sicily with my blood on her hands.Yakob, in the dark of this room, a thread of sound with her whole life behind it. Nobody has ever said my name like that.
The moon works its way across the shutter slat. The stripe of light climbs the wall, touches the cot, lays itself across her open hand at the edge of the mattress.
I could still do it. Deliver her, take the balance of the fee, and be a rumor by nightfall. It’s the correct move. It’s the move I’ve made after every job for twenty years, and it kept me alive, if that’s the word for what I was doing.
I look at her hand in the moonlight and I know I am not going to make it.
Falling is the wrong word for this. Falling is fast and has a bottom. This is more like the tide coming in over a man who sat down on the sand and told himself he would move in a minute. It’s slow and consuming.
Another day. Then a boat, a plane, five brothers, and a world where her life resumes.
I watch the track. I watch the door. I watch the rise and fall of her back, six seconds in, seven out.
The gravity of her, I thought, like I was describing a hazard.
It isn't a hazard. It's the first true north I've had in twenty years, and I've already set my course by it.
Iris
The morning after the torchlight, I am magnificently fine.
I want that on the record. I wake up on the bed roll with the sun coming through the shutter slat in one clean gold stripe, and Yakob is already gone, which would have frightened me two days ago and now just means the world is running on schedule. The bar is off the door. There's water in the pot beside Dmitri and a note that isn't a note, just a small pebble laid across the map at the point of the ridge above where I know the house to be.
So I don't worry. I’m fine.
I light Dmitri on the first try, which he and I both find suspicious. I boil the water to wash in. I do my sun salutations on the warm stone outside the front door, breathing the way the app used to tell me to back when my biggest problem was a man named Dave who described himself as an entrepreneur in the field of vibes. I narrate the whole morning to myself in my head, cheerful, running commentary, the way I've narrated every morning of this island while I make coffee.
I take a sip of the coffee and immediately pull a face. It's dreadful. Bitter enough to make my eyes water and somehow tasting faintly of ash, like somebody waved a coffee bean over hot water and called it a day. I should put it down, but the mug is warm between my hands and, after everything, there's something comforting about that.
Besides, the view is worth suffering through almost anything.
The little terrace sits high above Lipari, where the island tumbles down the hillside in a maze of whitewashed houses with faded shutters and terracotta roofs, all spilling towards a harbor so brilliantly blue it almost doesn't look real. The sea catches the morning sun like someone has scattered diamonds across its surface, little fishing boats rocking lazily on the water while ferries drift in and out of the port carrying people who have absolutely no idea how lucky they are to call this place home. Bright pink bougainvillea climbs over ancient stone walls; olive trees twist themselves into impossible shapes against the volcanic cliffs. Somewhere below, church bells ring softly through the warm air, blending with the breeze that rustles through the leaves.
It's beautiful in a way that sneaks up on you. Not polished or perfect, just... loved. Like generations of people have quietly cared for this little island until every flower box, every winding street and every weathered doorway became part of its soul.
I think that's what hurts the most.
Before all this, I'd have been the first one suggesting we book a little villa somewhere like this. I'd have dragged Grace into tiny boutiques, convinced Katya to spend far too much money on handmade ceramics she definitely didn't need, persuaded Tanya that yes, we absolutely should stop for gelato even though we'd only just had lunch, and laughed as Ma haggled with some poor market stall owner who never stood a chance. Liam would have pretended he wanted to go home while carrying everyone's shopping bags, Killian would have grumbled about tourists before buying ice creams for all the children, and by sunset we'd have been squeezed around a restaurant table far too small for our family, and eaten everything put in front of us.
