"Tomorrow," he says. "I'll be at the restaurant."
"You're always at the restaurant."
"Tomorrow I'll stay again."
My finger starts tapping again, against the doorframe, behind my back.
"Goodnight," he says.
"Yeah, sure."
He turns and walks away. I watch him until he rounds the corner and disappears. Then I go inside, lock the door, and stand in my kitchen with my back against the counter and my hand on my mouth.
My lips are swollen. I can still taste his coffee. My hip is sore where his hand gripped it and my jaw is warm where his palm held it and between my legs I'm aching in a way that is going to make sleeping impossible unless I take care of it.
I don't take off my jacket because it smells like him. I don't bother to turn on the lights. I walk to my bed and sit down and the pill bottle is on the nightstand and I look at it and I don't think about it. I don't think about Linda not calling back. I don't think about the flashes or the fragments or the chemical smell or the dark red.
All that fills the space in my head is his mouth on my neck and the sound he made when he kissed me and the sentence that stopped everything.
Because I need you to know who I am first.
I don't know what that means, but I'm sure as hell going to find out.
My finger taps my bottom lip, right where his teeth grazed me as my fingers slip between my legs.
It doesn’t take long before I finish and that triggers the rush that causes me to fall asleep in my jacket with the taste of him still on my tongue.
Chapter Eleven: Carmelo
Shehasn'tsleptinthree days.
I can see it from the apartment window before I even cross the street and head into the restaurant. The way she moves through the dining room tonight is off by a fraction. Half a beat behind her usual rhythm. Her turns are wider, her plate grip adjusted, compensating. She's running on caffeine and willpower and the last of whatever the pills are still doing in her system. The cracks are starting to show.
She called Linda's phone again this morning. I know because the cloned line logged it. Eleven seconds. She hung up before the voicemail kicked in. That's six calls and two texts in five days with no response. She hasn't panicked yet, but the pill bottle on her nightstand has two, maybe three left, and when they're gone, the real countdown starts.
Danila called an hour ago. The handler assigned to Grace's file hasn't flagged anything yet. The Marinos' next scheduled check-in isn't for twenty-two days, so the silence is still within normal parameters. But the Bratva's supply chain contacts are reporting increased activity from the placement network's logistics arm. Vehicles moving. Safe houses being swept. The Harrisons' restructuring is putting pressure on the whole system, and the system is responding by tightening, pulling inward, securing assets.
"You have weeks, not months to get her to safety, if that," Danila said. "Whatever you're planning with her, plan faster."
I'm not planning anything. That's the problem. I killed the Marinos, I cut the supply, and now I'm sitting in a restaurant eating pork shoulder and watching a woman fall apart in slow motion. I don't have a plan for what comes next because the plan was always justbe there, and being there isn't a strategy. It's a hope dressed up as intention.
She comes to my table at six fifteen. Coffee, pork shoulder. The circles under her eyes are darker than yesterday. Her skin has a grayish cast that wasn't there a week ago. Her tapping is faster at baseline, the idle rhythm that used to be slow and spaced now running at double speed against whatever surface her finger finds.
"You look tired," I frown as I take a sip of my coffee.
She blinks. "I'm fine."
"You're not."
Her finger taps the edge of my plate. Fast. "Since when do you talk in full sentences?"
"Since you stopped sleeping."
She stares at me. Her mouth opens, closes. Something moves across her face that I can't read, and I can read everyone. It's not anger. It's not surprise. It's the expression of a woman who has been holding herself together with both hands and someone just noticed the effort, and she doesn't know whether to be grateful or furious.
"How do you know I'm not sleeping?" she asks.
Because I watch your lights from across the street. Because I've tracked the time they go off every night for weeks, and for the last three nights they've stayed on past two AM. Because your bedroom window faces the street and I can see the blue glow of your phone screen through the curtain at three in the morning. Because I know you better than anyone alive and you don't know I exist outside this restaurant and walking you home. You have no idea who I am.
