Page 43 of The Last Dance

I thought about it. “Both,” I said. “You were right about her.”

He shrugged, but it was the shrug of someone who has run out of room for blame.

I let the silence build. The atrium was designed for echoes, for the kind of hush that magnifies every small sound and swallows the big ones. I let the next words ride on it, “No one will hurt you here.”

He gave me a look, sideways. “You can’t promise that.”

I shrugged. “It’s the only thing worth promising.”

We sat like that, the two of us, for longer than made sense. Iren with his blank book, me with the weight of a week’s worth of decisions I couldn’t undo.

Above us, the glass ceiling sent sun in through the haze, casting pale geometry on the marble. Somewhere in the east corridor, the rotation swept by: two men, right on schedule. The sound of their boots faded fast.

Iren finally spoke. “Are you going to ask if I’m okay?”

“No,” I said. “Because you’re not.”

He let out a breath, half a laugh, and picked up the book again. “You’re not so great at small talk, are you?”

“I never had to be,” I said.

He nodded, approving. “It suits you.”

I watched him watch the light, his eyes following the slow creep of a sunbeam across the tile. There was no fear in his face, only the practiced neutrality of someone who had learned the rules of every new room by watching who got punished first.

I said, “You don’t have to be afraid here.”

He looked up. “Then what should I be?”

I wanted to say “careful,” or “quiet,” or “mine,” but none of those felt right. Instead, I said, “Alive,” I said.

He smiled. “I can do that.”

I got up. The suit felt tighter than it should have, the fabric resisting the movement like a warning. I left him there, in the sun, cross-legged and silent and more dangerous than he looked.

By the time I reached the far end of the atrium, he was already lost in the next page, or pretending to be. I didn’t look back, but I knew he was watching my reflection in the glass.

The promise to her father was over. The next debt belonged to me alone.

I thought it would end there.

It never did.

The silence after that conversation was not a silence, not really. It was the intake of breath before the next shot. I was already three corridors away, halfway up the stairs to the mezzanine, when I heard Iren’s voice at my back. “Wait.”

I stopped. Turned. He had not moved from the bench, but the book was closed, hands braced on either side of it, as if it might decide to run.

He reached into the middle of the book, the pages parting along a seam already worn in, and fished out a piece of paper folded to the size of a matchbox. He unfolded it, smoothed it flat on his thigh, and then, with the same care a man uses to handle a live grenade, set it on the stone bench between us.

He didn’t look up. “I should have given it to you before,” he said. “But I needed to see if it scared me first. I wanted to know the answer before you did, because after you read it, it would stop being mine.”

I walked back, slow. Sat down, the letter exactly centered between us, white against gray stone. I didn’t reach for it. “What is it?”

He tapped it, once. “A letter. From Parsons. Someone at the club—Carmine, probably—grabbed my mail before the landlord trashed the rest. He passed it to me through the back gate. It was slipped under my old door the day after the shooting.”

I picked it up. It was thin, creased into quarters, the cheap paper fuzzed at the edges. The address was handwritten, block letters, nothing else.

I opened it.