Page 85 of The Dangerous Dance

"Hello," he says.

I look at him.

"It looks worse than it⁠—"

"Don't," I say. "Don't tell me it looks worse than it is."

He closes his mouth.

I cross the room. I stop in front of the desk and I look at his face with the focused attention of someone conducting an inventory, which I am. I reach out and I take his jaw in my hand — carefully, because the jaw is also involved in the topography — and I turn his face slightly to see the left side in the lamp light.

"Mackenzie was right," I say. "The Italian meeting is going to be a problem."

"Marco's seen worse."

"On other people," I say. "Not on the man who called the meeting."

He looks at me with the expression that is not quite amusement and is adjacent to it. "It's fine, Nadia."

"It's not fine, it's—" I stop. I look at his face. At the specific evidence of what this morning cost him. I think about a courtyard and two brothers and thirty years of shared history being put through something that hurt both of them on purpose because it was the only thing that would work, and something about the deliberateness of it — the willingness to take the damage because the outcome required it — does something to me that I'm not going to examine in this doorway.

"Are you crazy," I say.

"Probably," he says.

"You fought your brother. Your actual brother. For—" I stop. "What exactly. What was worth this."

"The family," he says. "The operation. The alliance." He holds my gaze. "The thing I'm trying to build."

I look at him.

"And other things," he says. Quietly. In the register that isn't for the room.

"What other things."

He looks at me steadily. "Someone once told me that doing things for someone he's in love with changes the math on what's worth it." He holds my gaze. "I've been thinking about that."

The room is very quiet.

My hand is still at his jaw.

I take it away.

And then I bring it back and I use it, open-palmed, against the undamaged side of his face, which produces a sound that is not hard — I calibrate it specifically, not hard — but which is real and which says the thing I need it to say.

He goes still.

He looks at me.

"You're so stupid," I say. My voice comes out differently than I planned, which is to say it comes out like it means something. "You're so — what were you thinking, saying that here, like that, after everything, when your face looks like—" I stop. I take his face in both hands and I kiss him, which is the thing that was always going to happen after the slap, which is why the slap happened first, because some things need the space created for them before they can occur.

He kisses me back with the careful quality of a man being mindful of his own damage, which would be funny under other circumstances and which is, under these circumstances, something I find I can't think about too directly.

When we separate I stay close. His hands are at my waist.

"You're in love with me," I say. It comes out flat. Not a question. Not an accusation. Just the specific weight of a fact being placed between two people.

"Yes," he says. The same flatness. The same specific weight.