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“You’re not processing. You’re somewhere else entirely, and you’ve been there since this morning.” I lean on the counter across from her. “Tell me where.”

Her hand goes to the phone next to the glass. Stops. Goes again, and this time she slides it across the marble like it’s heavier than it should be.

I read it.

Stop looking. You’re too good for your own good. Kalliopi was good too, right up until she wasn’t. You remember what they did to her. Walk away while it’s still an option.

The second message sits underneath, five words, and those are the ones that go through me colder than anything Stavros said standing in my own entryway nine nights ago.

Ask Adrianos about his son.

I set the phone down with more care than it needs. The alternative is putting it through the wall, and Elena’s already had enough scares this week.

“When did you get this?”

“Last night. After you left the office.” Her voice has gone quieter than I’ve heard it. “The first message I understood fine. But the second part—” She stops, and Elena Markides not finishing a sentence is its own kind of alarm. “I didn’t know you have a son.”

I look past her, at the gap in the cabinet where Penelope keeps the cereal with cinnamon that nobody’s eaten since Nikos went to Greece.

“His name was Nikos,” I say. “He was sixteen.”

Blood drains off her face the moment she hears the past tense.

“He was on a boat with my parents, off Cape Sounion, the same night I met you at Lux. There was an attack on the water while I was there with you. The boat burned to the line, and there was nothing left to pull out of it.” I keep my voice neutral. “They found the wolf-crown burned into the deck plate where the fire didn’t reach. The same mark that’s on the bodies Kalliopi died trying to trace.”

Her hand comes up to her mouth. Not theatrical, just there, holding something back, and her eyes go too bright, and she blinks against it.

“You buried your whole family while I was sleeping down the hall,” she whispers. “I was here. In your house. Eating your eggs and arguing with you about decimals and you’d just lost—” She doesn’t finish that one either. “I sat across from you for days and missed the biggest thing in the room, again, exactly like before, exactly like Kalliopi, and I’m so tired of being the person who finds the fraud but misses the person.”

“It wasn’t yours to find. I made sure of that.”

“That’s not the same as it didn’t happen.” She comes around the island, and for a second I think she’s going to do the thing people do, the soft voice and the hand reaching for mine, like grief is something you can treat with a compress. She gets halfway there and stops, reads whatever’s on my face, and her hand drops back to her side instead. “I’m not going to tell you I’m sorry for your loss. I got about forty versions of that at Kalliopi’s graveside and every single one of them slid off me like rain off a coat. I know exactly how worthless that sentence is.”

“Good. I’ve no use for it.”

“So what do you have use for?” she asks. “Is there something I can actually do? Real question. You don’t have to answer it the way people answer that question, with the thing they think you want to hear.”

I look at her properly then, at the curls that gave up on whatever she did to them this morning, at the eyes still too bright and refusing to spill, at the mouth that’s argued with me in every room I’ve put her in since the night a stranger handed her a drink at a bar.

“You can give me somewhere else to be,” I say. “For a while. That’s the entire request.”

“Somewhere else.” She tilts her head, and even now, even with her face still wet around the edges, the corner of her mouth twitches like she can’t help it. “You do realize there’s a whole category of options that don’t involve me. Television. A long walk. I’m told some men enjoy wine for this exact purpose, and you have an entire cabinet of it that I’ve personally watched you not drink.”

“I don’t want wine.”

“Of course you don’t. Wine doesn’t argue back.” She’s closer now, and the wet shine in her eyes is already losing the fight to the look that gets her into trouble, the one that had her halfway into Berezin’s office before her fear caught up with her. “You skipped a lot of perfectly functional grief management techniques and landed on me. I’m choosing to take that as a compliment, mostly because the alternative is that I’m cheaper than therapy, and I refuse to be cheaper than anything.”

“You’re not cheap. You cost me a fortune in pants alone.”

“You had me kidnapped in my pajamas, so that one’s all on you.” She’s an arm’s length away now, and her gaze drops to my mouth for half a second before she drags it back up, annoyed at herself for it. “For the record, I know what I’m doing right now, and usually by this point I’ve got six reasons lined up for why it’s a bad idea. Tonight I’ve got nothing. Not one. So either I’ve lost my edge or I just don’t care, and honestly I’m too tired to find out which, so you should feel honored.”

“I’m overwhelmed.”

“You are not, you’re standing there being unbearable, but I’ll allow that too.” She closes the last of the distance herself, and when she kisses me it isn’t gentle, not the careful thing I half expected for a man who just told her his son is dead. She kisses me like she’s furious, at the message, at whoever sent it, at not seeing what was sitting across the table from her, and I get a hand into her hair and the rest of it goes quiet, all at once, the wolf-crown and the wall and the empty room down the hall replaced entirely by the heat of her mouth and the small sound she makes when I pull her in closer.

“For the record,” she breathes against my jaw, “this is going under ‘distraction,’ not ‘comfort.’ I want to make that clear.”

“Noted.”