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He doesn’t answer, and I don’t make him.
18
Adrianos
“Make sure she’s taken care of.”
Evander doesn’t ask who, because he’s been with me long enough to know that when I call after dark with three words and no greeting, there’s only ever one thing it’s about. I’m at the office window, the city laid out below it the same as every night for fifteen years, and tonight it looks like nothing, lights on a grid, money moving under glass.
“The daughter,” I say anyway, because Evander deserves the rest of it even without asking. “Petros’s girl. Whatever she needs gets covered, tuition, the apartment, anything sitting on her father’s name that’s about to become her problem. Quietly. No note, no name, nothing that traces back here.”
“Done.” A pause, then the careful pitch Evander gets when he’s deciding whether to say a thing. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“I know.”
I end the call, and the quiet that follows isn’t one I usually let sit. I’m not a man who comes apart. I haven’t, not for the woman I lost over a decade ago, not for my parents, not for Nikos, not in any way another person could point at and name. I process, and then I move on to the next problem. That’s the whole architecture of how I’ve survived everything that’s tried to take me apart, and it’s holding tonight too, technically, because I’m standing here breathing and the city’s still down there and nothing in me has split open.
But Petros is dead because he came to me. I didn’t pull a trigger. I didn’t give an order. OB6 did this, the same hand that’s been signing my name to the wreckage for years, and there’s a version of tonight where that’s the whole of it, where the blood belongs to the people who spilled it.
That version doesn’t hold up. If OB6 hadn’t gotten to him first, I would have, the moment he stopped being useful and started being a risk. I wouldn’t have lost an hour over it. The only difference between the men who killed him and me is timing, and timing doesn’t mean anything to a man with a hole in his head and a daughter who lost her father.
The door opens behind me. I don’t turn, because I know her step by now, quick and a little uneven, like three things are competing for her attention and her feet are getting whatever’s left.
“Hey.” Elena’s voice, quieter than this morning, none of the speed she’s usually running at. “I’m not going to ask if you’re okay, because I already know what you’ll say, and we’ll both have to sit through the part where you say it.”
“I’m fine.”
“See, there it is, right on schedule.” She crosses to stand beside me at the window, arms crossed, looking at the same lights I’ve been looking at. “I just didn’t want you up here by yourself tonight. That’s the whole reason I came. Not an audit, not a follow-up question, nothing about this morning. Just that.”
I turn from the window, and she’s closer than I expected, close enough that the city behind her blurs and she’s the only thing left sharp. “I’d have done it,” I confess. “If they hadn’t gotten to him first, eventually I would have, and I wouldn’t have agonized over it. That’s the truth.”
“But you didn’t do it.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I say harder than I mean it, and I don’t soften it, because softening it would be its own lie. “Whether my hand pulled the trigger or someone else’s, whether I gave the order or just made it inevitable over lunch, it’s the same blood. I’ve told myself for twenty years there’s a line between what I do and what happens because of what I do. But there’s no line. There’s one long stretch of red with my name on it somewhere, and Petros is on it now too, whether I put him there or just left the door open.”
She doesn’t argue, but instead, her palm comes up to the side of my face, warm against skin that’s been cold since the call with Evander, and I lean into it before deciding to, the kind of motion a man makes toward the only warm thing in a room he didn’t know was cold until it walked in.
“I’m not going to tell you that’s not true,” she says quietly. “Because I think it is, and I think you’ve known it longer than tonight. But I’m not letting you stand here with all of it by yourself either. Grief and guilt don’t cancel out just because you feel both of them.”
“You’re looking for something that doesn’t exist. I’m not the person you think I am.”
“I’m well aware of that. Finding things that I shouldn’t know about is basically a hobby of mine at this point.” Her thumb slowly moves along my jaw, and the knot that’s been sitting in my chest since the headline this morning eases, just enough that I feel the breath come easier. “I just don’t want you alone with this. That’s the whole point. I said about four hundred extra words around it because apparently, I can’t help myself, but that’s it. You don’t have to be alone with it.”
I don’t answer with words. Nothing I have would say it better than she just did, and for once I don’t reach for the charm, the version of myself that knows what to say in any room, because this isn’t a room I have or want a script for. I pull her in instead, my hand at the back of her neck, and she comes easily, like she’d been waiting for exactly this but hadn’t wanted to ask.
She kisses me first. It’s slow and with no banter underneath it, just her mouth against mine and her hands sliding up to my shoulders.
“For the record,” she murmurs against my mouth, “I came in here to deliver another heartfelt apology, and you’ve derailed the entire thing with your face.”
“My face didn’t do anything.”
“Your face has been doing a lot since I walked in. I’m extremely perceptive; it’s the whole reason you hired me.” She pulls back an inch, eyes moving over me. “You’re allowed to want something other than the conspiracy tonight. As your accountant, I’m telling you it’s permitted.”
“Is that your professional opinion?”
“Sit down before you fall down, Kallistratos.” She gives me a small push toward the chair, and the second I drop into it, she’s already climbing into my lap, one knee finding the cushion, then the other, testing the leather. “There. Now you’re my problem instead of the window’s.”
“That must be the least romantic thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
