“You,” he said, and his voice went very quiet, very certain, “are not a loose end, Nora. Get that thought out of your head right now. Whatever happens with Castellano, you are not a problem to be solved. You’re a person I intend to keep safe. There’s a difference, and I need you to believe it.”
I wanted to believe it. God help me, after one impossible night, I already did.
PART 5 — Morning After
I woke to gray morning light and the unfamiliar softness of a bed that had clearly never once considered its occupant’s weight a design flaw. For a moment I forgot everything — the fire, the gunfire, the blood dried under my fingernails despite the shower I’d taken at 3 a.m. — and simply lay there, disoriented by comfort.
Then I remembered, and my stomach dropped all over again.
Downstairs, the house was quiet in the particular way of a place holding its breath. I found the kitchen by scent — coffee, and something with cinnamon — and found Damian at the counter, sleeves still rolled, reading something on a tablet with the focused stillness of a man doing math with other people’s lives.
He looked up when I entered, and something in his shoulders eased, minutely, like he’d been braced for the possibility that I wouldn’t come down at all. That I might have called a cab in the night and disappeared from whatever this was before it could become anything.
“Marcus is stable,” he said, before I could ask. “Sitting up. Already complaining about missing his daughter’s game, which Dr. Reyes says is an excellent sign.”
“Good.” I sat, awkwardly, across from him, aware of the borrowed T-shirt swallowing my frame, aware in the old reflexive way of how much space I took up on the stool, and then aware — a new awareness, born sometime in the last twelve hours — that he wasn’t looking at any of that. He was looking at my face, waiting to see how I was.
“How are you,” he said, like he’d heard the question in my head.
