“Honestly? I don’t know. Yesterday I was worried about whether my uniform was too tight for the guest list. Today I watched a house burn down and helped keep a man alive with my bare hands, and I’m sitting in a mafia boss’s kitchen wearing his shirt.”
“Businessman,” Damian said, with the faintest, driest twitch of his mouth. “The papers prefer ‘alleged.’”
“Damian.”
“I know what I am, Nora. I won’t insult you by pretending otherwise, not after last night.” He set the tablet down, and when he spoke again, all the wry distance had gone out of his voice. “My family built an empire in the shipping trade sixty years ago. Some of it is exactly as legitimate as it looks. Some of it isn’t. I inherited both halves when I was twenty-six, and I have spent fifteen years trying to keep the second half from swallowing the first. Castellano wants what I have, and he doesn’t care how many people burn to get it. That’s the truth, all of it, and if you want to walk out that door this morning and never see me again, I will have Felix drive you anywhere in the country and I won’t send anyone after you.”
The kitchen was very quiet.
“Is that what you want?” I asked. “For me to leave?”
Something raw crossed his face — quickly hidden, but not quickly enough. “No,” he said. “It is very much not what I want. But I’m not going to be the reason your life gets folded into something this dangerous without you choosing it with your eyes open.”
I thought about ten years of choosing smallness. Of choosing the seat that wouldn’t inconvenience anyone, the joke that got there first, the silence that kept the peace. I thought about the woman who’d frozen in a library doorway apologizing for existing in a room, and the woman who, four hours later, had run through rain and trees with a bleeding man’s weight braced against her own and not once thought about whether she looked like she belonged there.
