Chapter 2: The Promise I Wouldn't Break

HAUNTED BY THE MAFIA KING

By Ann E.

Chapter 2: The Promise I Wouldn't Break

Lila POV 

Jason called at noon, which was how I knew he was sorry.

He never called. He texted, in short bursts, between meetings. But at noon on the day after my birthday my phone rang with his name across the screen, and I sat down on the edge of my bed to answer it.

"Hey, you." His voice was soft and a little rough. "I've been awful."

"You've been busy."

"I've been awful," he said again. "Let me fix it. Tonight. The Hallam, the rooftop. I booked it already."

The Hallam was the kind of place we'd walked past a hundred times and never gone into. I looked at the gold hairpin on my dressing table.

"Okay," I said. "Yes."

"Wear something nice."

"I always do."

He laughed, and it sounded almost like him. When he hung up I held the phone against my chest for a second. Then I got up and found the green dress.

The rooftop was all candles and glass. Heaters glowed orange along the edges, and the city lay below us in thousands of small lights. Jason stood when he saw me.

He had never stood for me before.

"You look incredible," he said, and pulled out my chair.

I'd pinned the hairpin above my ear that afternoon, a small gold leaf in the dark of my hair. He looked at it for half a second and said nothing. I told myself he was nervous.

He ordered for both of us. The lamb, because I'd once said it was my favourite. The white wine I liked. He remembered which side I took my coffee on, and that I hated being rushed over dessert. He remembered everything.

That was what bothered me.

Jason didn't remember things. He was warm and forgetful and easy to love. This Jason had prepared. Every detail was laid in front of me like a gift he'd been wrapping all afternoon.

"I've been thinking about the future," he said, over the lamb.

My fork stopped.

"A flat. Something bigger than mine. Somewhere we'd choose together." He reached across the table and took my hand. "I want you in it, Lila. I want us to be serious."

"I want that too."

"Do you?" He turned my hand over and stroked my wrist with his thumb. "Because lately it feels like you're holding something back."

There it was.

I'd known it was coming, the way you know thunder is coming when the light changes. I set down my glass.

"I'm not holding anything back from you. I'm keeping something for myself."

"Lila."

"You know I want to wait. I told you at the beginning."

"I know." He smiled, patient, and I hated how badly I wanted to trust it. "I just thought, after a year, maybe..." He slid a small white card across the tablecloth. A hotel key, the Hallam's gold crest in the corner. "It's only a room. No pressure. I just want you to know it's there."

I looked at the card for a long time.

The thing nobody tells you about boundaries is that they don't feel brave in the moment. They feel like standing in a doorway while someone else's disappointment blows past you. I'd made the promise at nineteen, alone, on a night I don't talk about, when I finally understood that nobody else was going to guard what was mine. It wasn't a rule my mother gave me. It wasn't a test for Jason. It was the one thing I had ever decided entirely on my own.

It was mine to keep, which meant it was mine to change.

But not like this. Not because a man had put a card on a tablecloth and gone quiet.

I pushed it back across the table.

"Thank you. But no."

"Lila..."

"I love you. I'm not going to say it like it's a trade."

He sat back. The candle between us flickered, and I watched the warmth go out of his face the way a tide goes out. He didn't argue. He didn't raise his voice. He picked up his wine and looked past me at the skyline, and became someone I would have to earn my way back to.

"Fine," he said.

"Jason."

"I said fine."

His phone buzzed against the table. He glanced at the screen and turned it face down in one quick, smooth motion.

"Work?" I asked.

"Something like that."

"At nine on a Saturday?"

"Lila." A thin smile. "Don't."

I could have let it go. I had let a lot go over the years. But I looked at the phone, and the dessert menu he hadn't opened, and the key card lying between our plates like a bill, and I realised I was tired of being the only one at the table working to keep things pleasant.

"I think I'll go home."

"You don't have to."

"I know."

I stood. He didn't. For a second I thought he might reach for me, but his hand stayed flat on the cloth, and the card stayed where I'd left it.

At the lift I heard him say my name once, quietly. I did not turn around.

I cried halfway up my own front steps, with one hand pressed over my mouth so the house wouldn't hear.

Chloe's flat smelled of vanilla candles and toast.

"You did the right thing," she said, for the third time, pouring wine into two chipped mugs. We were on her sofa with a blanket across both our laps, the way we'd sat since sixth form. "I mean it. Don't you dare feel guilty."

"I don't feel guilty. I feel stupid."

"You're not stupid."

"I let him order for me. I let him say the word serious and practically melted." I laughed, and it cracked down the middle. "He didn't even notice my hair."

"Idiot," Chloe said fondly. She tucked her feet under her and knocked her shoulder against mine. For a minute neither of us said anything. It was the warmest I'd felt all day.

"The Hallam, though," she said. "Candles, the skyline, the lamb. That's a man trying."

"He did try."

"He was probably terrified."

"I never told you about the lamb."

I said it lightly, almost like a joke. But the air in the room shifted, the way it does when a glass breaks in another room.

Chloe's smile didn't falter. It held, perfectly, half a second longer than it should have.

"He must have mentioned it," she said. "He texted me, asking what you liked. To get it right."

"Did he?"

"Of course. He was nervous." She took a sip. "He loves you, Lila."

I nodded slowly. It was a reasonable explanation. Jason had texted her before, about my birthday last year, about perfume. It was the sort of thing a boyfriend might do. It was the sort of thing a friend might forget to mention.

Except Jason hadn't said a word about talking to her. And Chloe had said the lamb, not what you liked.

I didn't say any of that. I looked into my mug, and watched the vanilla candle gutter in its jar.

My phone rang in my bag. Mum.

"I should take this."

Chloe waved me off.

I stepped out onto the landing. Down in the stairwell a bicycle was chained to the banister, its front wheel turned toward the wall.

"Lila." My mother's voice was clipped and distant, the way it always was on the phone. "I won't keep you."

"Is everything all right?"

"Yes, of course. I only need a small detail for a form." A pause. "Do you remember your blood type?"

I frowned. "My blood type?"

"For the insurance. Your father's office needs it. It's a formality."

"O positive, I think. They tested us at school."

The silence on the other end was brief, but I counted it, the way I'd counted the quiet on the staircase at my birthday.

"O positive," she repeated. "Thank you."

"Mum, what's it for?"

"A form, darling. I told you." Her voice smoothed back into its cool brightness. "Don't stay out too late. Goodnight."

She hung up before I could say it back.

I stood there with the phone in my hand, listening to the stairwell hum. In twenty-two years my mother had never asked me one thing about my body. Not when I had measles. Not when I broke my wrist at twelve and sat in the hallway for an hour before anyone noticed. Now, at ten o'clock on a Saturday night, she wanted to know my blood type for a form.

I went back inside and said it was nothing.

---

I stayed until midnight, laughing at things that weren't funny, and Chloe walked me to the taxi and hugged me hard under the streetlamp.

"He'll come round," she whispered into my hair. "Give him a day."

"I know."

"Text me when you're home."

I did. She replied with a heart.

Jason didn't text at all.

I lay on top of my duvet in the dark, turning my phone over in my hands, trying to build the story where everything fit. Jason was nervous. Chloe was helpful. Mum was tired. All the small odd pieces were small and odd, and a person had to be very lonely to see a pattern in them.

I told myself a lot of things that night.

At one in the morning I got up and opened the drawer of my dressing table.

Under the old scarves and the spare chargers lay a small silver key on a red ribbon. Jason had pressed it into my palm in March, grinning, saying, In case you ever want to surprise me.

I'd never used it. It had felt like a promise to hold, not a door to open.

I held it now. It was cool and light, and the ribbon was frayed where I'd worried it with my thumb.

I thought about the face-down phone. About Chloe's smile holding a beat too long. About the way my mother had said thank you as though I'd handed her something breakable.

Tomorrow I'll bring him dinner, I thought. I'll let myself in. And I'll see his face when I walk through the door.

I slid the key into my coat pocket, and turned out the light.