Chapter 5: Before the Morning Finds Us

HAUNTED BY THE MAFIA KING

By Ann E.

Chapter 5: Before the Morning Finds Us

The car smells of leather and rain, and neither of us says a word.

The driver doesn't look at me once. His eyes stay on the road and the mirror, and I notice that he never lets them drift to the back seat. The stranger sits beside me with a careful hand's width between us. His phone lights up on his knee. He glances at the screen, turns it face down, and then switches it off entirely.

"You can do that?" I say. "Just ignore it?"

"Tonight I can."

The city slides past the window in wet gold streaks. I watch it and don't think. It is the strangest relief of my life, to sit in the dark with someone who is not asking me for anything.

We stop beneath a building of dark glass. A man opens the door without a word, and another, standing by a private lift, looks at the floor as we pass. The stranger says, very quietly, to someone behind me, "Nothing from tonight leaves this building."

"Understood," a voice says.

I almost ask. Then the lift doors close, and the question goes with the floor numbers climbing past us.

---

His flat is not what I expected. I think of gold and marble, and instead it is dark wood and bare walls, a long window with the whole city laid out beneath it, and a single lamp. It looks like a place where someone lives alone and likes it.

I stop just inside the door.

My heart is going hard. Not from fear exactly. From the sheer size of what I am about to do, standing in the entrance of a stranger's home in a green dress I put on for someone else.

"We can go back down," he says from behind me. "The car is still there."

"I know."

"I would rather you were sure than polite."

I turn. In the lamplight, his face is less guarded than it was at the bar. Tired, almost. There is a faint crease between his eyebrows I hadn't noticed.

"I'm sure," I say. Then, because I'm not good at lying even by omission: "I'm also terrified."

"That's reasonable."

"You're not going to tell me it's fine?"

"Would it help?"

I laugh, shakily. "No."

"Then I won't." He crosses the room, not to me, but to the window, and stands with his back half turned, giving me space to look at him or at the view. "Would you like something to drink first? Water. Something stronger. Nothing at all."

"Water."

He pours it. I take the glass and my fingers brush his, and the contact goes through me like a struck wire. I hold the glass in both hands and drink slowly, and when I put it down, we are standing very close.

"I don't want promises," I say. "I don't want pity. And I don't want you to tell me tomorrow that it was a mistake, or that I was drunk, or that you were being kind."

"I'm not being kind."

"Good."

"I expect nothing from you," he says. "Not gratitude. Not tomorrow. Not your name." A pause, and something dry crosses his face. "Though I won't pretend I'm not curious about the hairpin."

My hand goes up to my hair before I can stop it.

"Come here," he says, very softly, and I realise that it isn't an order. It is a question, with a door left open.

I step in.

He kisses me slowly.

I had braced for hunger. I'm not ready for patience. His hand comes up to my jaw, warm and steady, and he waits, a breath away, until I close the last inch myself. When I do, the whole day goes quiet. The hall. The sound through the bedroom door. Chloe's white face in the mirror. All of it falls away like water running off glass.

Somewhere in it I think: *this is mine.*

His fingers find the hairpin. He draws it out of my hair with such care that I barely feel it. The curl falls against my neck. He holds the little gold leaf up to the lamp for a second, looking at it, and then he reaches past me and sets it on the table by the bed.

I don't remember walking there.

I remember the quiet between us. I remember the way he stops with his hand at the zip of my dress, and says, "Still sure?" and the way I say yes, and the way he doesn't move until I say it a second time, against his mouth, as though I need to prove it to myself.

I remember being laughed at, very gently, when I fumble a button. I remember the drawer by the bed, the small foil packet, the way he says, "I'll take care of that," as if it is the most ordinary thing in the world and I'm allowed to be relieved.

I remember his hands, and how slowly he learns me. I remember a long, shuddering moment when I forget to be anyone at all.

And I remember, afterward, lying against him in the dark with the city glowing beyond the window, thinking: *Nobody has ever asked me twice before.*

---

I wake, and it is still night.

The lamp has gone out. A grey line sits at the bottom of the curtains, not yet light. He is asleep beside me, one arm flung above his head, his breathing slow and even. In sleep, his face is younger. There is a faint pale scar through his left eyebrow. I look at it for a long time.

I could stay.

The thought arrives without warning, so simple and so dangerous that I hold perfectly still. I could wait until he wakes. I could say my name. I could ask his. We could have breakfast, and the city could carry on without us for a little while.

On the nightstand, my phone lights up.

I reach for it before the buzz can wake him. **Mum. 14 missed calls.** And beneath it, a text that arrived at 4:12:

*Lila. Come home. Please. We need to talk before anyone else does.*

I read it three times.

My mother has not said *please* to me since I was nine.

*Before anyone else does.* Anyone else, who? About what?

The room feels very small suddenly. The warmth I woke in is draining out of it, and in its place comes the cold, thin light of everything waiting for me past that door. The house with a name on the gate. A mother who stops with her hand an inch from my hair. A form, and a blood type, and a silence on the telephone that I counted.

I look at the man sleeping beside me.

I don't want to be chosen because I stayed. I don't want to spend the next hour trying to turn one honest night into something it was never promised to be. And I know, with a clarity that surprises me, that if I wait until he opens his eyes, I will lose my nerve. I will ask him to keep me. And I will have walked out of one room where I begged to be chosen straight into another.

I leave because I decide to. Not because he did anything. Because I want to carry this out of here as it is.

I dress in the dark.

The green dress, the shoes in my hand. I don't look for the hairpin. I think of it, a flash of gold in lamplight, but my mother's text sits in my other hand like a hot coal, and I tell myself I will remember it in a moment.

At the door, I stop.

I look back once. His arm has moved across the space where I lay.

*Goodbye,* I think. Not a word. Just the shape of it.

The latch clicks behind me with a sound so small it feels like a secret.

---

The lift takes me down without a guard in it.

The lobby is empty. A man behind the desk stares at his screen with great concentration and doesn't lift his eyes, not when the lift chimes, not when my heels cross the marble, not when the glass door slides open on the pale, wet street. I wonder, only briefly, whether anyone is ever allowed to see people leave this building.

A taxi idles at the corner. I give the driver my address, and we pull away.

I am three streets from the glass tower when my hand goes to my hair.

Smooth. Bare. A gap where there should be a small gold curve.

I turn out my bag. My pockets. The seat. Nothing.

"Wait," I say. "I need to..."

The driver glances at me in the mirror. "Go back?"

I look through the rear window. The glass tower has already shrunk to a dark finger against a sky going the colour of pearl. I think of the lift, and the quiet lobby, and the man asleep in a room I will not be able to find again, even if I try, with a lamp I've never learned to turn on and a hairpin lying beside it.

If I go back, he will wake. I will see his face. I will have to explain why I came back for something I told him I took from nobody.

My phone buzzes in my lap. *Mum.*

"No," I say. "Keep going."

The taxi turns the corner. I press two fingers to the place above my ear, and it hurts more than it has any right to.

I have no name to remember. No number. No way to find him again.

I tell myself that is what I wanted.

Then I look out at the rain-streaked city going by, and I let the phone ring.