6. The Truth

Elio

It was just business per usual.

Marco was a mistake I had to correct. After what happened in Italy, I had no more room for error. Marco didn’t tell the truth and I couldn’t trust him. So he had to go. It was not personal. It was business.

I told myself all of this very calmly, and yet, my mind kept going back to the event of last night. And none of it was the thing I was actually thinking about.

If I’m being honest, I was thinking about the girl.

Not the way a man thinks about a loose end. I know how to think about a loose end, I've spent my whole life doing it. And yet, last night, I was standing in the dark with a witness lying unconscious on the ground and a gun in my hand, and I couldn’t tie the loose end.

It would have been nothing. A witness is a witness. You don't weigh it, you don't look at it, you simply do the thing the you were supposed to do. I have killed people I liked. I had, five minutes before, killed the man who taught me how to kill.

But then I looked at her face.

That was the mistake. I looked at her face, slack and pale in the passing streetlight, the smudge of some makeup under her eyes, her mouth soft around whatever a girl like that dreams about — and there was something in my chest that closed like a fist around the order I was about to give myself.

I found myself touching her face. Her skin was soft. Her cheek fit perfectly in my palm. I brushed a strand of hair away from her face, and even in this state, she was beautiful.

A beautiful little songbird. Lying on the ground in a short black dress that had hiked up to almost her stomach. I let my eyes travel and I saw something that stopped me in my tracks. She was wearing some pink underwear with unicorns on it.

Yes. Fúcking unicorns.

That almost made me smile. And the feeling in my chest pressed harder.

I have felt very few things in the last three years. I made sure of it. Grief I burned out on purpose; it's a liability. Fear I trained out of myself before I was eighteen. But what I felt looking at that girl was neither, and I didn't have a name for it, and I have survived this long precisely by never letting a nameless thing make a decision for me.

But it made this one anyway.

I didn't reach for the gun. My hand simply would not do it. I ended up bringing her to the car and I sat there in the dark like a stranger to myself, and after a while I heard my own voice tell Brandon to take us home. I carried her up myself, and I laid her on a bed behind a barred window, and I locked the door on the only living person who could put me in a cage for the rest of my life.

This is a weakness, I told myself, and it was true. She is a threat. A liability. And you are keeping her alive because of the shape of her mouth, and that is exactly the kind of thing your father is waiting across an ocean to hear about you. All true. I had said as much to her an hour ago, standing in that room while she cried into her dress that — I haven't decided what you are yet.

I'd lied. I don't lie. It's the one indulgence I've never allowed myself, because a man who lies has to remember what he said, and I'd rather just be feared. But I'd stood there and told her I hadn't decided, and the truth was that I'd already decided in the back of that car, before she ever opened her eyes.

I wasn't going to kill her. I just didn't yet know what I was going to do instead.

—KNOCK KNOCK

The sudden knock at the door pulled me from my thoughts.

I was grateful for it, which tells you how far the morning had gotten away from me. "Come in."

Brandon was behind the door. He stepped in and stood the way he always stands, hands loose, eyes level, waiting to be spoken to. Good boy. I'd meant to pay him more; I made the note again.

"It's done, boss." He didn't need me to ask which it. "The alley's clean. You'd never know. And the problem is handled. Gone. Nobody's going to find anything, and nobody who might come looking is going to say a word about it." A small pause. "It's like it never happened."

"Good." And it was. It was clean, and quiet, and exactly how these things are supposed to go. Ten years, and this was how it ended — handled, gone, like it never happened. I let myself feel the weight of that for exactly one second and then set it down. "You did well."

He nodded. Then, carefully, because Brandon is smarter than he lets on, he said, "And I found some information about the girl.”

“The girl?”

“The witness.” He corrected himself. “Her name is Dove Wallace, eighteen years old, a freshman at Juilliard. She came to the city alone, six weeks ago, had no parents.” He kept his voice flat, professional, offering. "Do you want me to take care of that too? Say the word and it's done. Nobody looks for a girl who came to the city alone."

He wasn't wrong. It was the sensible thing to do, the thing any man in my chair would say yes to without a second's thought. I'd already confirmed the details myself: no father, a dead mother, a grandmother three states away, two roommates who'd believe whatever story I paid to have told to them. She was, on paper, the easiest problem I'd ever been handed.

"No," I said instead.

Brandon didn't react, but I saw him file it away. "No?"

"No." I turned the coffee cup a quarter-turn on the desk, just to have something to do with the hand that hadn't reached for the gun. "The girl stays. She's not a problem to be handled, yet. She's — " I stopped, because I didn't have the end of that sentence yet either, and I've learned never to finish a sentence I can't stand behind. "I have other plans for her."

To his credit, he didn't ask what they were. He just waited.

"Call my lawyer," I said. "Get him here today." I leaned back and looked out at the city that used to belong to nobody and now belonged to me, and I heard myself say the thing that made it real.

"I've got a business proposal I need drawn up."

— End of Episode Six: To Be Continued. —