THE LAST ORDINARY NIGHT

CHAPTER TWO: 

Lyra didn't sleep. She sat on the edge of her bed until the window went gray, turning Dimitri Voss's offer over in her hands like a stone she couldn't put down — marry me by the end of the week — until the words stopped sounding like words and started sounding like a verdict.

By morning she'd made a list. She always made lists when the world stopped making sense; it was the one thing she'd learned from her father that actually worked. Pros and cons of marrying a stranger who may or may not have had Dad killed. The cons filled half a page. The pros were one line, written so hard the pen had nearly torn through the paper: Theo and June stay alive.

There wasn't a column wide enough to argue against that.

She found June at the kitchen table, still in pajamas, scrolling through her phone with the particular blankness of someone who hadn't slept either. Theo was at the stove, badly attempting scrambled eggs, because twelve-year-old boys processed grief by doing the most normal thing they could think of and pretending it was fine.

"Smells like burnt rubber," Lyra said, and Theo turned, startled into a small smile — the first one she'd seen in five days.

"It's fine. I got it."

"You absolutely do not get it." She crossed the kitchen, nudged him aside gently, and took over the pan before he set off the smoke alarm. June didn't look up from her phone, but Lyra caught the way her shoulders had gone rigid the moment she walked in — June always knew when something was coming. She'd always been the one who read rooms instead of trusting them.

"Where were you last night?" June asked, still not looking up.

"Meeting." Lyra kept her eyes on the eggs.

"With the lawyer."

"Yes."

"Lyra." June set the phone down. Her voice had the flat, exhausted edge of someone who'd spent the last five days being lied to gently and was done with it. "You smell like a building that has its own elevator attendant. Lawyers don't have elevator attendants."

Theo looked between them, confused, and Lyra felt the lie crumbling before she'd even decided whether to tell it.

She turned off the stove.

"Sit down," she said. "Both of you."

She told them as much of the truth as she could survive saying out loud — that their father had owed money to a man named Dimitri Voss, that the debt was enormous, that there was a way to settle it that didn't involve losing the house or the restaurant or each other. She did not tell them that the man's name had been their father's dying breath. She did not tell them about the folder on Dimitri's desk, or the look on his face when he'd said the men who killed your father aren't finished. Some truths were hers to carry alone; she'd decided that on the elevator ride home, somewhere between the ground floor and the front door.

"What kind of way to settle it?" June's voice had gone very quiet, which was worse than loud, the same way it had been with Dimitri. Lyra was starting to understand that quiet, in this new world, was a warning.

"I'm going to marry him."

The silence afterward had weight. Theo's fork clattered against his plate. June's face went through three expressions in two seconds — confusion, disbelief, and then something that looked horribly like understanding, because June, despite being sixteen, had always been the one who understood things first and felt them after.

"You don't even know him."

"No."

"Then why would you—"

"Because the alternative is worse." Lyra reached across the table, and June let her take her hand, which told Lyra more than anything June could have said. "I need you to trust me on this. I need you to trust that I wouldn't do this if there was another way."

"Is he going to hurt you?" Theo's voice was small, and it broke something in Lyra's chest more efficiently than anything Dimitri had said in that dark-wood office.

"No, baby. He's not going to hurt me." She didn't know if that was true. She said it anyway, because some lies were a mercy and she'd decided this was one of them.

June didn't cry. June had made a policy of not crying in front of people, the same iron policy she'd kept through the funeral, but her hand tightened around Lyra's hard enough to hurt, and that was its own kind of confession.

"When?" June asked.

"Three days."

That night, Lyra packed a single suitcase for a life she didn't recognize yet. She folded a sweater her father had given her for Christmas, a photo of the three of them at the restaurant's opening night, the cheap silver ring her mother had left her before she died — nothing valuable, nothing that mattered to anyone but her, which was exactly the point. If she was walking into a marriage built on debt and danger, she wanted at least a handful of things in that house that were entirely, unbreakably hers.

Theo found her in the doorway of her room around midnight, unable to sleep, the way he hadn't been able to since the night of the shooting.

"Will you still pick me up from school?" he asked, and the question was so achingly ordinary, so unconcerned with mafia kings and dead fathers and debts that could buy a person's whole future, that Lyra felt something in her chest crack open.

"Every single day," she said, and meant it with a ferocity that frightened her. "That doesn't change. Nothing about us changes, Theo. I promise you that."

He nodded, not quite believing her, the way kids stopped believing things after their father bled out on a sidewalk. He hugged her anyway — hard, the way he used to when he was small enough to be picked up — and Lyra held on a beat longer than he expected, memorizing the shape of him, the smell of his shampoo, the particular warmth of a sibling who still needed her to be the brave one.

When he finally let go and shuffled back to bed, June was standing in the hallway, arms crossed, watching.

"You're scared," June said. Not a question.

"Terrified," Lyra admitted, because there was no point lying to the one person in the house who'd never once believed her lies.

June nodded slowly, like she'd needed that honesty more than any reassurance. "Then be terrified. Just don't be stupid. Whatever he is — find out what he wants before you give him everything."

Lyra almost laughed. Almost. "When did you get so smart?"

"Around the time Dad started lying to all of us," June said, and walked back to her room before Lyra could answer, leaving her alone in the hallway with a suitcase, a wedding in three days, and the gnawing certainty that June, sixteen years old and grieving, had just given her the only useful advice anyone had offered sinc

the gunshot that started all of this.