CHAPTER TWO: SIXTEEN NAMES

VIENNA

The safehouse smells like bleach and cheap coffee, which is how I know I’m home, if home is a word that still applies to a room with no photographs in it.

I peel off gloves stiff with drying blood and drop them in the sink to burn later. My hands are shaking. They always do, after — not from fear, Voss says, just adrenaline leaving the body the only way it knows how. I used to believe that too. Tonight I stand at the sink and watch my own fingers tremble and wonder, for the first time in longer than I want to admit, whether adrenaline is supposed to still be arriving nine years in, or whether some other, smaller word might fit better.

I light a cigarette I don’t really want, just to have something to do with my hands, and the smell of the match catches me somewhere under the ribs before I can brace for it.

Smoke. Not cigarette smoke — the other kind. The kind that gets into your hair and doesn’t come out no matter how many times you wash it, because your hair isn’t what’s holding onto it. I’m thirteen and I’m suddenly seventeen at the same time, pressed flat against a stone wall two streets from a house that used to have my name on the deed.

I was in bed when it started. I remember that clearly — the specific, useless clarity trauma leaves behind, like a photograph developed in the wrong chemicals. My mother’s voice through the wall, laughing at something my father said. The particular creak of the third stair. Small, ordinary sounds I didn’t know yet were the last ones I’d ever get to keep.

Then the smell. Then the heat, arriving before the sound did, like the fire had learned to move faster than noise.

I don’t remember deciding to run. I remember being outside, coughing black smoke onto cold cobblestones, watching the house I grew up in fold in on itself like paper. I remember screaming a name until it stopped being a word and became just a shape my mouth made.

Nobody came. That’s the part I’ve never told anyone, not even Voss, not in nine years — not the fire, not even losing them. The part where I stood in the street of a city that boasts about its five families keeping the peace, and not one door opened.

A hand found my shoulder an hour later, when the fire brigade had finally come and gone and the neighbors had finally stopped pretending they weren’t watching from behind their curtains. I flinched hard enough to fall. I remember that too — hitting the cobblestones, expecting another hand to grab, to hurt, to take.

Instead the voice above me was quiet. “You’re safe now,” it said. “I’ve got you.”

I looked up into a face I didn’t know, silver already threading through dark hair even then, pale eyes that didn’t flinch from the state of me — soot-black, blistered, seventeen years old and completely alone in a way I hadn’t had the vocabulary for yet.

“Who are you,” I managed.

“Someone who knew your father,” Emeric Voss said, crouching so we were eye to eye instead of him standing over me like everyone else that night had. “Someone who knows exactly who did this to you.”

I didn’t ask how he knew. I was seventeen and everything I loved was still smoking behind me, and he was the only person in the entire city who’d bothered to kneel.

“Tell me,” I said.

He didn’t, not that night. He carried me — actually carried me, arms under my knees like I weighed nothing, though I must have weighed something — to a car with no plates that I could see, and he sat beside me in the back seat the whole drive out of the city, not talking, just letting me shake.

The house outside the city had a name I wasn’t given yet, and a woman who cleaned the burns on my arms without once asking how I’d gotten them, and a silence so total at night that I lay awake for the first three weeks convinced the quiet itself was a kind of grief.

“Why does it hurt like this,” I asked him once, maybe a month in, when the burns had scarred over enough to stop weeping but the rest of me hadn’t.

“Because you’re grieving without anywhere to put it,” he said. He said it simply, the way you’d explain a fact of weather, and something about the simplicity made it easier to believe than kindness would have. “Grief needs an address, Vienna. Without one, it just circles back and eats the person carrying it.”

“What address.”

“That,” he said, “is going to take some time to explain properly. You’re not ready yet. But I promise you — I will not let what happened to you sit unanswered.”

I believed him. Completely., the way you believe the first person who tells you your pain has a cause instead of just being the shape of an indifferent world. It would be years before I understood that certainty offered that quickly, by someone who benefits from you believing it, is its own kind of trap — one built so gently you never feel the door close.

He told me the rest later, in careful pieces, over the months I spent in that house he called safe and I later learned to call the Nest. He told me the Romano family had a debt older than me, and my father had gotten caught in the paying of it, and that grief without an address just curdles into something that eats you from the inside instead.

“I can give you an address,” he told me, the week I turned eighteen, sliding a folder across a table between us like it was a gift instead of the first brick in a wall I’d spend nine years building around myself. “I can give you somewhere to put all of this.”

Sixteen names were inside that folder. Men who’d signed things, moved things, looked away from things, all of them wearing the Romano crest somewhere on their lives even if not on their skin.

I didn’t ask him how he’d gotten the list. I was eighteen and drowning and he was offering me a shore, even if the shore was made of other people’s deaths. I said yes before I’d finished reading the first name.

I think about that sometimes — how fast I said yes. How a girl that broken will agree to almost anything if it comes wrapped in the promise of a reason.

The cigarette’s burned down to nothing between my fingers. I stub it out and look at my hands again, steadier now, and remind myself of the thing that’s kept me upright for nine years: this isn’t cruelty. It’s accounting. Every name on that list owed something, and I am simply the one who collects.

One name left.

Tomorrow Voss sends the file, and whatever I’ve spent nine years building myself into finally has somewhere to land, or nowhere at all. I lie down without undressing, watch the ceiling the way I always do the night before an ending, and try very hard not to notice the small, cold thought that’s been growing in me for longer than I want to admit — the thought that says: what if finishing this doesn’t feel the way you’ve been promised it will.

I get up once more before I let myself sleep, just to look at the mirror over the sink — something I don’t usually do, because there’s not much use studying a face nobody’s allowed to remember. The scar along my collarbone has faded to something silver, almost pretty in bad light, the kind of mark a stranger might mistake for decorative if they didn’t know what fire actually leaves behind on skin. I trace it once with two fingers, the way I used to when I was eighteen and still flinched at my own reflection.

I don’t flinch anymore. I stopped somewhere around name six or seven, when the woman looking back at me stopped being the girl from the rain barrel and started being someone Voss built on purpose, one drill and one debt at a time. I used to think that was progress. Standing here tonight, one name away from finished, I’m no longer sure progress is the right word for becoming a stranger to your own face.

I turn the light off before I have to keep looking at her.

I fall asleep before I can answer that question. It’s easier that way.

It’s always been easier that way.