Twenty Four Hours

POV: Kira

"You look like you saw a ghost." Priya dropped onto my couch without waiting for an invitation, the way she always did, balancing two coffees like she owned the place. "Actually, worse. You look like you saw a ghost who owes you money." She jested

"It is nothing." I did not look up from the card in my hand, his name engraved in plain black letters, no logo, nothing flashy, just Luciano Rodriguez and a phone number.

"It is very clear it’s not nothing." She set the coffee down and snatched the card before I could stop her. Her eyebrows went up somewhere near her hairline. "Rodriguez. As in the Rodriguez. As in the man who owns the entire building we clean." She exclaimed 

"Give it back." I demanded 

"Why do you have his personal card, Mara." She said my fake name easy as breathing, the way everyone in my current life did, and for a second I almost hated how easily I had let her believe it. "Did something happen. Did he do something to you. Because I swear, rich man or not, I will go up there myself and." She trailed off

"He offered me a job," I said, too fast, the lie already half formed before I finished deciding to tell it. "A different position and with more money."

Priya narrowed her eyes at me, the way she did when she knew I was not telling her everything, which was most of the time, because three years of lying to everyone I loved had made me very good at it.

"Okay," she said slowly. "So take it. What is the problem then." She inquired

The problem was I could not tell her the real problem. I could not tell her that three years ago I had a different name, a different face in a different city's newspapers, a father who traded me like a shipping contract to a man whose smile made my skin crawl before I even understood why. I could not tell her that the man whose card I was holding was that same man's nephew, or that saying yes to him meant walking into a room with everything I had spent three years running from, instead of hiding from it.

I could not tell her any of that. So I told her I needed to think, and she left an hour later, still watching me like she knew I was hiding something bigger than a job offer, because she was smarter than I ever gave her credit for.

Alone, I sat on my kitchen floor with my back against the cabinet, the card between my fingers, and I let myself remember the last time I saw my father's face.

"It is the only way to save the company, Kira." His voice, low, urgent, the voice he used when he had already made a decision and was only pretending to ask my opinion. "Marco has already agreed to the terms. You will want for nothing be it position, comfort, protection."

"Protection from what," I had asked him. "Protection from who, Papa." I had asked then

He had not answered that question. He never answered that question. And two weeks later I stood in Marco Igliozzi's office while he traced one finger along my jaw like I already belonged to him, and told me, in that same warm, easy voice Luciano had described at my door, that he had been waiting a long time for someone like me.

I ran few days after that.

I did not think about my father often anymore. I had trained myself not to, the same way I had trained myself not to think about Sofia's face the last morning I saw her, twelve years old and asleep in her bed, not knowing her sister was about to disappear and leave her alone with a man who collected people the way other men collected cars.

Three years. She would be fifteen now. Six more years until she turned twenty one, until whatever agreement my father made about me quietly transferred itself to her instead, because men like Marco Igliozzi did not forget a debt just because the original signature ran away.

I thought about Luciano's voice at my door and what he said about nobody touching a Rodriguez wife.

I thought about my stepsister's face, and how little time either of us actually had left before somebody came looking.

My hands were steady by the time I picked up my phone. I do not know when they stopped shaking. Maybe somewhere between my father's voice in my memory and Luciano's voice in my doorway, I had run out of room to be afraid and left space for something else instead. Something colder. Something that looked a great deal like resolve.

I dialed the number on the card before I could talk myself out of it.

It rang twice.

"Luciano Rodriguez."

I closed my eyes. "It is Kira," I said, and saying my own name out loud for the first time in three years felt like stepping off a ledge. "I will do it. But I have conditions of my own."

A pause on the other end, brief, and when he spoke again I could hear something that almost sounded like relief underneath the calm.

"Then you had better come tell me what they are," he said. "Tonight." He demanded with the authority of the man who was sure I’ll be his either ways

I looked at the clock. Then I grabbed my coat.

The hallway outside my apartment looked the same as it always did, dim bulb flickering over the stairs, someone's radio playing too loud through a neighboring wall, and none of it looked like the last night of the life I had spent six years building. It felt like it should have looked different somehow. It did not. It just looked like a regular Tuesday.

I locked my door behind me and did not let myself look back at it, because looking back had never once helped me before, and I did not think it would start helping now.