Page 57 of The Boss
“Always.”
She didn’t look back again. She stepped into the elevator with Tomas and the doors closed, cutting Leif off from the heat he’d used like oxygen and the argument he’d used like blood. The room felt wrong the moment she was gone. Too big. Too quiet. His desk was the remains of a battlefield under the lights.
He stood very still, listening to the building breathe, and told himself he’d done the right thing. Give her the choice. Give her the errand that proved she still had a life that belonged to her. Keep her shadowed without making her feel shadowed. He almost believedit.
The river slid dark below, pretending again to be gentle.
His phone buzzed. He didn’t pick it up. Not yet. He stared at the black glass and saw his reflection looking like a man who’d won and lost in the same hour and couldn’t tell which was which.
Then he reached for the phone and started to work, because that was what he knew how to do when everything else seemed like drowning.
MORNING SLIDbright and pitiless across Dallas, bouncing off glass and chrome, turning every window into a mirror. Mariah sank into the back seat, the leather still cool from the garage air, and watched the city sharpen as they rose from underground. The elevator doors had whispered shut between her and Leif, the echo of that sound like a bruise she kept touching with her tongue.
Tomas pulled the sedan into traffic with practiced smoothness, one hand at twelve, the other resting light and steady. He wore the uniform she’d come to associate with him—dark suit, pale shirt, tie knotted flat, face unreadable. Morning commuter flow folded around them. Cyclists arrowed between lanes, awoman jogged a dog with a bandanna, adelivery truck yawned its back door open onto stacks of boxes. It should have felt ordinary. It didn’t.
She rolled down the window two inches. Cool air slid over her skin and carried the smells of bakery exhaust, street coffee, warm concrete. Somewhere a horn barked, sharp and impatient. The city’s pulse thudded under hers, not quite in time. She pressed her palm to her sternum and sensed the faint throb of heat where Leif’s Brand had seared its twin into her palm. The ache wasn’t pain. It was presence.
The argument replayed in pieces, his voice low and immovable, the promise in it like iron. Her own, edged with the panic of losing herself. Then the desk—god help her, the desk—and the way he’d held her after, both of them breathing like they’d outrun death. None of that solved the problem waiting at the edges of her vision. Abomb that was too perfect for Rocco’s hands. Logs that didn’t line up. Aflorist manifest that agreed with itself too neatly.
“Miss De Angelis,” Tomas said, eyes on the road, tone neutral. “Fastest route to your building puts us up Thomas, cross on Hall. You want the garage or the curb?”
“The curb,” she said automatically, then, “No. The garage. Fewer eyes.”
He tipped his chin once. The turn signal ticked like a metronome. Morning light strobed across his cheekbone as they passed a line of young trees staked to the sidewalk. Mariah watched him for a long breath, taking in the small details Leif always told her to read: hands, eyes, breath. Tomas’s hands were calm. His eyes didn’t flicker. His breathing didn’t change. Professional. Invisible.
Invisible men moved the world.
She turned back to the window. The thought of her apartment unrolled. The narrow entry with the forgotten umbrella stand, the hook with her one good leather jacket, the top drawer with her passport and the ring her mother had kept hidden in a folded sock, gold, warm from the stories she’d poured into it when she was a girl. Shoes. Endless shoes. Asweater that smelled like her, not like Leif’s closet. Proofs of a life that existed before everyone looked her over like a purchase and before a lion burned into herskin.
And beneath all of that, tugging harder, something else. The cool shadowed hush of the chapel, the way stone held secrets without judgment. The ledger she’d seen only briefly, its pages dense with names and oaths, bloodlines inked like maps through time. She hadn’t read it. If she wanted to choose, really choose, she needed more than heat and defiance. She needed facts. She needed to know who Leif was under thefire.
She leaned toward the front. “Change of plan,” she said, the words tasting like decision. “Let’s hit my place first, quick. Passport, ring, abag. Then…” She hesitated, hearing his voice in her head, but continued anyway. “Then take me to Saint Bart’s.”
Tomas’s hand adjusted the wheel by a quarter inch. “Yes, ma’am.”
The sedan slid through a yellow and took a right. Morning thickened, workers with lanyards, apair of cops bent over coffee lids, astreet vendor fanning tortillas over a flat top. Aradio in a passing car spilled a chorus that snagged in the air for half a block. Mariah’s knee bounced once and she forced it still.
She pulled her phone out, thumb hovering over Leif’s name. If she told him she was going to the chapel, he’d hear accusation under the request. If she didn’t, he’d call it carelessness. The memory of him cleaning her with his own hand flashed hot. He’d said he wanted the fight and the fire, not something hollow. Fine. Fire needed air. She slid the phoneaway.
Tomas turned down the quiet street that led toward her building. She glanced at the mirrors out of habit, counting reflections, ahabit that had kept her alive more than once. Ablack SUV two cars back. Awhite pickup that had been behind them three turns ago, now gone. Acyclist with a red helmet she’d seen at the last light, now peeling off onto a side street. Nothing that made her skin prickle, nothing that seemed like atail.
“You sure about the garage?” Tomas asked. “Street’s open.”
“Garage,” she said. “Fewer eyes.” She heard Leif in the words and frowned at herself.
The ramp swallowed them, sound flattening as concrete closed around the car. He rolled the window down a fraction at his side. The garage air smelled like dust and coolant and old rain. The tires hissed across oil-dark streaks. He took the first curve slow, the second a little faster, landing them on level P2 with a smooth nose-in toward the far wall where a camera blinkedred.
He cut the engine. Silence dropped like a curtain.
“I’ll clear the hall and bring a bin,” he said. “You can start with the top drawers and the closet shelf. Ten minutes.”
“Fifteen,” she said, because she couldn’t help herself.
“Ten,” he repeated, and steppedout.
He moved with the efficient stride she’d seen a hundred times, not hurried, not lazy, just… measured. He scanned the level, then keyed the elevator and stood just to the side where anyone stepping out would have to turn to see him. He waited. The doors opened on an empty car. He didn’t relax. He never did. He pressed the floor, held the door for her with a hand, and watched the seam until it closed.
Up two floors, down the pale corridor that always smelled faintly of citrus cleaner, past Mrs. Alvarez’s unit with the plastic wreath on the door, to her place. Tomas tested the handle, looked at the jamb, at the floor near the hinge, then stepped aside so she could open it. The little things. The things Leif drilled into his men until they breathed them without thinking.
