Page 12 of Mistletoe & Mayhem
“Say it again.”
“I love you, Laura.”
She closes her eyes, and the gun slips from her hand, lands with a soft, padded thump against the butcher block countertop. I pour her more wine—deep burgundy catching amber light as it cascades into the glass—and this time she drinks it with shaking hands, her throat working silently, a single tear tracking down her left cheek.
“I don’t know what to say,” she whispers.
“You don’t need to say anything. Right now, I just want to look at you.”
Chapter 9
Pierce
Laura collapses into a nearby chair. Her shoulders curl forward like a closing fist, elbows locked against her ribs, fingers digging into her own arms as though holding the broken pieces of herself together. Her lips flush crimson where she’s been biting them. For a second, I think she’ll stand up and shoot me anyway, or else break the glass against my face out of pure sad symmetry. Instead, she asks, “Tell me everything.”
The voice is carved flat—no sarcasm, no warning. It’s the sound of a woman reconstructing the rules even as she burns the old book.
So I tell her: about the ride in the black SUV, the hood they used that smelled of bleach and gasoline, the damp palm that held me by the throat while my nose filled with blood. The translation of pain into threat. The way they made me kneel in the back of a cold butcher warehouse while Dominic himself stared through me, not at me, as if I was a slide under a microscope. I tell her about the envelope handed to me, fat with money and a sheet of paper that read in block capitals: GET ON THE PLANE. IF YOU CALL HER, HE DIES.
She shakes her head once, and it’s not denial but self-punishment. Like she expected no better of her father, and less of herself. “Who?” she manages.
“Adam. And my grandparents.” My voice feels like chewing glass. “He had photos. Your dad’s people were in the backyard. In their house. The morning I left, I found one of the old Polaroids in my mailbox. ‘Nice lawn,’ was written on it in red pen. He wanted to make sure I knew I could never come back, not even by letter.”
Her throat cinches. She presses her palms to her eyes, and when they come away, her mascara webs under the lights. Fury, grief, violence. Her hands quiver, and she whispers, “I’d have killed him myself if I knew.”
“That’s why I never told you.”
“Bullshit. You never told me because you thought I couldn’t help. Because you thought I’d do something reckless.”
I let that hang. Somewhere in the city, a siren starts its lonely descent, barreling through the night air, my own personal Greek chorus. I imagine what I look like right now: a ruined champion, a waxy shadow, in a kitchen filled with nothing but skeletons and Steve Winwood’s greatest hits humming through the wall from the neighbors.
Her mouth works. Nothing comes for a full ten-count, then: “After you vanished, he told me you’d left because you couldn’t handle it. That you hated my family. That it was business—always business. I waited. You never called.” Her voice is furious, but the words are fluid, almost delicate.
I want to reach for her, but I know better. “The truth is I loved you too much to let you become a widow before you turned twenty-five.”
She stares at me with all the broken galaxies in her eyes.
I ask, “Why did you come tonight?”
Her voice is red with violence. “The Old Man sent me to kill someone. Didn’t tell me who. Just an address.” She swallows hard. “I saw you through the window. Standing there like... like a ghost.” Her fingers curl into fists, then release. “I almost pulled the trigger right there. But I had to know why you were back. Why did my father want you dead without telling me it was you?” She huffs, a ragged laugh that’s more like a bite. “So I came to check your pulse before I stopped it.”
The confession cracks something elemental in me. I realize I am cold, my hands numb, my chest hollowed like a condemned house. But the pain feels clean for once, almost bracing. Like jumping off a roof and realizing, for a few seconds, you don’t regret a goddamn thing.
She stands. Her hands dig into the countertop, then move to her ribs and hug close, like a girl holding herself in the middle of a rainstorm. I want to scold her for not bringing a warmer jacket. Instead, “I’m sorry.”
She tosses her head back, and that dark river of hair flows down, covering her face. “No, you’re not. Not really.”
I don’t argue.
“You ever think about it?” she says, voice so low it almost belongs to a stranger.
“All the time,” I say. “Sometimes I picture you on the other side of a glass wall, and I spend my whole life clutching a phone that doesn’t work, yelling until my throat splits open. Sometimes I picture it differently. It’s the old place. You’re making eggs. The sun is coming through the curtain.” I stop short because I don’t want to say the rest.
She finishes it for me. “And then I walk in and you’re not there.”
“Yeah.”
She moves around the kitchen island and stands in front of me. She’s five foot three, but right now I swear she’s a foot tallerthan God. Her hand comes up, and she runs a thumb along the line of my jaw, almost clinical. Her voice is stripped raw: “I never even looked at another man.”
