Chapter 8
The Safehouse on the Water
The safehouse sat on the edge of the river in a building that looked abandoned until you noticed the security cameras and the man at the gate who did not look up when Dante's car came through.
Mia had a bruise blooming under her collarbone from where Dante had yanked her down before the glass fell. He noticed it the second they got inside.
"Sit."
"I'm not made of sugar."
"No," he said. "You're made of stubbornness and bad decisions. Sit."
She should have argued. Instead she sat on the edge of a narrow bed while Dante fetched antiseptic from a wall cabinet. The room was small enough that there was nowhere to hide from him and nowhere to escape the fact that he was kneeling in front of her with a careful hand and a face he had not shown her at the club.
"You do this often?" she asked.
"Clean bruises?"
"Kneel."
He gave her a dry look. "Only when requested."
Despite herself, Mia smiled.
The smile changed the room.
Dante noticed, then looked away like he needed the discipline of that movement. He dabbed antiseptic along the edge of the bruise with a touch so light it was almost insulting.
"That hurt?"
"A little."
"Good."
She blinked. "Good?"
"Means you're still here."
The answer should have been hard. It wasn't. It was too honest.
They sat in silence for a while after that. The river moved black and slow beyond the window. Somewhere in the building a floorboard creaked.
"Why are you still doing this?" Mia asked finally. "You could have handed me to your mother, your cousin, whoever is actually in charge, and gotten the ledger back. That would have been cleaner."
Dante set the antiseptic down. "Cleaner is not the same thing as better."
"That's not an answer."
"It is the one you get."
She studied him. "You sound like you have experience choosing the wrong thing because it was efficient."
That pulled a shadow across his face.
"I have experience choosing the thing that kept everyone alive," he said.
"Everyone except maybe yourself."
He looked up sharply. The shift in his expression made her aware, with sudden clarity, that she had touched something real.
"What?"
"You keep acting like protection is the same as control. Like if you keep people close enough, they can't disappear."
He did not deny it.
That made her more certain.
Mia lowered her voice. "Is that why you brought me here?"
"No."
"Then why?"
He stood, crossed to the window, and braced one hand against the glass. For a moment he looked older, the lines around his mouth deeper in the dark.
"Because when you walked into the club in the rain," he said, "you looked like someone who had already decided the worst thing would happen and came anyway."
The words hit harder than she expected.
"And?"
"And I wanted to know if you'd stay."
The honesty of it made her chest ache in a way that was almost anger and not quite.
"That's not a reason," she said.
Dante turned back to her. "It is for me."
The silence after that was thick enough to touch.
Then Mia asked the question she had been avoiding since the club.
"If I say no to your engagement lie, what happens?"
He did not answer immediately.
When he did, his voice was low. "Then we keep you alive another way."
She stared at him.
He came back to the bed, stopped close enough to make her pulse misbehave, and said the next part with a kind of rough precision that made it feel like a confession.
"And I keep wanting you anyway."
The room went still.
Mia forgot the bruise, the river, the gunfire, and the reason she was supposed to be angry.
All she could hear was the fact that he had said it out loud.