3 AM
* * *
Ican't sleep.
It's been a week. A week of Italian cotton and east-facing windows and the low hum of a city I'm learning to read through glass. A week of mornings with Nico in the kitchen and evenings with Nico in the hallway and the long dark hours between where I lie in this beautiful room and think about the man thirty feet away and wonder when I became someone who measures distance in heartbeats instead of feet.
Today was full — I spent the morning on calls with two clients, rebuilding a risk matrix for a healthcare startup whose CEO thinks cybersecurity is "an IT problem" and not the existential liability I've been explaining for three weeks. I had lunch with Finn at The Galley, two guards in the booth behind us pretending to read menus while Finn pretended not to notice them.
He's the same calm, sardonic brother who sees everything and says half of it. "You look different," he told me.
"How?"
"Rested. Which is weird, because you're sleeping in a building with a man who kills people."
"I sleep fine."
"Liar." He stole my chips and changed the subject to Ronan, who's apparently been drawing the security guards when they're not looking.
I came home —home, I called it that, which is a problem I'm not ready to examine — and worked until seven. Nico came in around six, nodded at me, poured scotch, and stood at the window the way he does when something's happened that he won't tell me about. I've learned to read the silence: operational silence is still, almost meditative. Worried silence is rigid, jaw tight. Tonight's silence was the second kind. I didn't ask. He didn't offer. We ate Thai from the place on Newbury and talked about nothing that mattered and everything that did.
Then the hallway. Then the doors. Then the goodnight that gets heavier every night, like we're loading it with everything we're not saying and eventually the word won't be able to hold the weight.
Now it's 3am and I'm staring at the ceiling and the insomnia isn't about the war or the threats or the man who wants to kill me. It's about the man who's waiting for me to knock, and the fact that every night I don't, the wanting gets worse.
I get up.
Bare feet on cold hardwood. The penthouse is dark, though the city glows through the glass walls, the skyline indifferent and glittering. I take the hallway toward the kitchen. His door is closed. No light underneath. No sound.
I pause. Two seconds. The wood grain is silver in the dark. I think about his hands and his scars and the way he saidknock. I didn't hear him say it through the wall, but I felt something that night. A vibration. A want that matched mine, pressing through plaster and silence.
I keep walking.
The kitchen opens off the living area — the island, the stools, the six-burner range Nico has conquered with eggs and toast and nothing else. I open the fridge. Pour water. Turn around.
He's already here.
Sitting at the kitchen island, shirtless, sweatpants low on his hips, hair wrecked from a pillow he wasn't sleeping on. A glass of scotch in front of him — his father's Macallan, the one he pours when the weight is bad. He looks up when I appear and those gold eyes catch the city light and he looks like something out of a painting I'd buy and a warning I'd ignore.
"Can't sleep?" I say.
"Can you?"
"No. I don't. Much."
I should leave. It's 3am and he's shirtless and the kitchen is dark and I'm wearing a t-shirt — his t-shirt, the one I stole and haven't returned — and shorts, and my hair is a mess, and my feet are bare and this is exactly the kind of situation my self-preservation instincts were designed to prevent.
I sit down.
He pushes the water glass toward me without being asked. I take it. Our fingers don't touch. They almost do. The almost is worse.
We sit in the dark kitchen and the silence is comfortable in a way that terrifies me, because comfortable silences are for people who know each other, and knowing Nico Konstantinos is a decision I haven't made yet. Or have. And just haven't admitted.
"Tell me about the scar," I say.
He looks down, following my gaze to the long line that runs from below his ribs to his hip. In the dim light it's a pale ridge, old and silvered, evidence of something that happened to a body I'm trying not to catalog in too much detail and failingcompletely. The bullet wound on his left shoulder is smaller, rounder, a punctuation mark to the sentence the rib scar started.
"I was twenty-two," he says.