"You're welcome," I say, in a voice that matches.
She walks away. The hallway swallows her, and I stand there with the ghost of her spine on my knuckles and the scent of her shampoo in my lungs and the absolute certainty that a zipper just undid me worse than a bullet ever did.
I don't follow. I should follow. But I don't.
* * *
The dinner at Elysium is a family affair — Greeks, O'Briens, Romanos around a long table in the private room. Ten days of marriage and the alliance is holding, barely, glued together by shared threat and the woman sitting four seats away from me in the dress I just unzipped.
She's talking supply routes with Cormac. Her hands move when she explains — mapping logistics in the air, sketching distribution channels on the tablecloth with her fingertip. Cormac is leaning in, listening. Actually listening. A month ago, he would have talked over her. Now he's nodding. Ward RiskAdvisory didn't make her sharp. She was always sharp. It gave her a language the men at this table understand.
"The containerized cargo through Revere is the vulnerability," she tells Cormac. "Your construction fronts on the south end are clean, but the overlap with Romano subcontractors creates a paper trail. Separate the billing entities."
Someone down the table — a Romano uncle, old guard, gold rings on every finger — asks Siobhan what she "does." The question carries weight.
What do you do, dear?
As in,what purpose do you serve beyond being decorative?
"I run Ward Risk Advisory," she says. No hesitation. No apology. "Crisis management and threat assessment. I advise companies on how to survive things most people don't see coming."
The table recalibrates. The Romano uncle nods slowly, reassessing. Two seats down, Cormac catches my eye — pride and amusement in equal measure — his sister just dressed down a patronizing question without raising her voice.
She catches me watching. Raises an eyebrow. Goes back to her conversation.
A man approaches her when she breaks from Cormac to get a drink. Marco Romano, late twenties, expensive watch, the kind of jaw that photographs well and the kind of confidence that comes from never having been told no by anyone who mattered. He puts his hand on the small of Siobhan's back to guide her toward the bar.
The small of her back. The exact place my hand rests when I walk with her. The exact gesture I use, proprietary, protective, mine.
My vision narrows. The room contracts to a single point: his fingers on the fabric of her dress, on the body underneathit, on the spine I touched twenty minutes ago. The zipper I pulled down. The skin I didn't kiss. Now this man — this boy in an expensive suit who has never held anything heavier than a cocktail glass — has his hand where mine was, and the jealousy that floods through me is so purely territorial that it bypasses every strategic circuit I have. This isn't the boss assessing a threat. This is the animal recognizing an intruder.
I don't move. I note it. I let Marco get Siobhan a drink and make her laugh at a joke not worth remembering and keep his hand on her back for six seconds longer than any man should touch another man's wife. Six seconds. I count them. My hand around my scotch glass tightens until the crystal protests.
Siobhan steps away from him without drama. She takes her drink, returns to Cormac, and Marco drifts back to the Romano table looking pleased with himself.
He shouldn't be.
Lex materializes beside me. He's been watching too, Lex watches everything, which is what makes him invaluable and occasionally unsettling. He doesn't say anything about Marco. He doesn't need to. The look we exchange lasts less than a second and contains a complete conversation.
Elena arrives late, apologizing saying something about the traffic from Cambridge, an accident on the bridge. She hugs Siobhan warmly, kisses my cheek, settles into her seat with the ease of a woman who's been at this table since childhood. She has. Elena Drakos has been part of our world since she was eight years old. Her father and mine shared cigars on the balcony at the old house while we played in the garden — Elena braiding wildflowers into crowns, Lex systematically dismantling them, Stavros eating the petals.
Those years feel like they belong to someone else. A boy who believed his father was invincible and the garden would always be there, and Elena would always be Elena — bright, loyal, partof the furniture of his life. She still is. The woman telling stories across this table is the girl who held my hand at my father's funeral because no one else thought to.
She tells stories about us as children and Siobhan laughs. Elena describes me at twelve, accidentally burning my father's ledger while trying to read it by candlelight because the power had gone out during a storm.
"He didn't tell anyone for three days," Elena says. "Just sat there with this guilty face, and finally Alexandros — my father — found the ashes in the fireplace and Nico just said, 'I can recreate it from memory.' And he did."
"Of course he did," Siobhan says, and the way she says it hits me in a place I didn't know was unguarded.
After dinner. Drinks. The conversation fragments into smaller groups. Elena finds me at the bar.
"The new security system at the penthouse… Is it the rotating guard model or fixed posts?" She sips her wine. "My father worries, Nico. He wants to know you're protected. Especially with the Reznikov situation."
"Rotating," I say. "Shift changes at 2am and 6am. The east entrance has a brief camera gap during transitions — four seconds — but Lex has men covering it manually."
"Good." She nods. "That's thorough. I'll tell him." She squeezes my arm. "I'm glad you're being careful."
When she hugs Siobhan goodbye at the end of the evening, her hands tremble slightly — a fine vibration I catch as she grips Siobhan's shoulders. I read it as emotion. Elena has always been sentimental about family. She's watching Siobhan with what looks like tenderness, or gratitude, or the particular warmth of a woman who has accepted her friend's happiness as her own.