Lex moves to handle the cleanup. He doesn't speak. There's nothing to say. We've done this before. We'll do it again.
The warehouse door opens.
Siobhan.
She's standing in the doorway with the Southie night behind her and her coat pulled tight and an expression I can't read — or rather, I can read it perfectly and what I see makes me go cold. She's looking at the body. The blood. The chair. The tools on the side table that Lex used during the preliminary work. The gun in my hand, still warm, smoke still threading from the barrel in the overhead light.
Everything I am is in this room. Every ugly truth I've hidden behind tailored suits and controlled silences and a penthouse that smells like her shampoo. This is what I do. This is who I am. And she's seeing it with her own eyes for the first time.
Our eyes meet. I don't flinch. I don't apologize. I don't lower the gun or step in front of the body or try to shield her from any of it. She came here — she tracked me through my driver when I'd been gone for hours after Lex's urgent call. She didn't know what she'd find. I'm certain of that. She came because I'd left without explanation after Lex's call pulled me from the desk where I'd been kissing her two hours ago, because she is awoman who runs a crisis management firm and her first instinct when information goes dark is to find the source. She came looking for her husband. She found the butcher instead.
She walked through that door, and now she sees.
I wait.
The silence stretches. The warehouse hums with the distant sound of the harbor. Blood drips into the drain. Somewhere outside, a ship's horn sounds, low and mournful.
"Is it done?" she says. "Whatever you needed?"
I blink. I've prepared for every possible response to this moment. Horror. Disgust. The particular revulsion that crosses a person's face when they realize the man they've been sleeping beside is capable of this. I've rehearsed the aftermath — the silence in the car, the separate bedrooms, the slow inevitable retreat of a woman who finally saw the thing she'd been pretending wasn't there.
She asked if it was done. Like it was a task. Like it was a task I needed to finish before I could come home.
"It's done."
"Then come home. You have blood on your shirt."
She turns. Walks out. The warehouse door closes behind her and the sound it makes is final and gentle and the opposite of everything this room contains.
I look at the gun in my hand. I look at the body in the chair. I look at the door she just walked through.
A wall I've maintained for fifteen years — the one that says no one can see this part of me and stay — she just walked through it like it wasn't there.
* * *
Two in the morning. The penthouse is dark. She's in the kitchen — not the bedroom, the kitchen, sitting at the island in my t-shirtwith coffee, not water. She's been waiting. The realization lands somewhere between my ribs.
I've showered. Changed. The blood is gone from my shirt, from my hands, from everywhere I can reach. But I can still feel it — the phantom residue that never quite washes off, the weight of the Beretta's recoil in my wrist, the sound of the echo in the corrugated steel.
She looks at me. I sit across from her at the island. The same seats as the 3am kitchen. The same positions. A different conversation entirely.
"Did he deserve it?"
"He gave information that will save Greek lives. Then he would have reported back to Reznikov. So yes."
"Okay."
"Okay?"
"I knew who you were when I married you. I knew what the blood on your hands meant before I agreed to share a hallway with you. I'm not going to pretend surprise at a choice I made with my eyes open."
The words land. Not soft, but solid. The weight of a woman who has thought about this, who has turned it over in the dark during the nights she couldn't sleep, who made a decision about what she could live with before she ever walked to his door. Before she ever considered knocking.
She pauses. Studies my face. "You missed a spot. Behind your ear."
I reach. She's right. There’s dried blood, a smear I couldn't see in the mirror, evidence of the thing I did clinging to the place where my jaw meets my neck.
My fingers come away dark.