She stands. Takes a cloth from the counter. Wets it under the tap — warm, I can see the steam. Comes around the island to where I'm sitting and reaches up.
Her fingers are steady. The cloth is warm against my skin. She cleans the blood from behind my ear with small, careful strokes that are gentle, thorough, the way you'd clean a wound on someone you love. Neither of us speaks. The kitchen is silent except for the water in the cloth and the sound of my breathing and the quiet fact of her hands on my skin, wiping away the worst of me without flinching.
She finishes. Folds the cloth. Sets it on the counter.
This — this small domestic act after the violence — breaks me more completely than anything she could have said. Words I could have argued with, deflected, rationalized. But her hands on my skin, cleaning blood she has every right to recoil from, steady and warm and matter of fact. There's no defense against that. There's no wall that holds.
"Come to bed," she says. Not his bed, not hers…just bed. A destination, not a negotiation.
"Siobhan —"
"You don't have to talk. You don't have to explain. Just come to bed."
She walks down the hallway. I hear her door close. Her door. Not mine. The invitation isn't sexual — it's something harder. She's offering to hold the weight of what I did tonight, to lie beside me in the dark knowing what these hands have done, to sleep next to a killer and call it coming home.
I sit in the dark kitchen for a long time. My hand goes to the spot behind my ear where her fingers were. The skin is clean now. Warm where the cloth touched it.
Two days. I give myself two days before the wanting kills me. She keeps seeing the gun in my hand. I know because her eyes track my hands whenever I move — not with fear, not with revulsion, but with the focused attention of a woman who is deciding, in real time, what she can carry.
She sees the gun. She sees the hands. She sees the monster.
And she didn't leave.
Maybe that's the most dangerous thing about Siobhan Konstantinos…
She sees the monster and wants him anyway.
Chapter 14
Siobhan
The Knock
* * *
Two days.
Two days since the warehouse. Two days since I watched my husband shoot a man in the head and felt the echo of it in the steel walls and in my chest and in the place behind my ribs where fear should live but doesn't. Two days since I walked out of that building and said "come home" like the blood on his shirt was a stain and not a confession.
Two weeks of marriage. Fourteen days. And tonight, I find out if we have a real one.
I lie in bed and think about his hands.
I can't stop. I've tried — two days of trying, two days of watching him across the kitchen island and tracking his fingers around the coffee cup and the scotch glass and the phone and the pen and the doorframe he braces against when he's thinking. His hands are everywhere. They're all I see.
Hands that made me breakfast. Eggs, toast, coffee poured before I asked. The quiet choreography of a man learning how to take care of someone. Domestic muscles, he called them once in a voice that suggested he'd forgotten they existed. Those handscracked eggs into a pan and slid the plate across the island and our fingers brushed on the ceramic edge and he pulled away first. He always pulls away first. As if touching me by accident is a luxury he hasn't earned.
Hands that held a gun. The Beretta was steady, I noticed that. No tremor. No hesitation. The precision he brings to everything: the boardroom, the alliance, the way he positioned the lighting in his office to catch his jaw from above. He held the gun the way he holds a negotiation. Controlled. Certain. Final.
Hands that cupped my face on his desk two days before the warehouse. His palms warm against my jaw, his thumbs on my cheekbones, his heart slamming under my palm when he pressed my hand to his chest and said,"you feel it too."
Not a question. An admission from a man who doesn't admit things, dragged out of him by a force that dragged me across his desk with my legs wrapped around him and my anger dissolving into want so fast I couldn't track the chemical change.
Hands that broke a man's fingers. Lex did the breaking. I know that from the details Nico gave me afterward, clinical and unsparing because I asked, and he doesn't lie to me. But Nico ordered it. Those hands signed the order the way a surgeon signs a consent form: necessary, precise, part of the cost.
Hands that pressed against the wall at night. I've heard him, not through the plaster but through the silence, through the particular quality of stillness that fills the penthouse at midnight when we're both awake and thirty feet apart and pretending to sleep. I know he stands at the wall. I know because I've stood at mine.
The same hands. All of them. Every version.