Chapter 1 - A Waitress Kissed a Bleeding Stranger to Fool His Killers—Unaware She'd Just Saved the Coast's Most Feared Mafia Boss
The match burned down to my fingers before I heard the wet thud of a body meeting brick.
I pinched it out. The alley behind Hollis Diner went black, then gray, as my eyes found the thin spill of light leaking from the broken neon sign above the back door. That sign had been dying since October. It used to spell HOLLIS in fat red cursive. Now it stuttered between HOLL and IS, spitting weak light onto the wet asphalt like something bleeding out slowly and refusing to die.
Two in the morning. My shift was over. The smell of burnt filter coffee and fryer grease had worked its way into my skin the way it always did, a second layer of clothing I couldn't take off. I dug into the pocket of my oversized cardigan, past a fistful of sticky quarters, and found the crushed pack of cigarettes I barely smoked anymore. They weren't a habit. They were an excuse—five minutes of standing still before the mile-long walk back to my apartment on Wexler Street.
November had settled into Havenport's bones that week. It was a damp, coastal cold that ignored fabric and went straight for the joints. I put the cigarette between my lips and cupped my hands around a fresh match.
That was when I heard it again. A wet, heavy thud. A sack of flour dropped from a height onto brick. Then the unmistakable scrape of leather soles dragging across asphalt.
I froze.
The alley fed into a narrow service street where the delivery trucks came in the morning. It was the kind of place nobody walked at two a.m. unless they had a reason, and the reason was never good. I should have stepped back. Slid inside. Thrown the deadbolt and the chain and called it a night, the way I had a hundred times before.
The city had rules. Rule one: keep your head down. Rule two: if it doesn't involve your paycheck, you didn't see it. My mother had taught me those rules before she forgot my name, back when she could still teach me anything at all. I had followed them for twenty-six years.
"You're making this tedious," a man said.
His voice was casual. Bored, almost. The tone of a man waiting on a slow elevator.
The man on his knees didn't answer. A ragged cough tore out of his chest, followed by the flat splatter of something hitting the pavement. I pressed my spine against the cold brick of the diner and told my legs to move.
They didn't.
Through the gloom, the ambient light from the service street caught a dull flash of metal. A pistol. Long and black and fitted with a suppressor, the kind I'd only ever seen in movies, held steady at the back of the kneeling man's skull.
There was no time to weigh anything. No time to do the math on my own survival, which is the only math I'd ever been good at. Maybe it was the exhaustion. Maybe it was the monotony of my life finally cracking my brain open. Maybe it was the fact that I'd spent four years wiping other people's tables and had never once, not once, been the person who got to change the ending of anything.
I stepped out from behind the dumpsters.
My boots made sharp, deliberate sounds on the wet concrete. Loud on purpose. I pitched my voice up an octave and slurred it, the way I slurred for the truckers who got handsy on Fridays.
"Tommy, you son of a bitch."
I didn't stop walking. "I told you to wait by the car."
The two standing men snapped toward me. The gun swung off the kneeling man and leveled at my chest. I kept moving. That was the trick—if I were a threat, I wouldn't be stomping toward them with a crushed cigarette hanging out of my mouth. Threats ran. Threats were careful. I was just a loud, stupid woman in a stained apron, and that made me invisible.
I reached the kneeling man before the gunman could recalibrate. Up close he was huge—shoulders like a doorframe, wrapped in a heavy charcoal overcoat that had probably cost more than my annual rent. I grabbed a fistful of that coat and hauled.
He came up heavier than a body should, all solid muscle and dead weight. He stumbled to his feet and swayed, and his head snapped toward me.
In the light, I saw the blood. It coated the whole left side of his face, ran from a cut above his eyebrow down into the collar of his shirt. His eyes found mine and held them, and something cold went down my spine.
They weren't the eyes of a man who was dying. They were calm. Utterly, terrifyingly calm. He was reading me. The exits. The angles. Me.
"Don't talk," I breathed into his collar.
Then I threw my arms around his neck, went up on my toes, and smashed my mouth against his.
It wasn't a movie kiss. It was violent and jarring and wrong. Our teeth clicked together hard enough to hurt. I tasted copper and rain and the bitter ash of my own cigarette, and under all of it something sharp and expensive, like cedarwood. He went rigid. A statue of ice and tension. His hands stayed pinned at his sides, but his breath caught in his throat, a small hitch that told me he was at least human.
I pressed closer. I angled my body to put myself between him and the gunman. I buried one hand in his hair—it was short and damp and cold—and fisted the other in his coat and poured every ounce of frantic energy I had into the lie.
Who the hell are you?
The bored man. Closer now. I broke the kiss but kept my face inches from the stranger's, my breath fogging against his jaw.
I turned my head and glared over my shoulder, and I let out a long, annoyed sigh, the sigh of a woman who had done this a hundred times.
"I'm his girlfriend," I snapped, loud. "And I'm sick of him getting trashed and picking fights in alleys. Back off. He's had enough."
The gunman paused. He glanced at his partner. I watched the calculation happen behind his pale eyes, and I watched him do exactly what I'd bet he would do: the arithmetic of liability. A dead body in an empty alley was business. A dead body with a screaming witness attached to it was paperwork, witnesses, questions, a mess.
"Your boyfriend owes people money," the second man grunted. He was built like a cinder block, and he kept his hand inside his jacket.
"Take a number," I said, rolling my eyes.
I hooked the stranger's arm over my shoulder. He complied instantly, sagging into me, and played the part of a dead-drunk loser so well that I almost believed it. His weight settled against my side, and I felt the heat of him through the coat—too hot, feverish, the heat of a body fighting itself.
"Come on, Tommy," I said. "If I have to carry you to the subway, I'm taking your television."
I didn't wait for an answer. I turned us around and started walking back toward the diner's heavy metal door. Every step felt like wading through deep water. The phantom crosshairs of that gun burned a hole between my shoulder blades the entire way.
Don't shoot. Don't shoot. Don't shoot.
We reached the door. I fumbled blindly with my free hand, caught the handle, and yanked. I shoved him through, stumbled in after him, and slammed the door shut. Deadbolt. Chain. The metallic clacks rang out one after another like small, decisive gunshots of their own.
Only then did I let out the breath I'd been holding. My knees turned to liquid, and I caught myself on the doorframe.
The back room of Hollis was a narrow corridor lined with sacks of onions and a mop sink and one folding chair under a flickering fluorescent bulb. The walk-in freezer hummed against the far wall, a low, endless note.
I leaned against the door and listened.
Nothing. No footsteps. No pounding on the metal. No bored voice asking me to open up.
I turned around.
He was leaning heavily against the industrial sink, one hand pressed to his ribs, and under the harsh white light he stopped being a silhouette and became a person. Early thirties, maybe. Tall. Broad. The bespoke coat was ruined—dirt ground into the wool and a dark, spreading stain blooming across the left side. His face was all sharp angles and bruised shadow, his jaw tight with pain he was refusing to show.
But it was his eyes that made my heart stutter. They hadn't changed. Calm. Assessing. They moved across the room, catalogued the exits, and finally settled on me.
"Tommy," he said.
His voice was a low, gravelly baritone, and it was the first thing he'd said to me.
"It was the first name that came to mind," I muttered, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. His blood was still on my lips. I could taste it.
I walked past him, giving him a wide berth, and pulled the battered white first-aid kit off the top of the ice machine. The lid was held shut with a rubber band because the latch had broken two years ago and nobody had ever fixed it.
"You're bleeding," I said, popping the band.
"I'm aware."
"Take the coat off."
He didn't move. He just stared at me, unblinking, and for a second I understood exactly what kind of man I had just dragged through my employer's back door.
"Who are you?" he asked.
"The idiot who just saved your life. Take the coat off before you bleed out on my boss's linoleum. I don't get paid enough to mop up plasma."
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile. The ghost of one. A man deciding whether I was worth the effort of an answer.
Then, slow and deliberate, he unbuttoned the overcoat and let it slide off his shoulders onto the mop sink. Underneath he wore a tailored black shirt, plastered to his torso with sweat and blood. He worked the lower buttons open and pulled the fabric aside.
The wound was ugly. A jagged gash along his lower ribs, maybe four inches long, the edges dark and angry. A bullet graze. Close enough to burn, shallow enough that it hadn't killed him—yet. It was still seeping.
I sucked air through my teeth. "You're lucky."
"I've been told otherwise."
I grabbed a bottle of saline and a wad of gauze and stepped in close. He was so tall that standing this near, I had to tip my head back to see his face. He smelled like cedarwood and rain and something else I couldn't place then and would recognize later, in a different room, on a different night—gunpowder.
"This is going to burn," I said flatly.
"Do it."
I uncapped the bottle and poured.
He didn't flinch. Not a hiss, not a twitch of the jaw. The muscles in his abdomen jumped and went rigid, corded and defined, but his face stayed carved from stone. I pressed the gauze against the wound and leaned in with my whole weight, and I felt his eyes on the top of my head the entire time.
"You shouldn't have stepped out," he said quietly.
"You're welcome."
"I'm not thanking you. I'm telling you a fact. People who step into alleys like that don't usually walk out."
"Well, lucky for you, my survival instincts are currently out of order."
I tore strips of medical tape with my teeth and started taping the gauze down. "So what was it? Piss off a loan shark? Sleep with the wrong man's wife?"
The ghost of a smile again. "Something like that."
"Right. Well, I'm taping this down, but you need stitches, and you're not getting them here. Do you have somewhere safe to go?"
"Yes."
"Good. Because as soon as I'm done, you're leaving out the front door. You walk two blocks north, you catch the night bus, and you never come back to this diner. Understood?"
He looked at me. Really looked. His gaze dropped—briefly, deliberately—to my mouth, and a spike of heat went through my chest that had no business being there. I remembered the force of the kiss, the rough scrape of his jaw, the small, surprised sound in his throat.
I shoved it down where I kept everything else I couldn't afford.
"Understood," he said softly.
I stepped back, tossed the bloody wrappers in the trash, and turned to the mop sink. I scrubbed my hands with the cheap pink soap until the water ran clear, and the adrenaline drained out of me all at once, leaving a cold, trembling exhaustion in its place. I had just stepped between an armed man and his target. I had put my mouth on a stranger to save his life.
I was insane. I was actually insane.
When I dried my hands and turned around, the room was empty.
I blinked. The folding chair was bare. The back door was still deadbolted. I hurried down the short hall into the main diner—lights off, chairs stacked on the tables, the front door closed.
The deadbolt was turned horizontal. Unlocked.
He was gone. No thank-you. No goodbye. Just gone, like a ghost who'd never been there at all.
I locked the door and leaned my forehead against the cool glass and stared out at the empty street. I told myself I was glad he was gone. I told myself I'd forget the whole thing by morning.
I was wrong.
Four days passed.
Ninety-six hours of lukewarm coffee, complaining truckers, and the endless hum of the fryer. I settled back into the gray rhythm of my life and pushed the memory of the bloody man into a locked box in the back of my mind, the way I pushed everything else—my mother's bills, the eviction notice taped to my fridge, the fact that I hadn't had a real conversation with another human being in months.
It was a Thursday. Half past eleven at night. The diner was dead. Rain lashed the big front windows and turned the streetlights into blurry halos. I was wiping down the counter, and Ray was in the back scraping the flat-top with a spatula, making that awful rhythmic shhhk-shhhk sound that meant he wanted to go home.
"Ray," I called. "You want me to lock the front or leave it for the last call?"
"Leave it," he grunted. "I got a table of four coming off the late shift. They tip."
Ray was sixty-one, bald, and built like a retired boxer who'd kept the shoulders and lost the wind. He'd hired me when I was twenty-two and had nothing but a duffel bag and a high school diploma. He didn't ask questions and he paid in cash and he let me eat the soup for free on slow nights. In a city like Havenport, that made him almost a saint.
I was just reaching for the rag bucket when the bell over the door chimed.
I didn't look up. "Take any booth you like. Coffee's fresh, but the grill's off in thirty minutes."
No one answered.
The only sound was the heavy, synchronized thud of leather shoes on the black-and-white checkered floor. Two sets. Moving in step. Deliberate.
I looked up.
Two men. Dark suits under heavy water-resistant trench coats, rain beading on their shoulders. They weren't truckers. They weren't college kids looking for sober-up fries. Their faces were blank in the way of men who had practiced being blank, and their eyes moved across the diner with clinical efficiency—exits, sightlines, me—before locking on and stopping.
I recognized one of them instantly.
The bored voice. The pale, washed-out blue eyes. He was leaner up close, sharper, with a nose that had been broken at least once and set badly.
My heart slammed against my ribs like a trapped bird. I made myself keep breathing. I picked up a menu, walked over to the counter directly across from them, and set it down.
"Just coffee?" I asked. My voice came out steady. I don't know how.
The bored man leaned an elbow on the Formica. "You work late, miss."
"It pays the rent."
"Coffee?" I offered again.
He ignored the menu. He reached into his coat, and every muscle in my body coiled, ready to dive behind the counter—but he only pulled out a folded square of paper. He slid it across the counter with two fingers.
"We're looking for someone," he said. "A man. Might have come through this area a few nights ago."
I didn't touch it. I just looked down.
It was a grainy surveillance photo, black-and-white, printed cheap. A man in a suit stepping out of a black car, caught mid-stride. Sharp. Untouchable. The face was angled away, half in shadow, but the shoulders, the set of the jaw, the way he carried his weight—I knew it. I'd had my hands in that man's hair four nights ago.
I didn't blink.
"Doesn't look familiar," I said. "But a lot of people come through here."
The second man shifted his weight. He was the cinder block from the alley, broader than the doorway, with a neck that had gone thick and a face that had been flattened by something heavy. Otto, I would learn later. Right now he was just a wall with a scar through one eyebrow.
"He was bleeding," Otto said. "He'd have needed help. Bandages. Somewhere to sit down."
"If someone came in here bleeding," I said, meeting the pale eyes, "I'd have called an ambulance. I wipe tables. I don't do triage."
The bored man stared at me. The silence stretched tight enough to strum.
"You know," he said softly, "four nights ago we ran into a bit of a snag in the alley out back. A drunk girl helping her boyfriend." He let that sit. "We let it go. It was raining. We were tired." He tilted his head. "But then we went back and pulled the security footage off the corner."
My mouth went dry.
"The girl walked into that alley alone."
I stopped breathing. Somewhere behind me, Ray's spatula scraped the flat-top—shhhk, shhhk—oblivious.
"Where is he, sweetheart?" the man whispered.
"I don't know what you're talking about," I said. And my voice finally broke. I heard it crack, and I hated myself for it. I took a step back, and my hip caught the register drawer. "I'm going to have to ask you to leave."
Otto moved so fast it was a blur. He reached across the counter and his hand closed around my wrist like a manacle. He jerked, and I slammed forward into the counter's edge, the corner driving into my hip, a white flash of pain up my side.
"Ray!" I screamed. Panic shattered whatever composure I'd been holding onto.
"Ray's taking a nap," the bored man said gently. He nodded toward the pass-through window into the kitchen. I looked, and my stomach dropped—a pair of legs on the floor by the fry station. Ray's legs. Motionless.
"You're going to tell us where Adrian Voss is," the bored man said, and he pulled a suppressed pistol from his coat and laid it on the counter, angled casually at my stomach. "Or you're going to join Ray."
Adrian Voss.
The name went through me like ice water.
I knew that name. Everyone in Havenport knew that name, the way you know the name of a disease you'll probably never catch. He wasn't a street thug. He wasn't a guy who owed the wrong people money. Adrian Voss ran the largest syndicate on the eastern seaboard. He owned the docks and half the politicians and a stretch of the waterfront that didn't appear on any city map. He was a ghost. A rumor. The kind of man people mentioned in lowered voices and then changed the subject.
I had kissed the head of the Voss organization and called him Tommy.
I had stood in a fluorescent back room with my hands on his bare skin and told him he was lucky.
The bell over the front door chimed again.
The match burned low against my fingers just as a body struck the brick wall.
I pinched it out and let the alley behind Hollis Diner swallow me whole.
Thirty feet away, three silhouettes had peeled out of the rain-slick dark—two standing, one on his knees, and the sound he made when he coughed was the sound of something tearing loose inside him.
A gun came up.
I should have gone back inside and locked the deadbolt.
Instead I walked straight at the barrel, grabbed the dying man by his thousand-dollar coat, and kissed him hard enough to convince two killers we were just drunk and in love. It worked. That was my first mistake.
The match burned down to my fingers before I heard the wet thud of a body meeting brick.
I pinched it out. The alley behind Hollis Diner went black, then gray, as my eyes found the thin spill of light leaking from the broken neon sign above the back door.
That sign had been dying since October.
It used to spell HOLLIS in fat red cursive. Now it stuttered between HOLL and IS, spitting weak light onto the wet asphalt like something bleeding out slowly and refusing to die.
Two in the morning. My shift was over. The smell of burnt filter coffee and fryer grease had worked its way into my skin the way it always did, a second layer of clothing I couldn’t take off.
I dug into the pocket of my oversized cardigan, past a fistful of sticky quarters, and found the crushed pack of cigarettes I barely smoked anymore.
They weren’t a habit. They were an excuse—five minutes of standing still before the mile-long walk back to my apartment on Wexler Street.
November had settled into Havenport’s bones that week. It was a damp, coastal cold that ignored fabric and went straight for the joints. I put the cigarette between my lips and cupped my hands around a fresh match.
That was when I heard it again. A wet, heavy thud. A sack of flour dropped from a height onto brick. Then the unmistakable scrape of leather soles dragging across asphalt.
I froze.
The alley fed into a narrow service street where the delivery trucks came in the morning. It was the kind of place nobody walked at two a.m. unless they had a reason, and the reason was never good. I should have stepped back. Slid inside. Thrown the deadbolt and the chain and called it a night, the way I had a hundred times before.
The city had rules. Rule one: keep your head down. Rule two: if it doesn’t involve your paycheck, you didn’t see it. My mother had taught me those rules before she forgot my name, back when she could still teach me anything at all. I had followed them for twenty-six years.
“You’re making this tedious,” a man said.
His voice was casual. Bored, almost. The tone of a man waiting on a slow elevator.
The man on his knees didn’t answer. A ragged cough tore out of his chest, followed by the flat splatter of something hitting the pavement. I pressed my spine against the cold brick of the diner and told my legs to move.
They didn’t.
Through the gloom, the ambient light from the service street caught a dull flash of metal. A pistol. Long and black and fitted with a suppressor, the kind I’d only ever seen in movies, held steady at the back of the kneeling man’s skull.
There was no time to weigh anything. No time to do the math on my own survival, which is the only math I’d ever been good at. Maybe it was the exhaustion. Maybe it was the monotony of my life finally cracking my brain open.
Maybe it was the fact that I’d spent four years wiping other people’s tables and had never once, not once, been the person who got to change the ending of anything.
I stepped out from behind the dumpsters.
My boots made sharp, deliberate sounds on the wet concrete. Loud on purpose. I pitched my voice up an octave and slurred it, the way I slurred for the truckers who got handsy on Fridays.
“Tommy, you son of a bitch.”
I didn’t stop walking. “I told you to wait by the car.”
The two standing men snapped toward me. The gun swung off the kneeling man and leveled at my chest. I kept moving.
That was the trick—if I were a threat, I wouldn’t be stomping toward them with a crushed cigarette hanging out of my mouth. Threats ran. Threats were careful. I was just a loud, stupid woman in a stained apron, and that made me invisible.
I reached the kneeling man before the gunman could recalibrate. Up close he was huge—shoulders like a doorframe, wrapped in a heavy charcoal overcoat that had probably cost more than my annual rent. I grabbed a fistful of that coat and hauled.
He came up heavier than a body should, all solid muscle and dead weight. He stumbled to his feet and swayed, and his head snapped toward me.
In the light, I saw the blood. It coated the whole left side of his face, ran from a cut above his eyebrow down into the collar of his shirt. His eyes found mine and held them, and something cold went down my spine.
They weren’t the eyes of a man who was dying. They were calm. Utterly, terrifyingly calm. He was reading me. The exits. The angles. Me.
“Don’t talk,” I breathed into his collar.
Then I threw my arms around his neck, went up on my toes, and smashed my mouth against his.
It wasn’t a movie kiss. It was violent and jarring and wrong.
Our teeth clicked together hard enough to hurt. I tasted copper and rain and the bitter ash of my own cigarette, and under all of it something sharp and expensive, like cedarwood.
He went rigid. A statue of ice and tension. His hands stayed pinned at his sides, but his breath caught in his throat, a small hitch that told me he was at least human.
I pressed closer. I angled my body to put myself between him and the gunman. I buried one hand in his hair—it was short and damp and cold—and fisted the other in his coat and poured every ounce of frantic energy I had into the lie.
Who the hell are you?
The bored man. Closer now. I broke the kiss but kept my face inches from the stranger’s, my breath fogging against his jaw.
I turned my head and glared over my shoulder, and I let out a long, annoyed sigh, the sigh of a woman who had done this a hundred times.
“I’m his girlfriend,” I snapped, loud. “And I’m sick of him getting trashed and picking fights in alleys. Back off. He’s had enough.”
The gunman paused. He glanced at his partner. I watched the calculation happen behind his pale eyes, and I watched him do exactly what I’d bet he would do: the arithmetic of liability. A dead body in an empty alley was business. A dead body with a screaming witness attached to it was paperwork, witnesses, questions, a mess.
“Your boyfriend owes people money,” the second man grunted. He was built like a cinder block, and he kept his hand inside his jacket.
“Take a number,” I said, rolling my eyes.
I hooked the stranger’s arm over my shoulder. He complied instantly, sagging into me, and played the part of a dead-drunk loser so well that I almost believed it.
His weight settled against my side, and I felt the heat of him through the coat—too hot, feverish, the heat of a body fighting itself.
“Come on, Tommy,” I said.
“If I have to carry you to the subway, I’m taking your television.”
I didn’t wait for an answer. I turned us around and started walking back toward the diner’s heavy metal door. Every step felt like wading through deep water. The phantom crosshairs of that gun burned a hole between my shoulder blades the entire way.
Don’t shoot. Don’t shoot. Don’t shoot.
We reached the door. I fumbled blindly with my free hand, caught the handle, and yanked. I shoved him through, stumbled in after him, and slammed the door shut. Deadbolt. Chain. The metallic clacks rang out one after another like small, decisive gunshots of their own.
Only then did I let out the breath I’d been holding. My knees turned to liquid, and I caught myself on the doorframe.
The back room of Hollis was a narrow corridor lined with sacks of onions and a mop sink and one folding chair under a flickering fluorescent bulb. The walk-in freezer hummed against the far wall, a low, endless note.
I leaned against the door and listened.
Nothing. No footsteps. No pounding on the metal. No bored voice asking me to open up.
I turned around.
He was leaning heavily against the industrial sink, one hand pressed to his ribs, and under the harsh white light he stopped being a silhouette and became a person. Early thirties, maybe. Tall. Broad. The bespoke coat was ruined—dirt ground into the wool and a dark, spreading stain blooming across the left side. His face was all sharp angles and bruised shadow, his jaw tight with pain he was refusing to show.
But it was his eyes that made my heart stutter. They hadn’t changed. Calm. Assessing. They moved across the room, catalogued the exits, and finally settled on me.
“Tommy,” he said.
His voice was a low, gravelly baritone, and it was the first thing he’d said to me.
“It was the first name that came to mind,” I muttered, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. His blood was still on my lips. I could taste it.
I walked past him, giving him a wide berth, and pulled the battered white first-aid kit off the top of the ice machine. The lid was held shut with a rubber band because the latch had broken two years ago and nobody had ever fixed it.
“You’re bleeding,” I said, popping the band.
“I’m aware.”
“Take the coat off.”
He didn’t move. He just stared at me, unblinking, and for a second I understood exactly what kind of man I had just dragged through my employer’s back door.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“The idiot who just saved your life. Take the coat off before you bleed out on my boss’s linoleum. I don’t get paid enough to mop up plasma.”
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile. The ghost of one. A man deciding whether I was worth the effort of an answer.
Then, slow and deliberate, he unbuttoned the overcoat and let it slide off his shoulders onto the mop sink. Underneath he wore a tailored black shirt, plastered to his torso with sweat and blood. He worked the lower buttons open and pulled the fabric aside.
The wound was ugly. A jagged gash along his lower ribs, maybe four inches long, the edges dark and angry. A bullet graze. Close enough to burn, shallow enough that it hadn’t killed him—yet. It was still seeping.
I sucked air through my teeth. “You’re lucky.”
“I’ve been told otherwise.”
I grabbed a bottle of saline and a wad of gauze and stepped in close. He was so tall that standing this near, I had to tip my head back to see his face. He smelled like cedarwood and rain and something else I couldn’t place then and would recognize later, in a different room, on a different night—gunpowder.
“This is going to burn,” I said flatly.
“Do it.”
I uncapped the bottle and poured.
He didn’t flinch. Not a hiss, not a twitch of the jaw. The muscles in his abdomen jumped and went rigid, corded and defined, but his face stayed carved from stone. I pressed the gauze against the wound and leaned in with my whole weight, and I felt his eyes on the top of my head the entire time.
“You shouldn’t have stepped out,” he said quietly.
“You’re welcome.”
“I’m not thanking you. I’m telling you a fact. People who step into alleys like that don’t usually walk out.”
“Well, lucky for you, my survival instincts are currently out of order.”
I tore strips of medical tape with my teeth and started taping the gauze down. “So what was it? Piss off a loan shark? Sleep with the wrong man’s wife?”
The ghost of a smile again. “Something like that.”
“Right. Well, I’m taping this down, but you need stitches, and you’re not getting them here. Do you have somewhere safe to go?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Because as soon as I’m done, you’re leaving out the front door. You walk two blocks north, you catch the night bus, and you never come back to this diner. Understood?”
He looked at me. Really looked. His gaze dropped—briefly, deliberately—to my mouth, and a spike of heat went through my chest that had no business being there. I remembered the force of the kiss, the rough scrape of his jaw, the small, surprised sound in his throat.
I shoved it down where I kept everything else I couldn’t afford.
“Understood,” he said softly.
I stepped back, tossed the bloody wrappers in the trash, and turned to the mop sink. I scrubbed my hands with the cheap pink soap until the water ran clear, and the adrenaline drained out of me all at once, leaving a cold, trembling exhaustion in its place. I had just stepped between an armed man and his target. I had put my mouth on a stranger to save his life.
I was insane. I was actually insane.
When I dried my hands and turned around, the room was empty.
I blinked. The folding chair was bare. The back door was still deadbolted. I hurried down the short hall into the main diner—lights off, chairs stacked on the tables, the front door closed.
The deadbolt was turned horizontal. Unlocked.
He was gone. No thank-you. No goodbye. Just gone, like a ghost who’d never been there at all.
May you like
I locked the door and leaned my forehead against the cool glass and stared out at the empty street. I told myself I was glad he was gone. I told myself I’d forget the whole thing by morning.
I was wrong.
