Chapter 4
In the foyer of the estate, the silence was thick enough to touch.
Norah stood at the foot of the stairs and struggled with the clasp of the diamond necklace. Her fingers were clumsy. The cold had gotten into her hands, or the adrenaline had, or the kiss still burning on her mouth—
“I’ll get it.”
She heard him cross the foyer. She heard his steps stop behind her. And then his fingers were at her nape, cool and sure, and the clasp opened like he’d been doing it his whole life. Clinical. Precise. The way he did everything.
His breath stirred her hair. Bergamot and scotch. She shivered, and she hated herself for it.
“There,” he said.
She turned to thank him — and stopped.
There was blood on his shirt cuff. Dark, drying, crusted into the white fabric above his wrist where the sleeve had ridden up.
“What happened?”
“Anton had friends waiting outside.” He said it the way other men said the traffic was bad. Matter-of-fact. Flat. “I handled it.”
“How many?”
“Two.”
A pause.
“They’ll live.”
She should walk away. She knew it. She was a nurse, and she had a contract, and the contract ended the moment the threats ended, and this man was not her problem—
“Sit down,” she said.
He didn’t move.
“Sit down, Dominic.”
He sat. At the kitchen table, because that was where she pointed. She disappeared into the kitchen and came back carrying a first aid kit. She’d found it on day one, in the pantry, because she was a nurse and she memorized where everything was the way other people memorized phone numbers.
She knelt beside him. He rolled up his sleeve without being asked. The gash ran along his forearm, deep and clean, an inch long. A knife. She cleaned it with steady hands, watching the wound, not his face.
“Do you want stitches?” she asked.
“No.”
“It needs stitches.”
“Then stitch it.”
She did. She worked by the light of the kitchen lamp, closing the wound with a needle and thread the way she’d done a hundred times in the ER, and he watched her the whole time. She could feel his eyes on her hands. On her face. On the ring.
“You didn’t ask me if I deserved it,” he said.
She tied off the suture. “I don’t ask questions I don’t want the answers to.”
Silence. Then, very quietly, he said:
“I knew about Liam before you walked into Il Posto.”
Her hands went still on his arm.
“I knew everything. I knew he borrowed the money from the Tarasovs. I knew what he spent it on.” He looked at her. “He spent it on you. Your nursing school tuition. You were drowning in debt, Norah — working double shifts, skipping meals. He found out. He tried to fix it. He didn’t fix it. He made it worse. And then he ran.”
The words fell into the kitchen like stones into deep water.
“He borrowed the money for me,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes.”
“And the money was already gone before he disappeared. It went to my loans.”
“Yes.”
She had built this — this entire desperate plan, this performance, this ring on her finger — to save a brother who had sacrificed himself for her. And this man had known it all along. He had sat in that back room for three minutes and let her pitch him a deal like he was hearing it for the first time, when he’d already had all the leverage.
“You knew,” she said. “You sat there for three minutes and let me convince you of a deal you’d already decided to take.”
“Yes.”
“And you could have just told Victor to nullify the debt and let me walk out of that restaurant.”
“Yes.”
May you like
She stood. She left the first aid kit on the table. She walked out of the kitchen, and she didn’t run, and she didn’t look back.
He didn’t follow.
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