Chapter 6
Six weeks after the gala, the performance had become habit.
Press photos. Charity events. Dinners with men who smiled with their mouths and not their eyes. Norah smiled back. She wore the gowns.
She let Dominic’s hand rest on the small of her back, and she leaned into it, and she told herself the current she felt was just stage fright.
Then the message came.
A hospital colleague handed her a slip of paper with a strange look. “Some guy at the desk left this for you. Said it was important.”
It was a phone number. Blocked. And she knew, before she even dialed, what the three words would say.
“I’m in Boston.”
She recognized the pattern immediately. Liam used to leave messages for her like this when they were kids — half a code, half a joke, the way he’d leave “Meet me. The creek.” on the fridge in a handwriting only she could read. It was the same rhythm. The same shape.
She didn’t tell Dominic.
She texted back a single address: a diner on the south end.
She went with Simon, as required. She told him she needed coffee, and she walked into the diner, and she walked out the back door, and in the alley behind the dumpsters, Liam was waiting.
He was thinner than she remembered.
Hollow-eyed. Two days of stubble. He looked like a man who had been running for a long time and had just realized there was nowhere left to run.
“Norah.” He took a step toward her. Stopped. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Sorry.” The word came out flat. “You borrowed four hundred thousand dollars from the Tarasovs. You spent it on my tuition. You disappeared. You left me to fix it.”
“I was trying to fix it for you.” His voice cracked. “The debt — the loans, the spiral, everything. I was trying to fix it for you, and I made it worse, and I ran because I was scared.”
“You ran,” she said.
“I was scared.” A beat. He looked at the ring on her hand, and something in his face twisted. “Are you okay? With him — is he hurting you?”
“No.” A pause. Too long. “Not the way you mean.”
Liam’s face crumpled. “Norah—”
She pulled her wallet from her coat and pressed a wad of cash into his hand. “Get out of Boston. Tonight. Take a bus, take a train, take anything. Don’t look back.”
“Norah, he’s not safe—”
“I know what he is.”
She turned and walked back through the diner, back to Simon, back to the car. She didn’t look back. If she looked back, she would break, and she had promised herself she was done breaking.
That night, Victor came to Dominic’s study.
“Alexi Tarasov has arrived in Boston,” he said. “Personally. This is not a diplomatic visit.”
The news landed like a stone in still water.
Alexi had rejected the debt nullification. He had been publicly humiliated at the gala — his enforcer slammed into a pillar at a party full of people who mattered. He wanted a meeting. Or, Victor said, he would make a different kind of statement.
Dominic came to find Norah. He was completely calm. Which was the most frightening version of him.
“There will be a meeting tomorrow,” he said. “You stay here.”
“What happens at the meeting?”
“We resolve this.”
“And if it doesn’t resolve?”
He looked at her for a long moment. The firelight moved across his face. “Then we’ve already survived the worst thing that happens.”
She understood, then, with a chill that had nothing to do with the cold: he meant her. She was the worst thing that could happen to him — the vulnerability, the crack in his armor that everyone could see — and it had already happened. He had already lost. Everything after this was just the accounting.
He left. She stood at the window and watched the black ocean churn against the cliff.
Her phone buzzed.
Unknown number. She opened it.
A photo. Liam. Blindfolded, hands bound, kneeling on a concrete floor.
May you like
A text followed.
“Bring her to the meeting or he dies.”
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