Chapter 7
Three days later, the rain finally cleared.
It went out the way it had come in — all at once, in the middle of an afternoon — and left behind a sunset that turned the whole eastern face of the city gold and bruised violet, so bright off the lake that Maria had to pull the blinds on the west side of the penthouse.
Khloe stood at the floor-to-ceiling windows in the emerald green dress.
She had tried it on at two in the afternoon out of a purely private curiosity, alone, with the door shut, and had stood in front of the mirror for four full minutes and not recognized herself. Maria, who had procured it and who had said nothing about it on any of the three occasions Khloe had asked her why, had simply knocked, come in, and set down a pair of shoes without comment.
The yellow marks on her skin had faded to something that could be concealed. Her ribs only ached now instead of stabbing. She had eaten breakfast, lunch, and half a plate of Maria’s scones.
The private elevator chimed.
Khloe turned as the brushed steel doors opened, and Lorenzo came out, and stopped dead.
He looked exhausted. He had been gone for three days — she had counted them — and she had learned from the newspapers and from Maria’s carefully neutral summaries exactly what he had been doing with them: dismantling the last of Aaron Miller’s footprint, moving money, moving names, settling the Bureau’s file in a way that required him to sit in a room with federal prosecutors twice, and personally answering questions from two men who had been asking, out loud, who the woman was.
He shrugged off his suit jacket and tossed it over the back of the sofa.
And then he looked up and saw her standing in the gold light by the windows, and the whole intentional composition of his face broke apart.
He put his hands in his pockets immediately.
Khloe noticed. She always noticed the small things — that was what two years under Aaron Miller had made of her, a machine for noticing the small things, and it had been a curse for the length of her life and she had never once thought of it as a gift until now.
He had put his hands in his pockets because his knuckles were bruised purple and split open, and he did not want her to see.
Because on Saturday night, a man on Calumet Avenue had said out loud that Don Marchesi had gone soft in the head and everyone knew why.
She walked toward him.
Lorenzo tensed. She watched him do it — the whole length of him going rigid, bracing for the flinch, for the question, for the request to leave, for the moment she finally understood what she had traded one violent man for and asked to be taken home.
She stopped right in front of him.
She reached out and took his right hand out of his pocket.
He held his breath.
Khloe turned it over and looked at the knuckles. Split, raw, purple along the ridge, two of them open. She traced them with her fingertip, once, along the whole line of them, and she felt the small involuntary shudder go through him when she did it.
“Did you stop him?” she whispered, and looked up.
“He is gone,” Lorenzo said. His voice was thick with something she had never heard in it before. “Federal supermax. Awaiting trial on charges he cannot beat. The people he owes money to are inside that system, and they are waiting for him.” He swallowed. “He will never come near you again, Khloe. I swear it on my life.”
Khloe lifted his ruined hand and pressed a soft, lingering kiss to his knuckles.
The undisputed king of the Chicago syndicate — a man who had ordered executions over morning espresso and who had buried half the Cook County judiciary — went very nearly to his knees.
“You shouldn’t be so gentle with me,” he said. His free hand came up and hovered, inches from her cheek, and did not touch. “I am not a good man, Khloe. The things I’ve done. The things I am—”
“You are the man who caught me when I fell.”
She leaned her face into his waiting palm and closed her eyes at the warmth of it.
“Aaron was supposed to be a good man. A protector of the law. And he broke me.” Her voice did not shake. “You are supposed to be a monster, and you put me back together.”
Lorenzo’s restraint came apart in his hands.
He pulled her against his chest with both arms around her waist, and there was nothing measured in it and nothing deliberate, and he buried his face in her hair and breathed in the smell of vanilla and rain.
“Stay with me,” he said. It was a command that had stopped being a command somewhere in the middle of the word. “I will give you the world, Khloe. I will burn down anyone who looks at you wrong. I will build an empire at your feet.” His arms tightened. “Just don’t leave.”
Khloe wrapped her arms around his neck and stood inside the steady, powerful beat of his heart, feeling it go through her healing ribs, and thought about how she had spent her whole life running and hiding and surviving in the shadow of whatever man happened to be standing in front of the light.
Standing here, in the arms of the most dangerous man in the city, she found that she had no interest at all in hiding anymore.
“I’m not going anywhere, Lorenzo,” she said. She tilted her head back to look at him. “As long as you don’t.”
Something in the storm behind his eyes cleared, finally, all the way through.
He lowered his head and kissed her.
May you like
It was not gentle. It was consuming, and it was a promise and a claim and a vow all at once, and it was the desperate hunger of a man who had found the one thing in his life that he genuinely could not live without, and who had spent three days terrified that he had already lost it.
Outside, the city hummed on, entirely unaware.
