Chapter 8
She stood in the warehouse for a while after they took him out.
The work lamp swung gently on its hook. Somewhere behind her, a man was hosing the drain down, and the sound of the water was the only noise in the building.
Declan came and stood beside her, and did not touch her, and did not say anything for a long time.
“You killed him.”
“Yes.”
“He was going to die anyway.”
“He was going to die anyway,” Declan agreed. “He could have died in a car and saved you the view. I wanted you to see it, because I want you to understand exactly who you married this morning, while there is still time to be frightened of it.”
Meline looked at the oil on the floor.
“I’m not frightened of you,” she said. “That’s the part I can’t get past.”
He turned his head.
“I’ve been an auditor my whole life,” she said. “I’ve spent eight years learning how to find the one number that doesn’t belong. And in the space of three days I have found the fraud, and the fraud is my fiancé, and the fraud is a life insurance policy with my name on it, and the fraud is a woman who was going to marry a man in a hotel ballroom and spend forty years reconciling somebody else’s accounts.” She looked up at him. “I don’t have anything to go back to. You didn’t take it. He did. It was already gone before I put that bottle on the bar.”
“Then what do you want,” Declan said.
“I want to know if the document this morning was real.”
“It’s real. It’s been filed. You are legally my wife as of nine minutes past eight.”
“That’s not what I asked,” she said.
Declan was quiet.
Then he reached into the pocket of his coat and took something out and put it in her hand.
It was a ring. Not the one she had left at the bar. A different one — a plain band, old gold, worn thin at the bottom, with a date scratched inside it that had been there long enough to nearly disappear.
“My mother’s,” he said. “She died when I was eleven. My father kept it in a drawer for thirty years and I took it out of that drawer the night he died, and until this morning I had never once had a reason to think about who it was for.”
Meline stood in the middle of a warehouse on Eighteenth Street with a dead man’s blood drying somewhere behind her and a widow’s ring in her palm.
“Declan.”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t have to do any of it. You could have paid the Volkovs off. You could have given them the three million and walked away with your routes and never seen me again.”
“I know.”
“Why didn’t you?”
He looked at her — really looked, the way he had looked at her that first night when she turned her head on the stool and he said by a ghost, it seems.
“Because I sat in that chair,” he said, “and I watched you refuse to break, and I have not seen anything refuse to break in this city in six years. And I decided that whatever it cost me, I was going to be the one standing between the two of you.”
Meline closed her hand around the ring.
“Ask me,” she said.
“I’m a difficult man to be married to,” Declan said. “I’m going to be gone at two in the morning and I’m not going to tell you where. I have people who owe me and people who want me dead, and if you stay, that becomes your life too, every day, for as long as we both last. If you want out, Kavanagh can have the marriage annulled by Friday and set you up somewhere with documents and money that Ivan Volkov will never find. I’m telling you that because I need you to know that I would actually do it.”
“I know you would.”
“Then say it anyway.”
Meline looked at him.
“Okay, Declan,” she said. “I’ll marry you.”
He took her face in both hands and kissed her, and it was not gentle, and she did not want it to be.
When it ended, her forehead was against his jaw and his hand was flat against the back of her head, and neither of them moved for a while.
“Liam,” she said, into his collar.
“He’ll be buried Saturday.”
“What do we do about Dmitri?”
“Nothing,” Declan said. “Dmitri will spend the rest of his life telling that story in bars, and every version of it will make us safer.”
She went back to the Obsidian Room two nights later.
She did it alone, and it was the first thing she had done alone since Tuesday, and Declan let her do it without a word.
It was a quarter past two in the morning. The rain had stopped. The stairwell still smelled faintly of cigars and copper.
Harvey was behind the bar with his sleeves rolled and a rag in his hand.
He looked up when she came down, and then he looked at her again, longer.
“Evening,” he said.
“Evening.”
She sat down at the end of the marble bar.
There was a wet ring on the surface where a bottle had been, and beside it, in a patch of dried lime juice, a two-carat diamond ring was still lying where she had dropped it Tuesday night, because Harvey had not been told whether it was garbage or evidence and had decided to leave it exactly where it fell.
Meline looked at it for a second.
“Trash,” she said.
Harvey picked it up with the rag, dropped it into the drawer beneath the register, and closed it.
May you like
She ordered one tequila. She drank it slowly, and it burned the same way it had the first night, and nothing else about the experience was the same at all.
When she went back up the stairs, there was a car waiting on Wacker Drive with its engine running and its lights off.
