Chapter 6
He arrived in eleven minutes. She knew because she counted.
He came through the front door with two men she did not recognize, took one look at the workroom, and went very still. The stillness she had learned to read — the one that meant he was compressing something dangerous rather than releasing it.
“Who?”
“I don’t know. They did not introduce themselves.”
“What did they want?”
“They thought I had something of yours. Financial architecture. Ledgers. Accounts.”
He turned to her. His eyes moved over her face, assessing, checking. “Did they hurt you?”
“They knocked the back door in and threw me against the table.” She gestured toward her hip. “It is fine.”
He stepped closer. “Evelyn.”
“I’m fine.”
“No.” His voice was not loud, but something underneath it had changed. “You’re not. You’re holding your left arm differently. You’re breathing shallow. You are not fine.”
She looked at him. The accuracy of the observation unsettled her more than the break-in had. She let her arm drop.
“They were looking for something they thought you had given me.”
“I know.”
“I don’t have anything.”
“I know.”
“Is there something you need to tell me?”
He was quiet for a moment. The two men he had brought were inspecting the back door, speaking in low voices. Damian moved closer — close enough that she could see the detail of the scar on his jaw.
“There is a man named Aldo Vasquez. He has been trying to move into Chicago territory for the past eighteen months. He has made several attempts to access certain financial structures that I control. He has been looking for leverage.”
“And he thinks I am leverage.”
“He knows I have been coming here. He does not know why. He assumes the worst.”
“Is there a worst?”
He looked at her. The directness of it — the absence of evasion — was what held her.
“Not in the way he means. But yes. There is a worst.”
She waited.
“The worst is that for the first time in twenty years, I have something I am not willing to lose. And people like Vasquez know that the most effective way to hurt someone like me is not to come at me directly. It is to come at what I care about.”
The words sat between them. Heavy. Deliberate.
“You have known me for five weeks,” she said.
“I have known you for eight months. Since September. Since the alley.”
“You didn’t know me. You were unconscious for most of it.”
“I know enough.”
He wanted her to leave the shop. Move to a hotel. Go somewhere safe until Vasquez was handled. She refused.
“This is my business. My home. If I leave, I am letting them decide where I can and cannot be.”
“It is not safe.”
“I have been unsafe before.”
“Not like this.”
“Then teach me.”
He looked at her for a long moment. “What?”
“Teach me how to be unsafe in a way that I can survive.” She held his gaze. “I am not going to hide. So give me the tools to stand my ground.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he reached into his coat and pulled out a small handgun. She looked at it. She did not flinch.
“Have you ever fired one of these?”
“No.”
“Then we start tomorrow.”
She nodded. And she did not tell him that she had been anticipating this — that she had known, from the moment he walked into her shop three weeks ago, that his world would eventually find her. She had chosen to stay anyway.
The training was not gentle. Damian did not treat her like someone who needed to be protected from the reality of violence. He treated her like someone who needed to be prepared for it.
They spent three evenings in a gun range in the basement of a building she did not ask about. He taught her how to load, how to aim, how to breathe through the recoil. He taught her how to stand so that she could not be knocked off balance. He taught her how to assess a room for exits, for cover, for the specific weight of threat.
And in the quiet moments between drills, when they sat in his car with the engine running and the heat blowing, he told her things about his world that she had not asked for and did not entirely want to know. The structure of his organization. The names of his enemies. The reasons he had spent twenty years building something that no one could take from him.
“Are you telling me this so I know what I’m involved in?”
“So you know what you are choosing.”
“I already chose.”
May you like
“I know. But you should know what you chose.”
She looked out the window at the city moving past. “I chose you. The rest is just details.”
