Chapter 8 - THE CHOICE
She was sitting in the window seat of the guest suite, a book open on her lap that she wasn’t reading, the garden gray and wet behind her. She looked up when he came in, and she read his face the way she always did — quickly, and without asking twice.
“Something happened,” she said.
“Marcus is gone.”
She closed the book. “Gone how?”
“He was the leak. He’s been feeding Victor information for four months. He’s being held upstate, and he’s not going to be hurt, and I’m not going to talk about him again until this is over.”
She looked at him for a long moment. He watched her absorb it — the small flinch, the way she looked down at her hands, the way she didn’t ask the questions he’d expected her to ask.
“I knew him,” she said finally. “He always put the mail on the left side of the counter because he knew I liked the right side clear. He brought me soup when I had the flu two winters ago.” She looked up. “I liked him.”
“So did I.”
They sat with that for a moment.
“What now?” she said.
“Now I tell you the truth about what Victor is doing, because you deserve to know it before he does it, and because I’m not going to make a decision about your life without you in the room.”
She set the book aside.
“He’s not coming for you as a brother,” Rhett said. “He’s coming for me. He needs the other families to see him as the wronged party — a man whose sister was taken in by his rival and kept from him, whose sister was beaten by a man your employer was protecting. Every part of that story is already true enough to use. He doesn’t need to win a fight. He needs to win a room.”
“And what does the room decide?”
“They vote on whether I’ve broken the rules we all pretend to live by.” Rhett’s voice was flat. “If they decide I have, he can move against me with everyone’s blessing. Territory. Men. Assets. And the only way I can stop him is to give him the one thing he actually wants.”
“Which is?”
“You.”
Isa was very still.
“He’ll offer a trade,” Rhett said. “He’ll come to me through the families. Give me my sister and we call it even. And it will sound reasonable, because it will sound like a family thing, and because every man in that room has a sister or a daughter and will understand it, and because it will let them all go home without a war.” He looked at her. “And if I say no, he gets to write the story he’s been waiting six years to write.”
“And if you say yes?”
“Then you go back to a house where every door belongs to him.”
She looked out the window at the rain for a long moment.
“You’ve already decided,” she said.
“I’ve already decided what I won’t do.” He came further into the room. “I won’t trade you. Not to keep the territory, not to keep the peace, not for anything. That part isn’t a question.”
“Then what’s the question?”
“The question is what you want.” He sat down in the chair by the window, facing her, not close. “You spent seven years running from that family. You built a life under a name you chose. And I’m not going to hand you back to him, but I’m also not going to make you a prisoner in this house for the rest of your life — not even a comfortable one. So I need to know what you actually want, Isa. Not what’s safest. What you want.”
She was quiet for a long time.
The rain moved against the glass. Somewhere in the house, someone was setting the table for dinner.
“I want to stop running,” she said finally. “I want to stop being something that has to be hidden and protected and moved from place to place like an object that might get stolen.” She looked at him. “I want to walk into that room myself.”
Rhett looked at her.
“That’s not how it works,” he said.
“I know how it works. I’ve watched it work my whole life. The room is full of men deciding what happens to women, and the women are never in it.” She held his gaze. “Victor’s story only works if I’m the thing you’re keeping. If I’m a hostage. If I’m a name in a database. But I’m not a name. I’m a person who left that family on purpose, seven years ago, and said so to his face, and he’s been lying about it ever since.”
She leaned forward.
“Let me tell the room why I left.”
Rhett looked at her for a long moment — at the swollen eye and the split lip and the throat that still hurt to use, at the woman who had spent three years making his coffee at the right temperature and never once mentioned a name she was born with, at the person who had just asked him for something he had never in his life given anyone.
He thought about every room he had ever walked into, and every room he had ever controlled, and how the thing that had made him powerful was also the thing that had kept him alone in seventeen unused rooms.
He thought about Petar, in a parking garage in Gary, and about Irena, and about every quiet person the world had taught to sit down and be small.
May you like
“All right,” he said.
And then he told her the plan.
