Chapter 25
He looked at her. Dust from shattered drywall covered her clothes. Someone else’s blood marked her cheek. “I told you not to leave the house.” There was no anger in his voice. Only fact. “I know.” Zo crossed toward his desk and leaned against its edge with his arms folded. “You understand what happened today.” It was not a question. “The Morettis targeted you because they know you’re here.” He paused. “Because they think you matter to me.” Tessa looked down. “Do I?” “Yes.” The answer was blunt. A confession forced from a man who regarded emotion as a terminal illness. Zo pushed away from the desk. He approached until only a foot separated them. “But you saw it today, Tessa.” His voice lowered. “You saw the reality.” He looked directly at her. “I am not a good man.” Tessa said nothing. “I don’t build things. I break them. I kill people who touch what is mine.” He continued. “That is what pays for the food you eat. That is what pays for your daughter’s insulin.”
Tessa closed her eyes. She saw the man on the floor again. A bullet through his throat. The brutality horrified her. But beneath that horror lay another truth. The man had been preparing to shoot her. Zo had stopped him. “I have a plane waiting at O’Hare,” Zo said. The words seemed difficult for him. “I have new passports for you and Mia. Cash. Enough to put you somewhere quiet in Oregon.” Tessa opened her eyes. “Good doctors. Safe schools.” Zo’s jaw tightened. “You can leave right now.” He forced himself to continue. “You walk out that door. You never see me again. And you never have to smell gunpowder in your living room.” Tessa looked at him. At the scar along his jaw. At the violent history carried in every part of his posture. He was giving her an exit. The civilian life she had always imagined. She thought about that civilian life. About the landlord who shut off her heat in January. The collection agents who threatened to break down the apartment door while her daughter cried. The hospital administrators who looked at a sick child and demanded a credit card. The civilian world possessed its own form of violence. Quiet. Bureaucratic. Indifferent.
