His Borrowed Wife

Kia The house was always quieter when Evan left. I stood at the top of the staircase and listened to his car pull out of the gate and kept standing there for a full minute after the sound was gone. Three days. He said three days, Evan never lied about his schedule. He was many things but he was not the kind of man who disappeared without telling you first. He liked knowing that you were here. Waiting. I went back to the bedroom and opened the window and let the night air in. It was almost ten when I heard it. I wasn't supposed to be downstairs. I had already eaten, already taken a shower, already told myself I was going to spend the next three days doing absolutely nothing that required effort. But I wanted tea and the kitchen was downstairs and so I pulled on my robe and went down and that is the only reason I heard it at all. A sound at the back of the house. I stopped at the bottom of the stairs and held still. The estate was big, big enough that sounds travelled in ways that still surprised me after two years of living here. It could have been anything. The wind, one of the outdoor lights flickering, an animal near the garden wall. Then it came again. Heavier this time. Like something falling. Every single reasonable part of my brain told me to go back upstairs and lock my bedroom door. That is what a smart woman does when she is alone in a mafia man's house at ten o'clock at night and she hears something at the back entrance. You do not investigate. You go upstairs, you lock the door, and you call whoever you are supposed to call. I walked toward the back of the house instead. The back entrance was a heavy door that opened onto a small stone path leading to the east garden and the service gate. We rarely used it. Evan's staff came through the main entrance or the side staff door. This one was mostly just there. I turned on the outside light before I opened the door and I don't know why I did it in that order. Like the light was going to protect me from whatever was on the other side. There was a man on the ground. He was on his side, one hand braced against the stone step like he had been trying to push himself up and lost the fight. Dark hair, big frame, shirt that was so dark with blood I couldn't tell what color it had started out as. He wasn't moving when I first looked at him and my heart dropped straight to the floor. Then he turned his head and looked up at me and he was very much alive. I didn't know him. Or I thought I didn't know him. He was white, maybe early thirties, jaw full of days-old stubble and an expression that was somehow still sharp even though he was clearly in a bad way. His eyes found me and he didn't say anything for a second. He just looked at me like he was calculating something. "Inside," he said. His voice came out rough and low. "I need inside." I should have shut the door. I still think about that sometimes. How easy it would have been to just shut the door and go upstairs and call Evan and let whatever happened next happen. My life would have kept going the way it was going and maybe that would have been fine. Maybe fine was enough. Instead I said, "Can you walk?" He could have been anyone: a thief, a r****t, a murderer but my first instinct was concern. Living in the mafia hadn’t succeeded in killing my empathy just yet. Maybe he was one of Evan’s men. I’ve seen them numerous times in this state or worse. He tried to stand and made it halfway before I grabbed his arm without thinking about it. He was heavy and I am not a small woman but I felt every bit of that weight as I helped him through the door and into the hallway. I got him to the east wing. It was the part of the house Evan never used. Three guest rooms, all empty, all kept clean by staff who came through once a week out of habit more than necessity. I put him in the room at the end of the hall, the one farthest from the main staircase, and got him down onto the bed and turned on the lamp. The blood was bad. Not as bad as I had feared from the outside but bad enough. It looked like a through and through on his left side, below the ribs. He was pressing his hand against it and the pressure had slowed things down but he needed proper attention. I went to the bathroom and came back with every towel I could carry and the first aid kit from under the sink. I don't know why there was such a well-stocked first aid kit under the guest bathroom sink. I had never questioned it before. I didn't question it then either. I just opened it. "This is going to hurt," I said. "It already hurts," he said. I cleaned the wound and packed it and wrapped it the best I could with what I had. He didn't make a sound the entire time. He watched the ceiling and breathed in a slow and deliberate way that told me he was using everything he had to stay still and let me work. When I was done I sat back on my heels and looked at him. "Who are you," I said. It wasn't really a question. It was more like I was saying it out loud because I needed to hear myself say it. He looked at me then. Really looked at me. "You know who I am," he said. "You just don't know that you know yet." I didn't answer that because I didn't know what to do with it. "Evan cannot find out you were here," I said instead. "You understand that? He comes back in three days and you need to be gone before that." He didn't agree. He didn't disagree. He just looked at me with those dark eyes and I felt the first real flutter of something I did not want to name. "Go get some sleep," he said, like it was his house and I was the guest. I stood up and picked up the bloody towels and told myself I was in control of this situation. I told myself it was just mercy. Anyone would have done it. He was a person and he was bleeding and I helped him. That was all this was. I was almost at the door when his hand caught my wrist. He didn't squeeze. He barely held on. But I stopped anyway. "Hey." His voice was quieter now. Almost gentle. Which somehow made it worse. I turned and looked at him. "If Evan finds me here," he said, his eyes steady on mine, "it won't just be me that dies." He let go of my wrist. I walked out of the room and pulled the door shut behind me and stood in the dark hallway for a long time with my back against the wall and the bloody towels in my arms and the full weight of what I had just done sitting on my chest like a stone. I had just hidden the enemy in my boyfriend's house. And for the first time in two years I didn't feel like I was surviving. I felt like I was in danger of something else entirely.