The Don’s forbidden witness

Chapter 3

The safe house smells like a place nobody's aired out in months, dust and old carpet and, faintly, mothballs from a closet somewhere Ava hasn't found yet. Roman checks the windows himself, twice on the back door, and there's a squeak in his left shoe every time he shifts his weight, which is often, because he can't seem to stand still.

"You're good at this," Ava says, watching him test a lock that was already tested.

"Practice." He doesn't look up. "Sit down before you fall down."

"I'm fine."

"You keep saying that. I'm starting to think it's a nervous tic and not actually a fact."

She sits anyway, mostly because her legs have started doing something unreliable, some fine tremor she can't fully control, and the couch under her is scratchy, an old wool weave that catches on her jeans when she shifts. Roman sits across from her, close, closer than the desk in his study had let him be, and for a while neither of them says much of anything. A radiator ticks somewhere. Outside, wind pushes against a loose gutter, a rhythmic little clang that doesn't stop.

"Tell me about your father," Ava says, when the silence gets to be too much.

"Why."

"Because you kept me alive tonight instead of hurting me, and ten years of hating your family isn't holding up the way it used to. I want to understand what I'm actually sitting across from."

Roman is quiet long enough that she thinks he won't answer at all. Then, "He wasn't a good man. Not the way people usually mean that. But he loved us. Built something out of nothing and defended it the only way he'd ever learned how, which was badly, mostly, and with a lot of collateral damage."

"You loved him."

"He was my father." Like that settles it, though his voice cracks slightly on the last word, just a hairline fracture, gone before she can decide if she really heard it. "I spent ten years avenging a story somebody handed me. If the story's wrong, I don't know what that makes the last ten years."

"It makes them a war built on someone else's lie. That's not the same as your fault."

"Feels the same from in here."

A sound outside, glass, sharp and sudden, cuts through whatever she was about to say next, and Roman is up before she's even processed it, gun already out, motioning her down and away from the window with two fingers, urgent, silent.

"Stay," he says, low.

"Roman—"

"Stay here, Ava."

He's gone into the hallway before she finishes his name, and she sits there for exactly as long as it takes her pulse to start actually hurting in her ears, three seconds, four, and then she's up too, grabbing the letter opener off the side table because it's the only thing shaped remotely like a weapon, brass, cold, absurd in her hand.

She reaches the kitchen doorway just as something moves near the broken window, a shape, fast, low, and Roman fires once and the shape is gone, footsteps pounding away into a yard she can't see.

"Roman."

"I'm fine." He's breathing through his mouth, checking the frame, glass all over the linoleum catching what little light there is. "They weren't here to chat."

"Did you hit them?"

"Don't know." He turns, finally looks at her properly, and his eyes go straight to the letter opener still clutched in her fist like she means to use it on someone. "What is that."

"It was the closest thing to a weapon."

"You were going to fight off an intruder with a letter opener."

"I panicked, Roman, I didn't exactly have time to—"

"I'm not laughing at you." Though something in his face suggests otherwise, briefly, before the tension of the last thirty seconds pulls it back under. "We can't stay here. They know this location."

"Then where do we—"

His phone buzzes against the counter, loud in the quiet kitchen, and he looks down at it, and whatever's on the screen makes his whole face change, the tired half-amusement draining out of it fast.

"What," Ava says.

Roman doesn't answer right away. He's still reading.