The Don’s forbidden witness

Chapter 4

"Marco," Roman says finally, still staring at the phone like it might change its mind. "He's got a location. Off the books, not tied to the family name on paper. Says we should move now."

"You trust that."

"I trust him." He says it fast, the way you say something you've said so many times it doesn't need checking anymore, and then, quieter, almost to himself, "I trust him."

They leave through the back, past the broken window, glass still crunching under Roman's boots, and the night air outside carries the wet-copper smell that comes before rain, mixed with something rottener from a dumpster two yards over that neither of them mentions. Ava's socks are soaked through by the time they reach the car, which she only now realizes she never traded for shoes, and there's a blister already forming on her heel, dumb and small and completely beside the point.

They drive almost an hour before Roman speaks again.

"I need to call him. Properly. Not text."

"Is that safe?"

"Nothing tonight is safe, Ava, I think we've established that." He glances at her in the rearview, and the skin under his eyes looks bruised with tiredness, gray-purple in the dashboard light. "But yes. I trust him completely."

She almost says something about the pause before he answered Marco's question in the study, the way Marco hadn't actually said who, but she holds it, unsure yet if it means anything or if she's just looking for reasons not to trust the one person tonight who's kept her breathing.

They stop for gas at an empty station, fluorescent light buzzing overhead with that particular hum that makes Ava's teeth feel funny, and Roman gets out to make the call, staying close enough to the car that she can watch his face change through the windshield without hearing a word of it. His jaw tightens. Loosens. Tightens again.

When he gets back in, he doesn't start the car right away.

"What did he say."

"He's sending someone to clear the first house. Wants us at a place he set up years back." Roman's hand is on the key but not turning it. "Ava. Tell me something true. Anything."

"About what."

"Whatever you want. I've spent ten years hating a family I apparently didn't understand, I'd like to know who I actually took captive tonight."

She thinks about it, or pretends to, mostly to buy herself time. "My sister doesn't remember our parents. Not really. She was nine. I've spent a decade trying to give her something like normal and some nights I still don't know if it worked."

"That's not nothing."

"Didn't feel like enough." She looks at the scar on her wrist, pale under the dashboard glow, worn smooth from ten years of her own thumb running over it without meaning to. "I gave up any kind of real life for her. Don't regret it. But I wonder, some nights, who I would've been."

"I wonder that too." His voice has gone rough at the edges. "What I would've been if I hadn't grown up thinking violence was the only language that actually worked."

The car radio is still on low, some station playing something with too much static to make out the words, and neither of them reaches to turn it off.

"Why tell me that," Ava says.

"Because you asked me to understand what I'm dealing with. Figured I owed you the same."

He starts the engine, finally, and the silence that follows isn't the same silence as before, sharper, more careful, less like two strangers sizing each other up and something closer, though she isn't ready to name what, not yet, not with her sister two hours and one lifetime away.

The second house comes up dark against the tree line, no lights on, nothing to suggest safety one way or the other. Roman parks around back, gun visible at his hip again, some of the ease from the last twenty minutes already gone out of his shoulders.

"Stay close," he says.

"Wasn't planning on wandering."

He almost smiles. Doesn't finish it.

They're halfway to the door when Ava catches movement at the treeline, there and then not there, fast enough that she almost convinces herself she imagined it.

"Roman."

He's already turning, gun coming up, and the porch light he hasn't switched on yet leaves them both standing in the dark, waiting to see if the trees move again.