THE DEVIL I CHOOSE

Roman Voss

Roman hated hospitals.The smell alone was enough to drag things up from places he kept carefully locked antiseptic, bleach, blood. The particular scent of vulnerability. He’d spent years making sure he never had a reason to be in one, and tonight had been a pointed reminder of how quickly plans fell apart.

He stood at the rain-covered window of the private recovery room while Manhattan stretched below him in silver light and storm clouds. The city looked smaller from up here. Quieter. Almost manageable.

His thoughts were neither.

A knock at the door.

“Come in.”

Damien entered first, then Luca. Both wore the particular tension of men who had bad news and were deciding how to deliver it.

Roman adjusted his cuff slowly. The bandage beneath pulled against his skin.

“The shooter’s been handled,” Damien said.

“But we still don’t know who hired him,” Luca added.

That bothered Roman more than the bullet had. He didn’t tolerate loose ends they had a habit of becoming nooses.

“You pulled the warehouse footage?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

Luca hesitated just long enough.

Roman looked at him.

One look was usually sufficient.

“The footage was wiped,” Luca said. “Ten minutes before the attack.”

Roman let the silence sit for a moment. Someone inside his operation had either made a catastrophic error or a deliberate choice. Both possibilities ended the same way.

“Find out who touched those cameras.”

“We already started.”

“Start faster.”

Rain tapped steadily against the glass.

Damien cleared his throat. “There’s something else.”

Roman waited.

“The doctor.”

Something shifted behind his ribs subtle, unwelcome.

“She saw the wound clearly,Damien continued. “She knew it wasn’t a car accident. She knew the second she looked at it.”

Roman said nothing, because that was precisely true. She hadn’t hesitated, hadn’t pretended, hadn’t looked away. Just held his gaze and called him out with the calm of someone who had decided his reputation wasn’t her problem.

Most people didn’t do that.

“She won’t talk,” Roman said.

“You can’t know that.”

“I do.”

Damien and Luca exchanged a glance.

Roman noticed. He noticed everything.

“Say it.”

Luca exhaled. You’re distracted.”

The word settled in the room.

Roman almost laughed. Distracted by a woman he’d met an hour ago in an emergency room. Impossible. And yet he could still see her clearly enough: steady hands, sharp mouth, dark eyes that hadn’t dropped from his once. Not from nerves. Not from deference. Just steadiness, the kind that came from not being particularly impressed by men who expected to be.

No fear.

That was what stayed with him.

He walked to the table by the window. His gun rested beside a half-empty glass of whiskey. He touched neither, just stood there.

“Run a background check,” he said. “Selene Vale. I want everything Luca frowned Roman

“Everything.

“Why?”

Roman looked back at the rain-soaked skyline.

Because she looked at me like I was a person. The thought arrived uninvited and he dismissed it immediately.

Someone tried to kill me tonight,he said I don’t believe in coincidences.”

Neither of them looked convinced. He didn’t particularly care.

He picked up the whiskey and took a slow sip. His arm throbbed steadily beneath the bandage a dull reminder that he’d stayed at that hospital longer than necessary. He knew it. His men knew it. No one was saying it out loud, which meant they were being careful, which meant they’d already noticed something he’d rather they hadn’t.

Damien’s phone buzzed.

Activity downtown. One of Moretti’s men near the docks.

Roman set the glass down get the car.

“You were just stitched up

And

Luca looked at the ceiling briefly you sound exactly like the doctor.”

Roman went still.

Then, quietly Watch yourself.”

“Right.” Luca raised both hands. “Forgot you’re terrifying and emotionally unavailable. My mistake.”

Roman let it go, mostly because the man wasn’t wrong.

He didn’t do attachments. Attachments were liabilities, and liabilities got people killed. He’d understood that at fourteen, kneeling on a cold floor beside his mother, and nothing in the years since had given him reason to revise the lesson Control mattered power mattered. Survival mattered.

Love was something men like him buried early and didn’t dig up.

Twenty minutes later, the elevator opened into the underground garage. Roman moved through the cold air toward the waiting SUV, his security falling into step around him.

He almost made it.

Movement across the street caught his eye — a figure under a flickering streetlamp, coat pulled tight against the storm.

Selene.

Roman stopped.

She was arguing with a taxi driver beside a car that had clearly given up on the evening. The driver looked frustrated. Selene looked exhausted but completely unbothered by either the rain soaking through her coat or the argument she was apparently losing.

Her chin was lifted slightly.

Of course it was.

He watched her for a moment longer than he should have.

Then the driver reached out and grabbed her wrist not hard, not threatening, but enough and Roman was already moving.

He crossed the street without deciding to. One moment he was standing beside the car, the next he was there, and the driver was turning around with the expression of someone who immediately regretted his evening.

“Is there a problem?” Roman asked.

The man let go of her wrist and stepped back. Then he got into his taxi and left with the particular speed of someone choosing not to find out what happened next.

Selene stared at Roman.

Are you following me?”

No.

“That was rhetorical.

Rain came down steadily between them. She crossed her arms, water darkening her coat, hair starting to pull loose from whatever she’d had it pinned in.

“I could have handled that myself,” she said.

He touched you.”

He was explaining the fare.

Roman’s jaw tightened. Still.

Selene studied him with the same calm attention she’d used in the treatment room like she was cataloguing him. Looking for the thing underneath.

“You stayed,” she said. At the hospital. Longer than you needed to.

He said nothing.

“You don’t like hospitals. You said so yourself.”

I did.

So why

Roman stepped closer. Not much just enough that the space between them became something with weight. He felt her breath catch, just slightly, before she steadied herself.

You ask too many questions,” he said.

You never answer any of them.”

The city moved around them, indifferent headlights blurring through the rain, traffic swelling and fading. Somewhere above them thunder rolled low across the skyline.

Roman reached up and moved a strand of wet hair from her face one slow motion barely a touch Selene went still So did he.

Go home,he said quietly not unkindly but not a suggestion either.

Because he was already standing too close, already learning the details of her face in the rain, and he recognized the feeling settling in his chest for exactly what it was the beginning of something he had absolutely no business starting.