Lethal Love novel · Chapter 15 of 32

Chapter 15: Tribeca

He didn't answer me in the car.

He didn't answer me on the bridge, or on West Broadway, or in the elevator that went up thirty floors without stopping.

The doors opened straight into his apartment.

It was all windows and dark wood and almost nothing else.

A long kitchen. A couch nobody had sat on. A table for twelve with one chair pulled out.

The whole city was lit up past the glass.

"Shower's down the hall," he said. "There are towels. There's a shirt on the bed."

"I'm not staying."

"You've been awake for three days, and you smell like Gennaro's cigars."

I smelled my own sleeve.

He was right.

I stood under his shower until the hot water made my hands stop shaking.

The shirt on the bed was one of his black ones.

It came to the middle of my thighs, and the cuffs hung past my fingers.

I rolled them up twice and went back out barefoot.

He was in the kitchen with his sleeves pushed up, cracking eggs into a pan one-handed.

He didn't turn around.

"Sit," he said.

I sat on a stool at the counter.

He put a plate in front of me.

Eggs, soft, with butter and black pepper and torn bread under them.

I ate all of it.

He watched me eat with his arms folded and his back against the stove.

"Is there a tape?" he said.

"No."

He shut his eyes.

"There's no tape," he said. "There's no somebody. There's nothing posting at midnight."

"There's me. Posting at midnight."

"With what?"

"With my face, saying what she told me." I put my fork down. "He doesn't know that. He thinks I have her voice."

"He'll know at midnight, when nothing posts."

"He'll think I called my somebody off because you walked me out."

He opened his eyes and looked at me.

"You walked into that room with nothing," he said.

"I walked in with a sketchbook to get."

"He'd have killed you."

"I know."

"Then why?"

"Because she was in a chair, Dom!"

It came out loud.

It came out so loud it rang off all that glass.

"Because she was tied to a chair with my sketchbook on the floor. Because she's a horrible person, and she was crying the way I cried at sixteen."

I stood up off the stool. "And because I didn't know if you'd come to save her or finish her."

That landed.

I watched it land.

"I gave you my word," he said quietly.

"You gave it to me on Shore Road. Then you told Gennaro everything I ever said."

"He's my family."

"He's the one who paid her."

"You don't know that."

"You walked in that room. You saw it." I came around the counter. "He didn't want her dead because of Matty. He wanted to know what she'd told me."

He didn't answer.

His hands were gripping the counter edge behind him.

"You saw it," I said again, softer.

"Yes," he said.

It was barely a word.

He looked at the floor.

"He held my face," he said. "At my father's funeral. At Matty's. He held my face and told me he'd find who did it."

I didn't say anything.

There wasn't anything to say to that.

I just went to him.

I put my hands on his face, both of them, the way his cousin did.

He leaned into them.

"You lied to me," he said into my palm.

"I know."

"Don't do it again."

"Then don't make me choose between you and a girl in a chair."

He lifted his head.

"What do you want, Jemma?"

"What?"

"Not for Oakley. Not for the shop. You." His voice was rough. "What do you want?"

I looked at him for a long time.

At the scar through his eyebrow and the coffee stain still on his cuff.

At the man who'd read my texts twice and never once asked me to be someone else.

"You," I said. "I want you. Tonight. Here."

He didn't move.

"Say it again," he said. "I want to see your chin."

I said it again, and my chin didn't go anywhere.

"Yes, Dom. Yes."

He kissed me then.

Not like the cutting table.

Slower than that.

He kissed me then.

Not like the cutting table.

Slower than that, like a man with all night and nothing in the room but us.

His mouth was warm and he tasted like black coffee and I made a sound I'd have been ashamed of anywhere else.

His hands found my waist through his own shirt.

Mine found the buttons on his.

The same two I'd opened on the cutting table, when the pins were still scattered on the floor.

I got them open.

Then the next one, and the next.

His skin was hot under my fingers.

He pulled back just far enough to breathe.

"Jemma."

"Stop being careful."

His eyes went dark, but he didn't move.

I pushed the shirt off his shoulders and pulled it down his arms until it fell.

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