Kill Order Kiss novel · Chapter 11 of 16

Chapter 11: One Night

"How did you get this number?"

"Paloma. Just now. She texted me from her bathroom." His voice was rough. "Lucio's in her kitchen drinking her coffee. She's fine. He won't touch her. He wants you."

"I know what he wants."

"Where are you?"

I looked up at the street sign.

I didn't say anything.

"Mari. I'm not asking for my father. I'm asking for me."

"Your father held the door."

There was silence on the line.

"What?"

"When my father was killed. Your father locked the door and turned the sign. I have it on tape."

The silence went on so long I thought he'd hung up.

"Tell me where you are," he said, very quietly. "Please."

He picked me up twenty minutes later in a car I'd never seen.

He drove without speaking to an empty pier in Red Hook, the one where he'd asked me to marry him.

We sat in the car with the engine off and the rain on the windshield.

I didn't have a VCR.

So I told him.

Everything, from the floor up.

I said his father's name twice and watched him not look away.

Rocco stared through the windshield while I talked.

He didn't interrupt once.

When I finished, he put both hands on the steering wheel and held it so hard his knuckles went white.

"I was thirteen," he said. "That spring. He took me fishing the weekend after. He said he'd had a good month."

He laughed, and it was the worst sound I'd ever heard.

"I thought it was Carmine," he said. "All of it. I thought my father was just too greedy to say no to him. I was going to hand the Grecos over and keep him out of it."

"You can't keep him out of this."

"I know."

"You have to choose, Rocco."

He turned in his seat and looked at me for the first time since I'd gotten in.

His eyes were wet.

"I chose you the first night I ate your father's food," he said. "I've been choosing you every day since. I just did it very badly."

I reached over and touched the scar through his eyebrow.

He closed his eyes.

"Where do I sleep tonight?" I said.

He drove me to an apartment in Carroll Gardens that nobody in his family knew about.

There was a mattress, a coffee maker, and a shelf of books.

He said it was where he went when he needed to not be a Ricci.

He locked the door behind us.

I put the backpack on the kitchen counter.

"Can I see it?" he said. "The tape."

I took the tin out and opened it.

He picked up the tape and held it.

He read my father's handwriting on the label.

Then he set it down, very gently, and turned around and kissed me.

It wasn't the kiss on the jet stairs.

It wasn't Lisbon either.

It wasn't angry.

It was slow, and careful.

I gave it.

I opened my mouth under his and pulled him down by the back of his neck, and the careful went out of him in one long breath.

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