Chapter 11: The Shelter Kitchen

The shelter kitchen smelled like toast and bleach.

It was past midnight, and every child in the building was asleep.

The night nurse had taken one look at us on the doorstep, me in a green dress and a vest, Rocco with a hand-shaped bruise on his face.

She'd gone to make tea without a single question.

She'd set two mugs on the steel counter and gone back to her desk with the door half closed.

I sat on a stool with my shoes off.

Rocco leaned against the stove with his sleeves rolled up and an ice pack from the freezer held to his cheek.

"Does it hurt?" I asked.

"Not as much as the look on your face when you took off that ring."

"I'm sorry I made you take a slap."

"I took it for myself."

"Why?"

"Because I should have told him what I saw days ago," he said. "I waited until he had a hand free."

I turned my mug in a slow circle.

"Eighteen years," I said. "I used to think my parents were dead. It was easier."

"What did you think they looked like?"

"Tired."

He almost smiled.

"When I was nine a girl in the next bed told me her mother was a mafia princess who'd come back for her. I hit her."

"Did she deserve it?"

"She was right."

I laughed, and then it caught in my throat and turned into something else.

He put the ice down.

He came around the counter and stood in front of my stool, and I looked up at him.

"I'm not asking you to marry me or to go back to that house," he said. "But I'm not going anywhere, either."

"You could go home."

"I could."

"You're the heir. You'd be safe."

"I've been safe," he said. "I hated it."

I stood up on the rungs of the stool so that our faces were level.

I kissed him.

It was slow this time.

There was nobody on a lawn and nobody at a window, and nothing to hurry for.

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