Page 38 of Night of Shadows
Chapter 14
Maeve
Three Years
He starts at the beginning.
He’s twenty years old. The year is the year before his father will be killed, although he doesn’t know that yet, and the man named Theo is a Reznikov captain who has spent six months running heroin through a Greek-owned warehouse on a contract that doesn’t exist on paper because the Greek-owned warehouse doesn’t know that one of its forklift operators has been moonlighting for the Bratva.
Theo is forty-one. Theo has a wife and a small son in a townhouse in Quincy. Theo has been warned by Lex's father, in person, in March, that the next time he’s found inside a Konstantinos building, he’ll not leave it alive.
Theo is found inside a Konstantinos building in May.
Lex's father gives the order to Nico, who is twenty-four. Nico gives the order to Lex, who is twenty. Nico doesn’t give the order with words. Nico drives Lex to the warehouse and hands Lex a gun. Nico says, ‘you do this,’and Lex understands that the sentence has two meanings, which are ‘you do this, and you become the brother who does this’ and ‘you do this, or our father will know you cannot.’
Lex does it.
He tells me about the room. He doesn’t soften it. He tells me Theo was tied to a chair, conscious, and asked for Lex’s name. He tells me Lex didn’t give it. He tells me Theo asked Lex to tell his wife. He tells me Lex didn’t promise. He tells me what the gun did and what He tells me about the body after. He tells me that he stood in the room for ninety seconds afterward and that he didn’t feel any of the things he had been told he was supposed to feel when Nico drove him home.
He tells me Nico didn’t speak the entire drive. He tells me Nico parked the car in the alley behind the Konstantinos house, turned the engine off, and sat with both hands on the wheel for a full minute. And that the minute was the longest minute Lex has ever experienced, and that at the end of the minute, Nico said, in a voice Lex had not heard before, ‘I am sorry.’
He tells me Lex had not understood why his brother was apologizing. He tells me he does, now. Then he stops talking.
The kitchen of his lake house is very quiet. The lake is gray through the window. Nora is asleep down the hall. The wood stove is putting out a slow, steady heat that I can feel on my hands where I have them folded around the warm edge of his counter, and Lex is six feet away from me and has just told me, with no music and no plea and no justification, the worst thing he’s ever done.
He looks at me and waits.
He’s letting me decide.
"Lex."
He looks at me. The gold eyes have not moved from my face.
Twenty. He was twenty years old, younger than the paralegal who sends me drafts. A boy, by any measure I have ever used, and someone put a gun in his hand and a man in front of him and made him into this. I do not know what I expected to feel. Idid not expect grief. It comes anyway, grief for the twenty-year-old sitting across a lake-house kitchen from me fifteen years later, with my daughter asleep down the hall. “Have you done it again?” I ask. “Killed someone?”
A pause. Then, "Yes."
"How many?"
He doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t soften. He says, "Eleven. That I did myself. Six more I ordered."
"Theo's wife."
"Was told he died in a workplace accident. The Konstantinos family paid for the son's college and his medical care for an asthma condition the family had no public reason to know about. The wife knows. The wife has not, in fifteen years, contacted any law enforcement agency about her husband's death."
"That is a kind of mercy."
"It is the kind I am capable of."
I think about that for a moment. I am, by training and by temperament, a woman who weighs information for a living, and the information he’s just given me is the information I asked for, and he’s given it the way a person gives information to a federal prosecutor under oath — without ornament. He’s not asked me to forgive him. He’s not asked me to understand. He’s answered the question I asked him because I asked it.
I cross to him.
I do not touch him. I stand in front of him. He’s very tall and very still, and his gold eyes are the gold of a man waiting to be told what to do with the rest of his life.
"I am not afraid of you," I say.
"You should be."
