Page 14 of Night of Shadows
Then I step back. I close the door very gently. There is nothing to say.
In the hallway, Maeve says, "Are you all right?"
"No."
"Lex,” she says with a slight sadness in her voice.
"I am not going to say anything I have not earned, Maeve. I have not earned anything. I am going to make calls. I am going to move you and Nora out of this apartment before sunrise. I am going to do my job. We will talk about everything else when she's safe."
"All right."
She stands in the hallway with her arms crossed, and she looks tired in a way that goes through several layers, and I make myself read every layer, because she has spent three years with no one to read them. She's tired of carrying things she's just put down, and the strange cruelty of it is that putting them down doesn’t make her lighter; it just makes her aware of howheavy they were. She's tired of doing it alone. She's tired in the specific way of a woman who has been told that her child was photographed by a Bratva operative for the second time forty-eight hours ago and that the photographer wants the killing done publicly. A woman who has nowhere to put the terror except behind her ribs, where she has been putting everything for three years. Her arms are crossed, not in defiance. They are crossed the way you hold yourself together when the person who is supposed to hold you is the last person on earth you can let yourself lean on or trust.
"Go pack a bag," I say. "For you and Nora. Three days. We will retrieve the rest later."
"Where are we going?"
"Somewhere I have prepared. A brownstone in Brookline. It is owned through a shell company that doesn't connect to my name on any record."
"You have prepared this?"
"I prepared it the night Petrov ran the contract on you. I knew I would not be putting you in a hotel."
She looks at me. There is a long beat, and in the beat I watch her decide, again, to trust me, and I watch how much it takes — how the trust is not a feeling for her but a thing she is choosing with her jaw set, the way you choose to step off a ledge because the building behind you is on fire. Then she says, "Okay. Three days."
She goes to her room.
I stand in the hallway alone for ten seconds. I close my eyes. I open them.
Then I take out my phone. I call Nico, he answers on the first ring and I immediately start talking. "There is a package. A photograph of the witness's daughter, taken at daycare yesterday. Note signed Nikolai R. The threat is forty-eight hours. I am moving them to the brownstone before sunrise."
"You're moving them tonight."
"Tonight."
"And?"
Nico is asking the and-question that brothers ask when they have been reading each other for thirty-five years, and they can hear in your voice that there is something under the operational brief. I have prepared for this. I had prepared for this in the SUV on the way over.
"And nothing tonight, Nico. I will brief you fully tomorrow."
There is a long pause on the line. A very long pause. Then Nico says, "All right. Tomorrow."
He hangs up first. He doesn't press.
I stand in the hallway of Maeve’s apartment, holding a phone I have just used to keep the truth from my brother, in a room across from a door I have just walked through to look at the daughter I didn't know I had until three hours ago. Behind that door is a woman packing a bag with steady hands and a shaking center, who handed me the most dangerous thing she owns tonight and trusted me not to use it as a wound.
I'm hers. I have been hers for three years. I just didn't know what 'hers' meant.
Chapter 6
Maeve
First Morning
It is 4:07 in the morning when I carry my sleeping daughter out of the only apartment she’s ever lived in.
She doesn’t wake up. She’s not woken up for a four AM transport since she was eight months old, when I had to take her to an emergency room in Cambridge for a fever that turned out to be roseola.
