Page 146 of Rage
Something moves in his face. “God, no,” he says. “I will do other things in the kitchen, preferably with me inside you.”
I laugh. He watches me laugh with the expression that I have decided is the truest thing about him, the one that is not rage or patience or calculation but something simpler and more difficult than all of them.
“Okay,” I say when I can speak again.
“Okay, what?”
“Okay, yes. All of it. The permanent version. The one that starts here.”
His hands come up and frame my face.
He kisses me. Not the slow, deliberate kind from the gray mornings. Something fuller than that. Something that has weeks and months and a white room and a photograph and a note slid under a door all the way back at the beginning, all of it arriving at once in this one gesture.
I hold on.
I hold on, and I think,This is the version where nothing gets to take this away.
Not the Order. Not Victor. Not Roman. Not the family connection index or the scholarship or the invisible asterisk next to my name.
Not anything.
We are here.
And this is ours.
Saint
The Crowned Families meet in a room beneath a restaurant in Lower Manhattan with no name on the door, requiring two separate key codes and the word of a man who has been vouching for people in rooms like this for thirty years.
My father vouches for me. It’s getting used to calling a man your father when, most of your life, you wondered who the man was and secretly hated him for abandoning his son and failing his mother.
I walk in alone.
Amy is upstairs in the restaurant proper, at a corner table with a glass of water and her notebook, which is how she handles situations she cannot control. She makes herself useful to her own mind, which is one of the things about her I find most recognizable. I have been doing the same thing for years. Turning inward when the exterior offers nothing to manage.
Downstairs, there are eight men and one woman, arranged around a table that has clearly been the site of decisions that do not appear in any public record. They are not what I expected, which is perhaps naive. I expected them to be older, the dark suits and the visible weapons and the performative gravity of organized power. They all appear to be my age. Heirs to a dynasty with more power than countries.
A man named Domenico sits at the head. He looks at me when I enter with a curious expression. There is no question of who my father is, since I look like my father.
He makes the introductions. Names I will need to learn. Territories. Responsibilities. The architecture of an organization that has been operating for generations and intends to continue.
I sit. I listen.
They ask me questions. Direct questions, the kind that do not have safe answers, the kind that are designed to locate the edges of a person’s honesty. I answer them directly because directness is the only register I trust and because these are people who will hear an evasion the second it leaves my mouth and will not forget it.
An hour in, the woman across the table, Caterina, late forties, looks at me and says, “You released the Consortium archive. You burned an institution’s forty years of leverage in a single morning. Why should we believe you won’t do the same to us?”
I look at her.
“Because the Consortium used that leverage against people who had no power to resist it,” I say. “It was built on harm from what the Order couldn’t control. The Crowned Families’ operations are its own matter and not my jurisdiction to judge. But if I find that this organization is running anything analogous to what the Order ran, if I find a Prey list, a scholarship selection committee, a system for targeting the vulnerable, I will burn that too. And I will tell you that now, at this table, before I’m a part of anything, so there is no ambiguity about who I am and what I will and will not protect.”
The room is very quiet. Caterina looks at Domenico.
Domenico looks at me with something in his face that I have seen once before, in a mirror, on my own face, when Amy said something that reached somewhere I did not know was accessible.
He looks like a man who is proud of something.
“Nonnegotiable,” Caterina says finally, in the tone of someone recording a term in a document that does not exist on paper but is nonetheless binding.
