Page 80 of Crowned in Sin
"He died when I was eleven," she says. "So, no. Not really." She looks down at the club floor below us, unfocused. "There's a safe in the house in Gravesend. My mom's house. His oldpaperwork's in it, work stuff, nothing important probably, but it's the only thing of his that's still... his. Frank's never been able to open it. Doesn't have the combination. My mom never gave it to him."
"What kind of paperwork?"
"Accounting stuff, I think. He kept his own business, did books for people around the neighborhood." She says it like it costs her something, small and worn smooth from handling. "Mitchell."
I don't say anything.
"That was his name," she says, and I understand she's giving me something she doesn't give easily, something she's kept behind glass for longer than I've known her. "Harry Mitchell."
The floor doesn't move. The lights don't flicker. Nothing about the room changes at all, and that's the worst part, because everything in me does.
Harry Mitchell.
I was eleven years old with a knife in my hand that was too big for it, and my father's voice behind me saying finish it, and a man on his knees in front of me whose name I never asked for because I was too afraid to know it. Not knowing kept it from being real. Knowing would finish what the knife started.
I know it now.
I've never said this name out loud to anyone in thirteen years. I didn't know I would ever hear it from anyone else's mouth, least of all hers.
"Nico?"
I pull her into me before she can see my face, wrap both arms around her, and press my mouth into her hair. She relaxes into me, mistaking my cover for tenderness while I hide my face from her.
"I'm glad you told me," I say, and my voice comes out steady, flat, the way it always does when something underneath it isn't.
"You okay?"
"Yeah." I kiss the top of her head. "Just thinking how much I like having you here. In my place."
She laughs, soft, and lets it go, and we stand there a while, her back against my chest, both of us looking out over the floor of the one thing in my life that's never asked me to be anyone but myself.
She has no idea what she just handed me.
Neither, yet, do I, not the whole size of it. Not yet.
Lydia's asleep beside me,sprawled loose across half the bed, one leg thrown over mine, skin still damp where I had my mouth on her twenty minutes ago. I lie there a while just listening to her breathe, slow and even, sated.
Then I ease out from under her, careful, and pad across the dark bedroom to where my phone sits charging on the dresser.
Four messages. All from men I trust to be quiet.
Done. Clean.
Handled, no noise.
In progress, will confirm by morning.
Confirmed.
Four names off Lydia's list, the ones closest to what they did to Bianca, already moving through the machinery I built for exactly this. I told her that I would find every man who touched her mother and I would make them pay for it.
I meant it as a vow. Now it's just paperwork, coming in one text at a time.
I'm still looking at the screen when it rings.
Unknown number. I already know.
"Yeah."
