Page 71 of You Can Run

Borya set the apple down and watched the knife turn in his fingers.

Sasha had been careful about it, using crypto-wallets, digital transfers, a quiet siphoning of Borya's capital into accounts where his older brother's eyes couldn't reach. He'd managed itfor nearly two years before Borya found the discrepancy. A small number, in the context of what they moved. But the number was never the point.

He'd handled it the way he handled most things: not with anger, but with logistics. A routine buy at the club in Philadelphia. A young gang member from the South Side named Daniel Castaño sitting across from Sasha in the VIP booth while the bass thumped through the mezzanine floor and the air hung thick with cheap vanilla body spray. Borya had watched from the balcony railing, looking down through the haze of strobe lights, and had given a small, almost imperceptible nod.

It had happened between the beats of a pop song. A drug deal gone wrong—that was the story, and it held, because in places like that, stories like that always held. The boy had executed the order with a clinical, terrifying efficiency, and Borya had watched Sasha's head explode and had felt nothing that resembled grief. Only the quiet satisfaction of a glitch corrected in the system.

The crypto-wallets were long gone, the private keys buried with Sasha, but the principle remained. You don't steal from the man who made you.

Borya picked up the apple again and took another bite.

The girl—Jessica, Julia, whatever she was calling herself now—was a loose thread. Daniel was a missing asset. For thirteen years, Borya had carried them on his books as outstanding debt. A debt ignored was a debt that grew.

And now Ferrera was dead, which meant the layer of insulation Borya had maintained between himself and this particular piece of unfinished business was gone.

It was time to stop managing this from a distance.

He finished the apple, set the core on the edge of the plate, and wiped the knife clean on a cloth napkin. Through thewindow, the fog was beginning to thin, the masts in the harbor sharpening into definition.

He picked up the phone and dialed.

“Get the plane ready,” he said. “Galveston.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

The moonlight camethrough the glass wall of the room in a wide, pale sheet, laying itself across the white linen, across the curve of Jessica's shoulder, across the slow rise and fall of her breathing. Dante lay on his back and watched the light move—the water outside shifting it in imperceptible increments, the shadows on the ceiling drifting like something alive.

She was almost gone. He could feel it in the weight of her, the way she'd softened against his side in stages, her hand loosening on his chest, her breathing finding a slower rhythm. Not quite asleep. Still present enough that when he moved his thumb along her shoulder, she made a small sound and pressed closer.

He didn't move otherwise. He lay still and let her drift and kept his eyes on the ceiling.

He was good at stillness. He'd learned it young, in rooms where moving at the wrong moment had consequences, and he'd carried the skill forward into a life where it mostly just meant he could wait longer than other people without it costing him anything. Stillness had served him well. It had kept him alive in situations where alive was the best available outcome. He'd never had much cause to resent it before tonight.

He'd made the decision in the dark of the warehouse, while she slept. It had simply been there, waiting, the only option that left her standing at the end of it. He'd known her long enough to know she would fight him on it if she knew. She'd burn the whole thing down before she let him walk into it alone.

Which was why she wasn't going to know. Not until morning. Not until it was already done.

He felt the thought try to surface fully—the morning, what it looked like, what she would say when she understood—and he pushed it back down. Not yet. He had a few more hours. He was going to use them for this.

“Dante.” His name in her mouth, blurred with sleep, barely there.

“I'm here,” he said.

She settled. Her breathing slowed again. He felt the exact moment she went under, the last small tension leaving her hand, the weight of her becoming total and trusting.

He closed his eyes.

Her hair smelled of the management company's shampoo and underneath that something else, something that had nothing to do with the house or the night or any of it, something that had been the same for thirteen years.

He looked at the Gulf. The moon was lower now, its light thinner, the room beginning to shift almost imperceptibly toward the first suggestion of grey.

Jessica woke to light, the sun burning gold and flat beyond the glass wall, the room warm with it. She lay still for a moment, eyes half-open, and let the unfamiliar ceiling remind her whereshe was. The house. The West End. The white linen, the smell of cedar, the sound of the water.

Dante.

She reached without looking and found the sheet beside her cool, the warmth of him long gone. She opened her eyes fully and looked at the space he'd left.

Last night came back to her in pieces. His hands. The steam of the bathroom. The scent of his skin and the feel of him inside her. She'd fallen asleep with her face against his chest and his arm around her and the sea outside and for the first time in longer than she could accurately calculate, she hadn't dreamed about anything at all.