Page 120 of Shadow Of Sin

He looks at me. “Ready to talk?”

Over coffee and breakfast, I give Sal the minimum. Wolfe and I had a fight. I found out things I didn’t know about him, and now I need time to figure out what it means.

“What kind of things?” he asks, sitting across from me at his tiny kitchen table.

“The kind I can’t share.”

“E, you’re killing me.”

“I know. I’m sorry. But this one I have to work through on my own.”

“Is it over between you two?”

The question punches me square in the chest. I stare at my eggs. “I don’t know.”

“Do you want it to be?”

My mind stumbles back to our time in the cabin, sitting on the porch in those two chairs, holding hands, making love after he opened up to me about his mom, the way he said “I know” when I told him this thing between us was real.

But then an image of my case file pops into my head, followed by his stupid relocation plan and those cold, hard texts where he didn’t stand up for me. He didn’t tell Ronan to fuck off, that he has feelings for me.

Of course he didn’t. Because it’s always the fucking family.

And maybe admitting to those feelings was just a smoke screen to throw me off track, which it fucking did.

A sigh heaves my chest, and I throw my hands in the air. “I honestly don’t know, Sal.”

He reaches across the table and squeezes my hand. “Okay. You don’t have to know right now. But whatever he did, you’ll figure it out. You always do.”

“Yeah.” My voice is thick. “I always do.”

We walk the two blocks to Rosario’s and my eyes don’t stop moving. Every parked car. Every person on the sidewalk. Every window with a line of sight to the street. I’m scanning the way I always did and the Wolfe does, and the irony of me using our shared habit to protect myself from a danger he was supposed to shield me from is not lost on me.

I catch sight of Wolfe’s car parked outside Sal’s building. Halfway to Sal’s, it hit me that there must be some kind of tracker on it. Wolfe is the kind of guy who counts the number of minutes I spend in the bathroom and measures the space between the edge of his cereal box and the counter. There’s no way in hell he doesn’t know where I am right now.

Good. Let him know. Let him sit behind his laptop monitor at his family’s cushy mansion and watch the blinking little dot on his screen, knowing it’s the woman he planned to throw away. I hope it fucking haunts him that I figured his shit out before he could execute it.

Sal talks about the soup he’s planning for today’s special. I nod in the right places and laugh when he expects me to. The whole time I’m calculating whether Dmitri’s people are watching this block right now, and whether walking out in the open with my brother was the dumbest thing I’ve done since leaving the cabin.

Which is saying something because leaving the cabin was pretty fucking dumb.

But I’m here now. And going back isn’t an option.

We make it safely to the restaurant. The scent of garlic and olive oil consumes me once we walk inside. I’ve been breathing these familiar smells for as long as I can remember. And fuck Dmitri if he thinks he can just take it all away from us.

I sit at the bar while Sal starts his prep. He puts coffee in front of me and gives me small jobs rolling silverware and filling salt shakers. The kind of mindless work that keeps your hands busy while your brain tears itself apart.

My phone is in my pocket. I haven’t turned it on since I left the cabin. I pull it out and stare at the black screen for a long time before I press the power button.

Seventeen missed calls. All Wolfe. No voicemails.

My throat tightens and air abandons my lungs. Seventeen calls. He didn’t leave a single message because he knows me well enough to know that words on a phone aren’t going to fix what I found. He knows the only way this conversation happens is face to face with his eyes on mine.

I shove the phone into my back pocket and keep working.

Around noon, Sal shows me his phone while he’s wiping down the prep counter.

“Hey, Andersen rescheduled. He sent me a text this morning. It’s kind of a bummer, but next week works, too, I guess.”