Chapter 5 FIVE

Nadia

Sunday came whether I wanted it to or not, which meant Vittorio Salvi's black-and-silver card sat on the nightstand in my borrowed room like a countdown, and by Saturday night I still hadn't told Damien I was thinking about going.

I hadn't fully decided I was, either. But I hadn't decided I wasn't, and that distinction felt important enough to keep to myself a little longer.

Sofia showed up at the clubhouse that evening with a duffel bag of my actual clothes, cleared through the garage by a prospect who patted her down for weapons with an apologetic wince the entire time, and the second we were alone in my room she rounded on me with the particular fury of a best friend who has spent three days being lied to by omission.

"You've been kidnapped by a motorcycle club," she said, "and your text messages have been describing it like a bed and breakfast."

"It's not a kidnapping if I could leave."

"Could you, though?"

I opened my mouth to say of course, and found I wasn't actually sure. That uncertainty must have shown on my face, because Sofia's fury softened into something more worried.

"Nadia."

"I'm safe here," I said, and it was true, which surprised me every time I said it. "Safer than I'd be at the apartment. Safer than I'd be walking into Vittorio Salvi's dinner Sunday night and letting him hand me to his son like a fruit basket."

"And the terrifying biker who apparently runs the place?"

I didn't answer fast enough. Sofia's eyebrows climbed toward her hairline.

"Oh my God."

"It's not — " I sat down hard on the edge of the bed. "It's complicated, Sof. He's not what I thought. He's careful, in this very specific, very unnerving way, like he's spent his whole life making sure nobody around him gets hurt on his watch, and I keep almost forgetting that includes me now, and then I remember, and it's — " I ran out of words, which almost never happened to me.

"You like him."

"I've known him for three days."

"That is not a no."

It wasn't. I didn't say so out loud, but Sofia read it off my face anyway, because that's what a decade of friendship does to a person's ability to lie.

She left an hour later with a promise to cover my shifts and a warning — half joking, half not — that if I got myself killed over a man with a motorcycle and a grudge, she was going to be furious about it at my funeral. I walked her down to the garage myself, and that's where I found Damien, alone, running a cloth over a bike that already looked clean enough to eat off of, the particular restless busywork of a man whose hands needed something to do while his mind did something else."You're thinking about Sunday," he said, without looking up.

"Is it that obvious?"

"You've got the same face you had in the parking lot the night Salvi came to see you. Like you're doing math you don't like the answer to."

I sat down on an overturned crate near the bike, close enough to talk quietly. "If I don't go," I said, "he sends someone. If I go, I'm walking into a room with the man who might have had my father killed, sitting across from the son he wants me to marry, and I don't know which of those is worse."

"Neither. You're not doing either." Damien set the cloth down, finally looked at me, and there was something steady in his face that I was starting to recognize as the specific way he looked at problems he'd already decided how to solve. "You're not walking into that dinner alone, and you're not walking into it at all if I can help it. But if it comes to it — you go with us behind you. Not instead of you. Behind you. You say what you need to say to Vittorio Salvi, and if his patience runs out before mine does, that's when he finds out exactly how much of Ironport he doesn't actually control."

"That sounds like a war, Damien."

"It's been a war for six years," he said quietly. "You just walked into the middle of it three days ago. I'm sorry for that. I'm not sorry you're here instead of somewhere I can't reach you."

The garage was quiet around us, engines cooling, the smell of oil and rain coming in through the half-open bay door. I thought about my father's duffel bag, half-packed for eight months like some part of him had known this exact reckoning was coming. I thought about Vittorio's black-and-silver card, still sitting on my nightstand, patient as a spider.

"Okay," I said. "Sunday, I go. But I want to be in the room when you decide what happens after. Not told about it after the fact like something you're managing. I've spent my whole life being the last person to find out what was happening to my own life. I'm done with that."

Something crossed Damien's face — respect, maybe, or the particular ache of recognizing a wound that matched one of his own. "Deal," he said, and held out his hand like we were closing a business arrangement instead of something that had started, somewhere in the last three days, to feel a great deal more dangerous than that.

I shook it anyway.

His hand was warm, and rough with years of engine work, and he held on maybe half a second longer than the handshake strictly required, and neither of us said anything about it.

Outside, the fog was starting to come up off the harbor, same as it did every night in Ironport, indifferent to debts and dinners and wars six years in the making.

Sunday was coming regardless.