Demetrio's POV
Her apartment was small.
Not badly kept, just compact, the kind of space that made a statement about priorities. A worn couch covered in a blanket that had been washed so many times it had no particular color left. Books stacked on the coffee table and the windowsill and one precarious pile on the floor beside the couch that suggested she had run out of flat surfaces. A kitchen that was barely separated from the living space, all open counter and mismatched appliances, a string of small lights along the window over the sink. A film poster on the wall. A half-dead plant on the ledge that had clearly been through some things.
She moved through it without looking at me, dropping her grocery bag on the counter and pulling out the wine and the bread and setting them down with the practiced efficiency of someone who knew this space well enough to navigate it without thinking.
I stayed near the door.
"This thing with Tony," I said. "End it."
She stopped moving. Slowly, she turned and leaned back against the counter with her arms folded and the particular expression she used when she was deciding how seriously to take something. That expression alone was enough to irritate me.
"I'm sorry," she said, in the patient tone of someone explaining something to a person who was being deliberately difficult. "Which part of Tony are we ending, exactly? Our friendship? Our movie nights? The fact that he's the only person in this building who helped me carry my furniture up three flights of stairs when I moved in?"
"I told you," I said, "you can't be alone with men. Not anymore. Not with who your family is now."
"My family," she repeated the words like she was tasting them and finding them lacking. "You mean your family. I'm an add-on, Demetrio. I'm Penelope's adopted daughter, which makes me a footnote in Manuel's household, which makes me so far removed from the DeLeon name that the idea that some movie night with my neighbor constitutes a security risk is genuinely one of the more dramatic things I've heard this week, and I live in Chicago, so that's saying something."
"It's not about security," I said.
"Then what is it about?"
The question landed cleanly in the space between us and I didn't answer it right away because the honest answer was something I had no intention of handing to her.
Her eyes moved across my face with that focused, assessing quality she had, like she was reading something I hadn't meant to write. Something shifted in her expression.
"Oh," she said, quietly, and the way she said it put my teeth on edge.
"Don't," I said.
"I didn't say anything."
"You were about to."
She tilted her head slightly. "You drove to my neighborhood. You know where I live, which means you looked that up, which means someone in your operation spent actual working hours locating my apartment building. And then you parked outside and waited, and you came over here because Tony touched my hair." She watched me. "And now you're standing in my kitchen telling me to end a friendship."
"I'm telling you to be careful."
"No," she said, and her voice was steady and very deliberate, "you're standing in my apartment being jealous, and I think you know that, and I think it is making you absolutely furious."
The air in the room shifted.
I crossed the kitchen in four steps and she held her ground, which I was beginning to understand was simply what she did. She did not back up. She did not look away. She tilted her chin up and watched me come and kept her arms folded and her expression level, and the fact that she could do that, that she could look at me that way from that close when most grown men with weapons could not, was doing something to my patience that I had very little left of.
"You want to be very careful," I said quietly, "about the conclusions you're drawing."
"You want to be very careful," she said, just as quietly, "about showing up at a woman's apartment uninvited because you saw another man talk to her."
We stood there in her narrow kitchen, close enough that I could see the exact blue of her eyes, which were not simply blue the way I had been dismissing them in my head but something more complicated than that, darker at the edges, and she was looking up at me with the kind of directness that I was not accustomed to in anyone, let alone someone who should, by any reasonable measure, be at least slightly afraid of me.
"This isn't a game," I said.
"I know it isn't," she said, and something in her voice had changed, dropped slightly, the bravado still there but underneath it something more honest. "That's why I need you to tell me what you actually want here, Demetrio. Because I'm not going to keep having versions of this conversation where you show up and crowd my space and tell me how to live my life and then walk away like nothing happened. So tell me. What do you want."
The question sat there between us, direct and unambiguous, and I had not been asked a question that simple in so long that I had almost forgotten what it felt like.
I reached out and pushed a strand of hair back from her face slowly, just off her cheek, and I watched something move through her expression that she didn't manage to conceal in time.
"Nothing I'm going to act on," I said.
She searched my face. Something complicated moved behind her eyes, some calculation I couldn't fully read.
"Then we have a problem," she said.
"We already have a problem."
"Yes," she agreed. "But now it's a different kind."
The silence between us stretched into something taut and unresolved, and I was aware, with the particular clarity that came sometimes at the worst moments, that I was standing in the middle of a very small kitchen in a very ordinary apartment and I could not remember the last time I had wanted something this badly and chosen not to take it.
I stepped back.
I put the distance back between us and straightened my jacket and looked at her once more, because I had the self-control for at least that much.
"End things with Tony," I said, because I needed to leave on something firm and that was the only thing I had.
She looked at me for a long moment. "Goodnight, Demetrio," she said, even though it was eleven in the morning.
I walked to her door and let myself out and pulled it shut behind me, and I stood in the hallway for exactly three seconds before I started moving toward the stairs.
I had a drug negotiation with the Mexicans in four hours. Territory disputes with the Polish that had been simmering for six weeks. The Bratva testing our eastern boundary with a creativity that was beginning to make them a genuine priority. My father's new marriage introducing variables I hadn't finished calculating. An organization of three hundred men that required my full attention and my full mind at all times.
I got in my car and sat there with both hands on the steering wheel and stared at the front of her building.
One of those windows up there was hers.
I turned the ignition and pulled into traffic and did not look back.
I promised myself it was the last time.
I was already aware that it wasn't.