Cellie's POV
I stood across the street from Rico's for four minutes before I crossed.
This was the third time I had made it this far in the last two days, and the previous two times I had turned around before reaching the door, which was a new personal low even by the generous standards I applied to my own track record of avoidance behaviors. I was a woman who had walked into a mafia estate and argued with a don in his own office. Asking for my job back at a bar should not require three attempts.
And yet here we were.
The problem was not the asking. The problem was the walking back into the space that Demetrio now owned and facing that particular reality in daylight, in the flat ordinary light of a Tuesday morning, after everything that had happened in the weeks since I had walked out in a blaze of principled resignation that had lasted approximately eight days before my bank account made its position on principle very clear.
