Page 28 of Knight
Good fucking question. I stare at her across three feet of linoleum and I don't have an answer that doesn't blow the arrangement apart. I can't tell her the truth — that her apartment smells like mildew and dish soap and survival and I want to put her in a room at my place where the walls aren't peeling. That watching her grip the counter like it was the only thing keeping her upright made something in my chest shift in a direction I can't afford.
"Just a change of scenery," I say. Casual. Light. The voice I use when I'm lying to everyone including myself.
She sees through it instantly. She always does.
"No." Clean. Final. Her chin lifts half an inch and her eyes are steady on mine.
"I'm not asking as part of the arrangement."
"Then what are you asking as?"
The question hangs between us. I open my mouth. Close it. She watches me fail to answer and something flickers across her face — satisfaction, maybe, at proving what she already suspected. That I don't know what this is either. That the categories I built to keep her at a safe distance are dissolving faster than I can rebuild them.
"You should go," she says. Quiet. The fight drained out of her hours ago and what's left is a woman standing in a doorframe at two in the morning trying to protect herself from a man who keeps showing up when she tells him to stay away.
"Yeah." I push off the counter. "I should."
I walk past her. Close enough to feel the heat off her skin, to catch that citrus again, to see the pulse in her throat beating faster than her voice suggested. She doesn't move. Doesn't stepback. Holds her ground like she always does — like giving me an inch is the same as giving me everything.
At the door I don't look back. I step into the hallway and pull it shut behind me, the swollen frame catching before it clicks.
The stairwell swallows me. Third step creaks. Fourth floor light still dead. The argument three floors down has gone quiet — either resolved or abandoned, both equally likely in a building like this.
I hit the street. The air is cold and wet and I breathe it in deep enough to hurt.
My phone buzzes in my pocket.
I pull it out. The screen glows white against the dark.
Nova.
What time tomorrow?
I stare at the four words until my vision blurs. Then I laugh — a short, broken sound that bounces off the brick facade and disappears into the empty street.
I'm so fucked.
Her Reaction to His World
She steps through the door and stops.
I've watched men walk into this penthouse — capos, allies, enemies dressed up as friends — and every single one of them did the same thing. Eyes to the ceiling. Eyes to the view. Alow whistle or a comment about the square footage designed to remind both of us who owns what.
Nova does none of that.
She stands just inside the entryway with her bag on her shoulder and her sneakers still on and she looks at my apartment the way a detective looks at a crime scene. Slow. Methodical. Like everything in this place is evidence of something I'm trying to hide.
The kitchen first. Her eyes trace the marble countertops, the six-burner range that has never been lit, the espresso machine still wearing the plastic film on its display screen. I watch her clock every detail — the empty fruit bowl, the knife block with blades that have never cut anything, the absence of crumbs or stains or any proof that a human being feeds himself here.
She moves into the living room. Runs her fingers along the back of the couch — the leather she'll sit on later like it's her own, shoes off, legs tucked. But right now she's still in reconnaissance mode, cataloguing the blank walls, the bookshelves with nothing on them, the glass coffee table without a single ring or scratch.
She walks to the windows. The view punches outward — the whole city laid open, steel and glass and the river cutting through it like a scar. Twenty-third floor. On a clear day you can see the harbor where my father's shipments used to dock.
She stares at it for a long time.
I lean against the kitchen island with my arms folded, watching her watch my life, and the silence is so heavy I can hear the elevator humming thirty feet behind the closed doors.
"Who lives here?" she says.
