Page 128 of Cruel Kiss

"He did."

"So what's this?"

Ronan is quiet for a second. "This is different," he says. "It's not leaving. He's not being cast out and buried in the marshes. He came home." He looks at his coffee. "I couldn't fix what I did to him, taking his life apart to keep him under my thumb. But I could make sure the ending was the one he wanted."

There is no leaving, Igor said.

But there is coming home, his son decided instead.

I put my hand over Ronan's on the counter. He turns it over so our fingers lace, in the light, in the middle of the morning, where anybody could see.

The engine does one more job for the family.

"The guns are off," I say. "For good."

"That's it then," Ronan agrees.

"And," I add, "the firm has been dragged fully into the light. All the old money-washing mechanisms are disabled and dismantled, never to be used again."

"Keep going, Ms. Meadows," he says with a wicked smile. "This is the kind of talking dirty I could get used to."

I blush, but this is important, so I charge on. "Plus, the Anna House model is ready to be scaled and replicated. From now on, that's where the clean money goes." I peek up at him over the top of my computer screen. "That's the whole point, right? Making something clean out of something dirty?"

He smiles proudly. "Why else would we do it?"

Bending forward, he kisses me, our mouths sealing together right above the screen where my engine is humming along, turning sins into virtues, bad money into good, hopeless futures into bright ones. That's the best place for a kiss I could possibly think of.

Some other things settle, too. Small ones, but important ones nonetheless.

One of Ronan's lawyers who specializes in venture capital funding has gone through my company's cap table with a fine-toothed comb and ensured that it's all mine, down to every lastbit and byte. Todd, Emmett Glover, Ronan himself—all the men who once posed a threat to my right to my own work have been cleared away.

It's justmineagain.

And there's Lev's hundred-dollar bill.

The one he pressed into my hand in the grocery store, for my avocados, like a grandfather. I've kept it in the junk drawer this whole time because I couldn't figure out what to do with a dead man's money.

I figure it out, eventually.

I take it to the Anna House. Louisa is there, and the little girl with the dark braids is once again on the swing in the courtyard, going as high as she can, simply because she can. There's a donation box by the front desk, a plain wooden contraption with a slot cut in the top.

I fold Lev's hundred in half and drop it in.

It's the only thing that man's money will ever do that's worth anything. It goes to the swing, and the reading nook, and the laundry machines, and the air conditioning. It gets turned into somethinggood.

I stand there a second and watch the girl swing. Nobody tells her to make herself smaller.

Then I go home.

The house is quiet.

The kids are with my mother for the night, one last handoff before the world goes back to being ordinary. She keeps making jokes about how much I owe her for this summer of unlimited babysitting, and she's very much right. I'm sure I'll pay her back one way or another. Maybe I'll set her up with Grigor. I could see them two hitting it off.

Ronan is on his way home from work. I'm waiting for him on the front steps.

Because it's time for an overdue conversation.After,he said,then I'll tell you everything.

Well. It's after.