Page 35 of Angel’s Doll

I put mine into it. That one’s mine too.

17

ANGEL

The gate rolls shut behind us. It’s one in the morning and every light in the clubhouse is burning, which usually happens when there’s a party or when the club has bled or come close.

Brothers in the lot, voices low, phones out. Bishop peels off toward church with Cash. They’re reaching out to Feeney, who will forward the recording to the Quinlans. By sunrise, Chicago will have cleaned its own blood off our city, major housekeeping. That’s Bishop’s night.

Mine is walking beside me with rain in her hair, quiet in a register I know from war. Not broken. Gone inward to count the damage.

“My room or yours,” I say. “Or neither. You call it.”

“Yours.” She doesn’t slow down. “With you in it.”

My room is what it is. Bed made tight enough to bounce a coin. Boots in a row. Nothing on the walls I’d miss in a fire. She stands in the middle of it, dripping.

I close the door behind her and take the Glock off my hip, lock it in the footlocker where she can watch it stop existing, and set the key on the shelf in plain sight.

I peel the borrowed coat off her shoulders when she nods. Hand her a dry shirt from the drawer, strip out of my own wet clothes and look up when she calls my name. The shirt hangs to her thighs. Her mother’s ring lies over it on its shoelace, dead center. The only thing she owns that Victor never touched.

I run the tap in my little bathroom sink until it’s warm and hold her hands under it. No blood on them. Doesn’t matter. Some things you wash off on principle.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel,” she says to the water. “He was awful. He was still my uncle and he wore my father’s face. I hate that he’s dead but I’m glad I’m alive.”

“Both can ride on the same bike.” I dry her fingers one at a time. “You don’t have to pick one tonight. Or ever.”

She looks up at me, and there it is, the other conversation, sitting in the room with us.

“Say it,” she says.

“When the radio went quiet and you came through that door, I lost years I don’t have spare.” Flat, because if I let it be loud it’ll sound like blame, and it isn’t. “I’m not sorry you’re breathing. I’m not sorry I fired. I’m telling you what the thirty seconds cost.”

“I’m not sorry I ran.” Chin up. There she is. “I’m only sorry I promised a thing I couldn’t keep.”

“Then we quit making promises built to break. New deal. You don’t promise to stay put. You promise to stay loud. Radio, voice, where I can find you.”

“Deal,” she says, and takes my hand like she’s signing it.

She doesn’t let go. She steps into me instead, palm flat on my chest, and tips her face up, and I kiss her slow because anything faster would be a lie about what kind of night this is. It isn’t panic. It isn’t falling. It’s a woman who survived the consequences of her whole life today, deciding what comes after.

When we break, she keeps her grip on my shirt.

“I want you,” she says. “Tonight. All of it. I want it to be you.”

Everything in me goes still, the stillness before a door gets kicked. Wanting her isn’t the question. Wanting her stopped being news the first night.

“Doll.” One word, so she knows I’m not saying no. “You’re twenty-two. You’ve known me days. Not even a week. Tonight you watched me put your uncle on his kitchen floor. For the past ten years, nobody let you choose anything about your life. The first free choice of your life shouldn’t get spent on a man like me.”

“That’s a lot of reasons,” she says, “and none of them are no.”

They’re not. I’m sure of her. Been sure since the first night, sure in the way I’m sure of my own hands. That’s not the problem. My certainty is mine to carry, not hers to match.

“That doesn’t mean I get to decide I’m the one for you.”

“Then don’t decide. Listen.” She takes my face in both hands.

I let her.