— MIA —
I didn't sleep.
I lay in the dark with the Dostoevsky on the nightstand and my eyes open and my mind doing the thing it had been doing since I came to this house — running in circles, looking for exits, finding walls. The sounds from the west wing had stopped sometime around two in the morning. I knew because I had been listening.
I shouldn't have been listening.
I couldn't stop.
By six I was dressed. By six thirty I was at the kitchen table with coffee I was not tasting, waiting for the sound of him on the stairs.
Elena moved around me quietly, asking nothing, which I was grateful for. She had a gift for knowing when questions were the wrong thing.
He came down at seven.
He looked better than the night before, which meant he had slept at least a little. He was still in that particular mode of his — controlled, contained, every movement deliberate — but underneath it something was different. Something that looked, if I was reading it correctly, like a man who had gotten an answer he had been looking for and was not sure what to do with it yet.
He saw me at the table.
He sat down across from me.
We looked at each other.
"We said we would talk today," I said.
"We did."
"Then talk."
He was quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet that was not hesitation but selection — choosing what to say and what to keep.
That was already the problem.
"I have a name," he said. "Someone inside my organization who was involved in what happened to Ryan."
I set down my cup carefully.
"Who?"
"A man named Marco Carver. He runs my west side operations. He has been with me for three years."
"He set Ryan up."
"He pointed Ryan toward the Vega debt. He made sure Ryan was in the right place at the right time to be used."
"Why?"
A pause.
"I am still establishing that."
I looked at him. At the careful evenness of his face, the way he was giving me the information in measured doses like I was something that needed to be managed.
"You know more than that," I said.
"Mia..."
"Do not Mia me. You have been investigating this for a year. You know more than a name."
Something shifted in his expression. Not guilt exactly. Something adjacent to it.
"There is also a man named Danny Reyes," he said. "He was Ryan's friend, not from this world. He was there the night Ryan died. He called me because he has information about what happened."
The name hit me somewhere unexpected.
"Ryan never mentioned a Danny."
"Ryan kept his worlds separate. You know that."
I did know that. I hated that I knew that.
"Where is he?"
"Somewhere safe. I am handling it."
"You are handling it?"
"Yes."
I stood up.
Not because I had decided to. Because sitting still had become physically impossible.
"You are still not telling me everything," I said. Not loudly. Loud would have been easier. "I can feel it, Damien. There is something behind what you are saying and you are choosing not to say it and I need you to understand that I am not a child you are protecting. Ryan was my brother. Whatever happened to him happened to me too. I have been carrying that for a year without knowing the shape of it and you are standing here with the shape in your hands and giving me pieces."
He looked at me.
"Some pieces need to be confirmed before I share them," he said. "If I tell you something that turns out to be wrong..."
"Then it turns out to be wrong and we deal with it. Together." I held his gaze. "Or is that the problem? The together part?"
The silence that followed was a different kind of silence than his usual ones.
He didn't answer.
Which was an answer.
"Fine," I said.
I picked up my coffee. Walked to the sink. Set it down.
"Fine," I said again, quieter, mostly to myself.
I left the kitchen before he could say anything else.
* * *
The man from the west wing was in a room on the ground floor of the east side of the house.
I knew because I had listened to Viktor's footsteps after breakfast, tracked where he went with the tray, counted the doors. It was not difficult. Damien's house ran on routine, and routines, once you understood them, were maps.
Viktor wasn't in the corridor when I got there.
I knocked.
Nothing.
I opened the door.
The man inside was younger than I expected. Mid-twenties, sitting on the edge of a bed that was nicer than the situation implied, with his hands between his knees and the particular posture of someone who had been scared for a long time and had gotten used to it. He looked up when I came in.
There was someone else in the room.
Standing by the window, arms crossed, with the expression of someone who had been in the middle of his own conversation when I walked in — a man around Ryan's age, dark-haired, with tired eyes and the kind of face that had probably been open and easy once and had learned to be careful.
He looked at me.
I looked at him.
"You must be Mia," he said. His voice was careful. Recognizing.
Something about the way he said it.
"Danny Reyes," I said. Not a question.
He nodded once. And something in his face broke open slightly, the way things break open when you have been holding them together for too long and suddenly the person in front of you is connected to the exact weight you have been carrying.
"Ryan talked about you," he said. "All the time. He said you were the smartest person he knew."
I didn't let myself feel that. Not yet.
"Tell me what you saw," I said. "That night. Tell me everything."
* * *
Danny told me.
He told me slowly, with the particular care of someone who had been over it many times in their own head and was choosing words that would not break him while he said them. The other man in the room — whose name, I learned, was Teo, low-level, scared, useful — sat very still and said nothing.
Danny had driven Ryan to the meeting that night. Ryan had said it was routine, a quick handover, nothing serious. He had been nervous in the car — Danny could tell, though Ryan was pretending not to be — and at one point he had said something that Danny had not understood until now.
"If something happens, you call Damien. Not the police. Damien. He will know what to do."
He had said it like it was practical. Like he had already decided.
Danny had laughed and told him nothing was going to happen.
The meeting was in a warehouse on the east docks. Ryan had gone in alone — he had told Danny to stay with the car, that it was better that way. Danny had waited. Ten minutes. Fifteen. And then he had heard the shots.
Three of them.
Close together.
And then nothing.
Danny stopped talking for a moment.
I sat very still on the chair I had pulled from the corner of the room and looked at my hands in my lap and breathed.
"He did not suffer," Danny said. I could hear that he did not know if that was true. I could hear that he was saying it because he needed to say something and that was the only thing that felt like it might help. "It was fast. He would not have..."
"It is okay," I said. "Keep going."
Danny ran. He said it plainly, without excuses. He panicked and he ran and he had been running in his own way ever since, moving from place to place, not calling the police because Ryan had specifically said not to, not calling Damien because he was afraid of what that conversation would look like.
"Why did you call him now?" I asked.
Danny was quiet for a moment.
"Because I found out that Ryan knew," he said. "He knew it was a setup. He knew going in that something was wrong but he thought he could handle it, talk his way out, buy time. He had a plan." Danny looked at me. "And because I found out that plan involved you."
The room was very quiet.
"What do you mean it involved me."
"Before he got out of the car he gave me something. An envelope. He said: if I am not back in thirty minutes, this goes to Mia. Only Mia. Nobody else."
Danny reached into his jacket.
The envelope was worn at the edges, soft from being carried for a year. My name was on the front in Ryan's handwriting — the large, slightly uneven letters of someone who had never quite grown into their own penmanship.
I took it.
My hands were steady.
I did not understand how my hands were steady.
I did not open it there.
I held it against my chest and stood up and thanked Danny in a voice that did not sound like mine and walked out of the room and down the corridor and up the stairs and into my room and closed the door.
Then I sat on the floor with my back against the bed.
And I opened the envelope.
Mia,
If you are reading this then I did not make it out and I am sorry. I am sorry for a lot of things but mostly I am sorry I could not keep my promise to always come home.
There are things I should have told you. I did not tell you because I was trying to protect you and I know you hate that, I know you think you do not need protecting, and you are right. You never did. That was my mistake.
Trust Damien. I know that sounds insane right now. Trust him anyway. He is the only one who will actually try to find out what happened and the only one who will not stop until he does. He cared about me even when he was pretending not to. That is rare.
I love you. I should have said it more. I am saying it now.
Ryan
I sat on the floor for a long time.
The light in the room changed as the morning moved. I sat and held the letter and did not cry, which surprised me, because I had expected to cry. Instead there was just a very large, very quiet thing in the center of my chest that had no name.
Ryan had known.
Ryan had gone anyway.
Ryan had written me a letter and given it to a friend and walked into a warehouse knowing what was waiting.
That was so like him.
So completely, entirely, heartbreakingly like him.
Eventually I folded the letter carefully and put it back in the envelope.
I stood up.
I went to the window and looked out at the garden where I had sat on the cold stone bench and talked to Viktor about careful men.
Trust Damien.
I pressed my forehead against the glass.
The thing about Ryan's advice was that it had always been inconveniently right.