Chapter 7
Something had shifted, and Maya couldn’t decide if it had shifted in him or in her, or whether that distinction mattered anymore.
Nico found her the next afternoon in the estate’s east garden, where she’d taken to walking the perimeter under the pretense of getting air and the actual purpose of counting cameras. He didn’t mention the workshop. He didn’t need to. It sat between them now the way a held breath sits in a room, present in everything neither of them said.
“You looked at me differently last night,” he said, falling into step beside her. “After.”
“Differently how.”
“Like you’d found something you weren’t expecting.” He glanced at her, and there was none of the guarded stillness she’d catalogued in him at dinner, in front of his father, in every room that wasn’t the one full of half-finished violins. “Most people who find out what I actually do down there look at me like I’ve disappointed them. Like the son of Vittorio Marchetti should have a more interesting secret than woodworking.”
“I didn’t think it was disappointing.”
“What did you think it was?”
Maya stopped walking. Around them the garden was doing the thing expensive gardens did, performing a wildness that had been engineered within an inch of its life, and she thought about how much of what surrounded her here was exactly that, a careful performance of something real. The workshop hadn’t been that. The workshop had been the one unrehearsed thing in this entire fortress, and some reckless, unprofessional part of her wanted to give him something unrehearsed in return.
“I thought it was the truest thing I’ve seen since I got here,” she said.
He didn’t say anything to that, not right away, and the silence between them felt less like the calculated pauses she’d watched him use at dinner and more like a man genuinely searching for words that wouldn’t come easy. Maya, for reasons she would spend a long time afterward trying to justify to herself, kept talking.
“I told you my grandfather was a smuggler,” she said. “That part’s true, mostly. What I didn’t tell you is that I had a sister.”
Something in his face went still and attentive in a different register than before, the register of a man who understood, instinctively, that whatever was coming mattered.
“Grace,” Maya said, and the name came out rougher than she intended, five years of practice at not saying it out loud undone in a single syllable. “Four years younger than me. She wasn’t careful the way I learned to be. She trusted the wrong person at the wrong party, and six months later she was dead in an apartment I’d told her a dozen times to move out of, and by the time anyone called me it had already been four hours.” She looked at the garden instead of at him, because she wasn’t sure her face would hold if she didn’t. “The drugs that killed her moved through a supply chain I understand a lot better now than I did then. People like your family don’t just sell product. You sell it to people who don’t know how to say no to it, and then you act surprised when they die.”
She hadn’t planned to say that last part. It was too close to the truth of who she actually was and why she was actually standing in this garden, and she felt the words leave her mouth with a kind of vertigo, like she’d stepped off something without checking how far down the ground was.
Nico didn’t flinch. That was the thing she would remember afterward, turning it over at night the way she turned over everything. He didn’t defend his family, didn’t offer the practiced deflection she’d watched him give his father at that first dinner. He just stood there and let the accusation land, and something in his jaw tightened like he was absorbing a blow he felt he’d earned.
“I’m sorry,” he said finally. “Not the kind of sorry people say because it’s expected. I mean it did that. To someone who mattered to you. And I’ve spent five years telling myself I got out clean because I don’t sell it myself, I don’t touch it, I just exist in the same house as the men who do, and that distinction has never once made the dead any less dead.” He looked at her, and there was nothing careful left in his expression at all. “I’m not going to tell you I can undo any of that. I can only tell you I understand, better than most people would, exactly what you’re describing.”
“How do I know that’s true and not just something a smart man says to a woman who’s upset?”
“You don’t,” he said simply. “That’s the whole problem with trust. You never get proof in advance. You only get it in hindsight, after you’ve already decided to give it.”
Maya laughed, short and surprised, because it was such an unromantic thing to say and somehow landed as the most romantic thing anyone had said to her in years. “That’s a terrible thing to tell someone you’re trying to reassure.”
“I’m not trying to reassure you,” Nico said. “I’m trying to be honest with you. I thought that mattered more.”
She looked at him standing there in a garden built to look wilder than it was, a man who’d just been accused, fairly, of belonging to the machine that killed her sister, and who hadn’t once tried to talk his way out of the accusation. She thought about Elena Voss, and the eleven minutes with her thumb over Reeves’s contact, and the report she’d sent anyway, and felt something in her chest crack open in a way that had nothing to do with any operation she’d ever been trained to run.
She kissed him first.
It wasn’t careful, and it wasn’t part of any plan she’d built or any cover she was maintaining. His hand came up to her jaw like he’d been waiting for permission he hadn’t expected to get, and for one long, unguarded moment neither of them was performing anything at all, not the heiress and not the estranged son, just two people standing in a garden who had, for reasons neither of them could fully account for, decided to stop being careful with each other.
He kissed her back like he meant it as an answer to a question she hadn’t asked out loud, slow at first and then not slow at all, one hand sliding from her jaw into her hair, the other finding the small of her back and pulling her in until there was no careful, measured distance left between them at all. She felt the last of her training go quiet, just for a moment, drowned out by the warmth of him, the low sound he made against her mouth when she pressed closer, the particular vertigo of wanting something this much and not once, in that moment, caring what it cost her to want it.
The garden around them kept doing what it always did, engineered wildness performing itself under a sky going soft with early evening, and neither of them noticed when the light changed, both of them lost entirely in the slow, unhurried rediscovery of each other, hands and breath and heartbeat, nothing held back and nothing performed.
When they finally broke apart, it wasn’t because either of them wanted to. It was because breathing had become, briefly, a genuine problem, and Maya rested her forehead against his, both of them laughing softly, unsteadily, at the particular helplessness of it.
“Well,” Nico said, his voice rough, his hand still tangled in her hair. “That was unplanned.”
“Was it,” Maya said, and found she meant the question more seriously than the light tone suggested.
He didn’t answer, not with words. He kissed her again instead, softer this time, lingering, and Maya let herself stay exactly there, in a garden built to look wilder than it was, for as long as the evening would let her.