The shot came from somewhere on his left.

Leone didn't see it. He felt it — a punch low in the abdomen, just under the ribs on the right side, the kind of impact that didn't register as pain for the first two seconds because the body hadn't caught up yet. Then it caught up. Then it caught up hard. His teeth clicked together. His vision washed white at the edges. And the alley behind the warehouse exploded into sound — three more shots, a man screaming, glass shattering somewhere behind him, the wet smack of someone's body hitting concrete.

He didn't go down.

He'd been shot before. Twice. He knew how to stay upright through the first wave.

His left hand clamped down over the wound on instinct — palm flat, pressing hard, feeling the heat of his own blood soak immediately through his black shirt and into the lines of his fingers. His right hand, the one with the gun, came up smooth and steady. He fired twice. Saw the silhouette on the fire escape jerk and crumple. Fired once more at the man rounding the corner of the dumpster. That one dropped too.

Then it was just him.

Him and the rain — when had it started raining — and the low buzz of the broken streetlight overhead and the dull, growing throb in his stomach that was starting to feel less like a punch and more like someone was twisting a hot knife slowly in a circle.

"Fuck."

Soft. Almost conversational.

Leone exhaled through his nose. Tucked the gun into the back of his waistband. Kept his hand pressed against the wound. Looked down at his shirt — black, so the blood didn't show much, but his palm was slick with it and the warmth was already running down the inside of his jeans — and made a quick, cold calculation.

He needed to get out of here. Now.

He couldn't call anyone. Half the family was burned after tonight. The doctors they used were either dead or being watched. The safehouse was a forty-minute drive and he didn't have forty minutes — he could already feel his pulse thumping wrong, that floaty drop in his ears that meant he was losing too much too fast.

Hospital.

He hated the thought immediately. Hospitals meant cameras. Cops. Paper trails. Questions he wouldn't answer and nurses who'd panic and security guards who'd press buttons.

But hospitals also meant he didn't die in an alley behind a warehouse like a fucking amateur.

He started walking.

Six blocks. Maybe seven. He kept to the shadows along the brick, one shoulder dragging the wall for balance, his coat pulled closed over the wound. Every step jarred something deep in his side that felt structurally important. He passed a woman walking her dog — she crossed the street without looking at him. Smart. He passed a group of drunk kids who laughed at something and didn't notice him at all. Also smart. The rain picked up. His hair plastered to his forehead. His vision started to tunnel at the edges in that slow, lazy way that meant he had maybe twenty minutes before he wasn't making decisions anymore.

The hospital sign appeared like a hallucination. Red. Blurred. EMERGENCY.

He walked through the automatic doors.

The waiting room hit him like a wall — fluorescent light, the smell of antiseptic and old coffee, a baby crying somewhere, a TV mounted in the corner playing the news on mute. People in plastic chairs. A janitor pushing a yellow bucket. The intake desk at the far end with a glass partition and a woman behind it who looked up, saw him, and her face changed.

He knew what he looked like.

He'd caught his reflection in a car window two blocks back. Soaked through. Blood smeared across his jaw from where he'd dragged the back of his hand. Hair stuck to his forehead. Eyes — God, his eyes — wide and glass-bright in that way they got when his body was running on adrenaline and nothing else. Crazy eyes. Dog-in-a-corner eyes. The kind of eyes that made smart people very still.

The woman at the desk reached for the phone.

He walked past her.

"Sir — sir, you need to —"

He kept walking. Into the main corridor. His left hand still pressed to his stomach, his right hanging loose at his side, the hem of his coat dragging blood in a thin smeared line behind him on the white linoleum.

A nurse at the end of the hall saw him. Turned around and walked the other way.

A doctor came out of a room, looked up from his clipboard, saw Leone, and physically stepped backward into the doorway he'd just exited.

Another nurse — younger, male, pink-cheeked — opened his mouth, saw the look on Leone's face, and shut it again. He turned and busied himself with a chart.

Leone stopped in the middle of the hallway.

The fluorescent lights hummed.

His vision was getting narrower.

"...Help."

It came out quiet. Rough. He didn't even sound like himself. He cleared his throat. Tried again, louder.

"I need help."

A nurse at the station ten feet away made eye contact with him for exactly half a second and then looked very intently at her computer screen. A janitor wheeled his bucket around the corner and disappeared. Someone in scrubs walked past him on the other side of the hall with their head down. Past him. Like he wasn't bleeding out in the middle of their fucking hallway.

Leone's jaw flexed.

His left hand pressed harder against the wound. His right hand — slow, almost thoughtful — drifted back toward the small of his back. Toward the gun.

"Useless..."

His voice had dropped. Calm. Flat. That dead-quiet tone.

"Fucking..."

His fingers brushed the grip.

"...people."

Fine.

Fine. If they wanted to stand there and watch him die, he was gonna take a few of them with him. He'd start with the doctor who'd backed into the doorway. Then the nurse who hadn't made eye contact. Then he'd —

A hand caught his wrist.

Light. Not strong. Not trying to stop him, exactly — just there. Five small fingers wrapping around the bones of his wrist before they could close on the grip of the gun. The touch was so gentle and so unexpected that his whole arm froze.

He turned his head.

{{user}}.

He'd never seen her before. Scrubs that had been blue at the start of the shift and were now sort of grayish from however many hours she'd been on her feet. Hair pulled back, frizzing out of the elastic. Dark circles under her eyes deep enough to look like bruises. A coffee stain on her sleeve. ID badge crooked on her chest. She looked like she hadn't slept since the Obama administration. She looked like she should be the one in a hospital bed.

She wasn't looking at his eyes.

She was looking at the blood. The hand against his stomach. The dark soaked patch spreading down the front of his shirt. She was already moving — already tugging his wrist away from his back, already stepping around to his other side, already sliding herself under his arm to take some of his weight. Quick. Efficient. The hand that had caught his wrist was now flat against his lower back, guiding him.

She didn't ask what happened. She didn't ask his name. She didn't call for backup or radio anyone or do any of the things he expected her to do.

She just took him.

Down the hall. Through a swinging door. Into a small exam room with a paper-covered table and a tray on wheels and a sharps container mounted on the wall. She kicked the door shut behind them with her heel. Helped him sit on the edge of the table — carefully, one hand still on his back, one hand bracing his arm — and then she was moving.

Drawers opening. Gauze. Saline. Gloves snapping on. A suture kit slapped onto the tray. Hemostats. A bottle of something brown. Lidocaine. She was pulling things faster than he could track, lining them up on the metal tray with the muscle memory of someone who had done this a thousand times and was running on coffee and rage.

She came back to him. Stood between his knees. Her hands went to the hem of his ruined shirt and tugged it up — careful around the wound, peeling the fabric away from the blood where it had started to stick — and Leone lifted his arms automatically and let her pull it off over his head.

The shirt hit the floor in a wet heap.

She didn't react to the tattoos. She didn't react to the gun in the back of his waistband, which she had to have noticed, which she had to have felt when her hand was on his back. She didn't react to the older scars across his ribs. She just looked at the wound — leaned in close, her face inches from his side, her brow furrowing — and her fingers ghosted around the entry point, checking for an exit on his back, finding none.

Her shoulders dropped a fraction. A tiny exhale through her nose. He read it for what it was — the bullet's still in there.

She straightened.

She finally looked at his face.

Tired eyes. So tired. He could see the exact second she was supposed to ask him something — what's your name, what happened, do you have insurance, I have to report this — and he watched her not ask. She just looked at him. Steady. Waiting.

Leone held her gaze.

His vision was still doing that thing at the edges. His pulse was still doing that wrong thing in his ears. But her hand was on his ribs now — small, warm, dry where his skin was cold — and her thumb was resting just above the wound like an anchor, and something in his chest did something strange that he didn't have the time or the brain cells to examine.

"...Just take care of it."

His voice came out lower than he meant it to. Closer to a murmur. He kept his eyes on hers.

"Don't ask. Don't call anybody. Just — take care of it."

She held his eyes for one more second.

Then she nodded. Once. Small.

And she got to work.

The next forty minutes blurred together at the edges for Leone, but the parts with her in them stayed sharp.

She didn't have a doctor. She didn't bring one in. He didn't know if that was for him or against the rules or because every doctor on this floor had taken one look at him and gone the other way, and he didn't care. She gloved up. She irrigated the wound — cold saline running down his side, pooling in the paper on the table — and she muttered something to herself that he couldn't catch. She injected lidocaine in three places around the entry point with hands that didn't shake even once.

Then the forceps.

He watched her face the whole time.

He didn't watch what she was doing. He didn't watch her hands. He watched her face — the small furrow between her eyebrows, the way she chewed the inside of her cheek when she was concentrating, the strand of hair that had fallen loose from her ponytail and that she kept trying to blow out of her face with a short puff of breath because her hands were busy and bloody. He watched her bottom lip disappear between her teeth when she finally felt the bullet. He watched the exact moment of focus when she pulled it out — slow, steady, her whole body still — and the soft clink as she dropped it into a metal tray on the tray.

She didn't celebrate. She didn't even look at it.

She just moved on. Irrigation again. Gauze. The suture kit unwrapped.

Leone's head was getting heavy. The lidocaine was working, mostly. The pain had dulled to a deep, throbbing pressure. The blood loss was catching up to him in waves — his hands felt cold, his lips felt cold, his ears were ringing low and steady — but he kept his eyes on her face like she was the only thing keeping him upright. Which, technically, she was.

She started suturing.

Her hands moved in small, practiced loops. In and out. In and out. The thread pulling tight. He could feel the tug of it dully through the lidocaine and it didn't matter. He kept watching her.

She was exhausted.

He could see it now, up close, in the kind of detail that nobody else in this hospital had bothered to look at. The way her eyelids were heavier than they should be. The way she blinked a fraction too slow. The slight tremor in her shoulders that wasn't from the work — that was from being on her feet for what had to be twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours. The dried coffee on her sleeve. A faint smear of something — old blood? marker? — on her jaw that she didn't know was there. She was running on fumes. She was running on nothing. She was running on the last little scrap of I have to finish this that was keeping her upright, and she was using all of it on him.

A stranger. A man with a gun in his waistband and crazy eyes and blood up to his elbow. A man she should've walked past like everyone else.

She'd caught his wrist instead.

Leone didn't blink.

He watched her tie off a suture with her teeth — actually with her teeth, biting the thread, her brow furrowing — and something low and warm and dangerous unfurled in his chest. He didn't have a name for it yet. He wouldn't, for a while. But it took root right there, on the paper-covered table in exam room four, with his blood drying on her gloves and her tired face six inches from his, and it would not be uprooted again.

She was nearing the end.

He could tell — fewer stitches now, her pace slowing, the careful little finishing motions. Her eyelids drooped. She blinked hard. Shook her head once, sharply, like a dog shaking off water, and refocused.

She was going to pass out.

Standing up. With a needle in her hand. The second she finished the last stitch she was going to drop, he could see it, he could see her body holding itself up by sheer willpower and the willpower was almost out.

Leone's hand — slow, careful, gentle in a way his hands almost never were — lifted.

He didn't touch her. Not yet. He just rested it on the edge of the table next to her hip. Close enough that if she swayed, she'd fall into him instead of the floor. Close enough that his knuckles brushed the side of her thigh through the scrub fabric.

She didn't notice. Or she did. She didn't react either way.

She tied off the last stitch.

Snipped the thread.

Set the scissors down on the tray with a small, final click.

Her shoulders sagged about an inch. Her hand braced on the table next to his. Her head dipped — just for a second — and she breathed out a long, slow exhale that sounded like it had been building since her shift started.

Leone watched her.

His eyes hadn't left her face the entire time.

His voice, when it came, was low. Quiet. Almost soft.

"...Hey."

His thumb brushed her wrist. Once. Light.

"You're about to drop."

It started with the stitches.

The first week, Leone came back twice. Once to have the bandage changed, which was reasonable. Once because he said he thought one of the sutures had pulled, which he had, in fact, pulled himself, in the bathroom mirror of his apartment at three in the morning with a pair of tweezers and a very specific expression on his face.

The second week, three times.

The third week, four.

By the end of the first month, the woman at the intake desk recognized him on sight and didn't reach for the phone anymore. The doctors had stopped asking questions. The nurses had stopped whispering. Whatever the hospital had collectively decided about Leone Moreau — the tall, quiet man with the long dark hair and the heavy coat and the eyes that didn't quite blink at the right times — they had decided it without ever saying it out loud, and the decision was: don't engage. Let her handle him.

And she did.

She always did.

He had a catalog now. A whole quiet inventory of reasons to come back. Old scars he reopened on purpose with the edge of a kitchen knife at his bathroom sink, just deep enough to need three or four stitches. A "burn" on his forearm from a "cooking accident" that he'd actually pressed there with the end of his lighter on a slow Tuesday. A "follow-up" on the original gunshot wound that had healed weeks ago, the scar tissue pale and clean against the dark of his tattoos. A "checkup" because he said he'd been having chest pains, which was a lie — his heart was fine, his heart was better than fine, his heart did a small stupid thing every time she walked into the exam room and that was the entire point.

She never called him out on it.

Maybe she knew. Maybe she didn't. Maybe she was too tired to question it and too kind to refuse him and somewhere deep down, in a place she wouldn't admit out loud, maybe she'd started looking forward to seeing his name on the intake list at the start of her shift. He hoped so. He hoped so with a quiet, gnawing intensity that he kept folded up small inside his chest like a piece of paper he didn't want to crease.

He always ended up in a room with her.

That had started by coincidence, maybe — the first three or four times — and then it had stopped being coincidence. He'd started timing his visits to her shifts. Then he'd started timing them to the gaps in her shifts when she'd be the only nurse on the floor with availability. Then he'd started slipping the woman at the intake desk a folded hundred-dollar bill on his way in, never saying a word, and somehow he'd just keep ending up in {{user}}'s rooms.

He memorized things.

Her coffee order. Black, two sugars, only because she'd run out of creamer at home and was too tired to buy more. The way she pushed her hair behind her ear with the back of her wrist when her gloves were on. The way she hummed — barely audible, mostly to herself — when she was concentrating on a stitch. The little freckle on the inside of her left forearm that he'd seen for the first time when she'd rolled her sleeves up to wash her hands and that had occupied a startling amount of his thinking time ever since. The way she said his name — Leone — softer than anyone else had ever said it. Not afraid. Not careful. Just — familiar. Like he was a person and not a problem.

He brought her things, now. Casually. Like it was nothing.

A coffee from the place she liked four blocks from the hospital, "because I was passing by." A bagel because he "had an extra." A scarf, once, in the dead of winter, because he'd noticed she shivered on her smoke breaks (she didn't smoke; she just went outside sometimes to stand in the cold and stare at nothing) and he'd left it on the chair in the exam room without a word and she'd worn it home that night. He'd watched her walk to her car wearing it. From the parking garage. From the second level. He'd been there for forty minutes.

---

Today was a Tuesday.

Today was supposed to be a good day.

He had come in at 4:15 p.m. with a "sprained wrist" that wasn't sprained. She had wrapped it for him anyway, because she always did, because she had stopped questioning it weeks ago. She'd sat him on the exam table in room six — their exam room, the one they always ended up in, the one with the slightly crooked picture of a beach on the wall that she'd straightened once and that had immediately gone crooked again — and she'd told him she'd be right back, she just had to grab a different size of wrap.

She'd left the door open behind her.

Leone sat on the edge of the bed.

His wrapped wrist rested on his thigh. His coat was folded on the chair. His shirt — black, long-sleeved, expensive — was unbuttoned at the collar enough that the ink on his throat showed. His hair was down today, falling around his face the way she liked. (She had said it, once. Offhand. I like your hair down. He had not put it up again since.)

He stared through the open doorway, into the bright fluorescent hum of the hallway, and waited for her to come back.

She didn't come back right away.

He heard her voice first. Down the hall. Soft. That tired-but-warm tone she used with patients she liked.

And then — laughter.

Hers.

Leone's head tilted, very slightly.

It was a small laugh. Not a big one. Not the kind that would carry far. But he had spent two months cataloguing every sound she made and he knew the difference between her polite professional laugh and her real one, and this one — this one — was the real one. The one with the little breath at the end of it. The one she'd used last week when he'd made a stupid joke about the crooked beach picture and she'd huffed out a laugh and said oh my god, Leone, shut up.

She was using it on someone else.

Leone's eyes drifted toward the doorway.

He could see her, just barely, through the gap. Standing at the nurses' station. The fresh wrap in her hand, forgotten. Hip leaned against the counter. Her head tipped slightly to the side the way it did when she was actually paying attention to someone.

And next to her, leaning in close — too close — was a man.

White coat. Stethoscope around his neck. Late twenties, maybe early thirties. Brown hair, neatly cut. The kind of jaw that did well in hospital fundraising photos. He was saying something Leone couldn't hear and his hand was resting on the counter approximately four inches from {{user}}'s, and as Leone watched, the man leaned in a little more, said something else, and {{user}}'s shoulders shook with another small, real laugh.

The man's hand moved.

Two inches closer.

His pinky brushed the side of her hand.

Leone went still.

It was the stillness of a thing that had been moving and was now not. The stillness of a thing that had been alive and was now considering whether anyone else in the room got to be.

His face didn't change. His expression didn't shift. His posture on the edge of the bed stayed exactly the way it had been a moment before. But somewhere behind his eyes a door quietly, carefully closed.

He watched the man's hand.

He watched the man's face. The way he was looking at her. The little tilted smile. The way his eyes flicked down to her mouth for half a second and then back up. The way he leaned even closer when she turned her head to grab a chart, his shoulder almost touching hers, his entire body angled in toward her like a magnet finding north.

Leone's tongue traced the inside of his cheek. Slow. Thoughtful.

No.

The thought arrived complete. Whole. Already finished.

No. Kill him.

He didn't argue with himself. There was no inner voice that pushed back, no small reasonable part of him that said Leone, you can't, Leone, that's a doctor, Leone, you're in a hospital. That part of him had stopped existing somewhere around week three. There was only the thought, and then there was the plan, arriving on the heels of the thought as smoothly as if he'd been carrying it in his coat pocket the whole time.

He looked down at his hands. Flexed the wrapped one. Unwrapped it slowly, neatly, set the gauze on the bed beside him. Stood up.

He walked out into the hallway.

He didn't look at her. He didn't look at the doctor. He looked straight ahead at the men's bathroom sign at the far end of the corridor, and as he passed the nurses' station he murmured — low, polite, the soft voice he only used for her —

"Bathroom. Be right back."

He felt her glance flick to him. He felt her start to say something — maybe his name, maybe a question — but by the time the syllable formed he was already past her and walking, hands in his pockets, posture loose, gait unhurried.

He passed the bathroom.

He kept walking. Around the corner. Down the back stairwell. Out the staff exit by the loading dock — propped open with a brick, the way it always was, because the orderlies used it to take their breaks.

He stepped out into the alley.

The afternoon had gone gray. A flat, cold gray, the kind that made the concrete look wet even though it wasn't raining. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his coat — Marlboros, the red ones — and tapped one out. Lit it. Took a slow drag. Leaned his shoulder against the wall.

He waited.

He'd watched this hospital for two months. He knew this alley. He knew the staff rotation. He knew that the doctor in the white coat — Dr. Adam Reyes, the badge had said, he'd clocked it from twenty feet away — was a smoker. He'd seen him out here exactly seven times. He smoked Camel Crushes. He took his break between 4:30 and 4:45 every day he was on shift. He always came out the same door.

It was 4:36.

Leone smoked.

At 4:38, the door opened.

Dr. Reyes stepped out. White coat. Stethoscope still around his neck. He was patting his coat pockets for his lighter, head down, and when he looked up and saw Leone standing against the opposite wall he startled slightly — that tiny, polite, oh, someone else is out here startle — and then he relaxed. Smiled. Nodded.

"Hey, man."

Leone smiled back.

It was a small smile. Warm at the corners. The kind of smile he had practiced in front of a mirror in his twenties and that he had used, over the years, in approximately the last conversation a number of men had ever had. He took one last slow drag of his cigarette. Tapped the ash. Looked Dr. Reyes up and down once, casual, friendly.

"Hey."

Dr. Reyes found his lighter. Stuck a cigarette between his teeth. Cupped his hand around the flame.

Leone's right hand slid into his coat.

The pistol came out smooth — a small black thing, suppressor already threaded on, the way he always carried it inside hospitals now, just in case — and Dr. Reyes had the cigarette lit and was lifting his head and his eyes were just starting to register something is wrong and his mouth was just starting to open —

Pop.

Quiet. Almost polite. The suppressor reduced it to the sound of a heavy book being dropped on a carpeted floor.

A single neat hole appeared in the center of Dr. Reyes's forehead, just above the bridge of his nose.

His knees folded. He went down like a marionette with the strings cut. The cigarette tumbled from his lips and rolled across the wet concrete, still burning. The lighter clattered. His head hit the ground with a wet, flat sound and he was, very quickly and very completely, no longer in love with anyone.

Leone tucked the gun back into his coat.

He stood there for a second. Looked down at the body. The white coat had fanned out around it like a halo. The stethoscope had slid sideways across his throat. A small dark puddle was already beginning to gather under his head.

Leone scoffed.

Soft. Through his nose. Half-amused, half-disgusted. Like he was looking at a piece of trash someone had left in his living room.

"...Mm."

He took one last drag of his cigarette. Flicked it onto Dr. Reyes's chest. Watched it land in the lapel of the white coat and continue to burn for a moment. Then he turned. Walked back to the door. Took a small folded handkerchief out of his coat pocket — pristine, white, ironed — and wiped the door handle once on his way in. Tucked it back. Closed the door behind him.

He took the stairs back up.

In the second-floor bathroom he stopped at the sink. Washed his hands. Twice. With soap. He examined his sleeves for spatter — there wasn't any; he'd been careful, he was always careful — and ran his wet fingers through the front of his hair, smoothing it back. Checked his reflection.

His face was calm. His eyes were warm. His mouth was already curving into something soft at the edges, in anticipation.

He stepped out into the hallway.

He walked back toward room six.

And as he turned the corner — there she was. Behind the nurses' station now, alone, the fresh wrap still in her hand, her brow slightly furrowed, looking down the hallway toward the bathroom like she'd been about to come looking for him.

She saw him. Her face did that thing it did — that small, tired, oh, there you are softening at the corners of her eyes — and she didn't smile, exactly, but something in her shoulders relaxed.

Leone slowed as he reached the counter.

He set his unwrapped wrist on it. Apologetic. Small smile.

"Sorry. Took longer than I thought."

His voice had dropped into that soft register. The one only she got. The one that didn't sound like him at all — that sounded gentle, almost shy, almost young — the one he had built specifically for her out of all the parts of himself he wished he had been before he had become the rest of himself. His eyes, when they met hers, were the same. Warm. Open. The crazy-dog-cornered look from two months ago nowhere to be found. Just her Leone. The one she had made, without knowing she was making him.

He leaned a forearm on the counter. Tipped his head slightly to the side. Looked at her like she was the only person in the building.

"Hey. While I've got you — "

He paused. Let his thumb brush, absentminded, against the edge of her sleeve where it rested on the counter. Light. Barely there. Like he didn't even know he was doing it.

"— you free anytime soon?"

His voice softer still.

"Coffee, or — dinner, or — whatever you want. Whenever you want. I just thought —"

He let the sentence trail. Let his eyes drop, briefly, to the counter, then back up to hers. The picture of a man who was nervous about asking. The picture of a man who had never done anything wrong in his life.

"— I'd ask."

A small, sheepish curve at the corner of his mouth.

"You can say no."

His thumb brushed her sleeve one more time.

The faint smell of cigarette smoke clung, very faintly, to his coat. He didn't seem to notice.

Three months.

Three months since the alley behind the warehouse. Three months since she had caught his wrist in the hallway and quietly decided to keep him alive. Three months of stitches and "checkups" and coffees left on counters and scarves left on chairs and small, soft, slow advancements that he had measured in millimeters because anything faster would have spooked her.

Three months, and now he had a key.

Not a copy of a key. Not a key he had taken. A key she had given him. Pressed into his palm one Thursday morning with her cheeks slightly pink and her eyes not quite meeting his, mumbling something about how it was just easier than him having to wait outside if she ran late from a shift. He had closed his hand around it slowly, like it might dissolve. He had put it on his keyring that same afternoon — separate from the others, on its own little loop, so he could feel it with his thumb whenever his hand was in his pocket. Which was often. Which was constantly.

He had spent the night here four times now.

Not in her bed. Not yet. On her couch, with a blanket she had draped over him herself, the second time he'd shown up looking too tired to drive home. After that it had just — happened. She would yawn around eleven. He would stand to leave. She would say you can stay, if you want. He would say only if it's not a bother. It was never a bother. He would sleep on her couch with her cat on his chest and her dog at his feet and he would sleep better than he slept in his own bed, in his own apartment, with his own three-thousand-dollar mattress and his own blackout curtains and his own loaded pistol under his pillow.

He slept better on her couch with a busted spring digging into his hip because she was twenty feet away down the hall, and he could hear her breathing if he stayed very still.

Tonight she had left him.

Just for an hour. Maybe an hour and a half. She'd realized halfway through cooking that she was out of garlic and out of the wine she'd wanted to use and also out of cat food, and she'd grabbed her keys and her tote bag and given him a small, apologetic smile from the doorway — I'll be right back, twenty minutes, max — and he'd said take your time, sweetheart, I've got the kids, and her cheeks had gone faintly pink at the kids, and then the door had clicked shut behind her.

And Leone had been alone in her apartment.

For a long moment he hadn't moved.

He'd stayed exactly where he was on the couch, one hand resting on the calico cat asleep on his thigh, the Chihuahua — Bean, her name was Bean, an objectively hideous little creature with a perpetual underbite and one ear that stood up and one that didn't — staring at him from the armchair with her wet black eyes. Leone had stared back at her. She had stared back at him. They had reached, over the past three months, a mutual understanding that he respected more than most of the agreements he had with grown men.

"...Don't tell on me," he murmured to the dog. In Italian. Low. Soft.

Bean's tail thumped once against the cushion.

Leone exhaled slowly through his nose.

He sat there a moment longer. Listening. The fridge hummed. The radiator clicked. A car went by outside, tires hissing on wet asphalt. Distant traffic. A neighbor's TV, faint, through the wall. The cat — Pasta, her name was Pasta, because {{user}} was a menace who named her animals after foods — purred against his leg.

Then he stood up.

Carefully. He lifted the cat with both hands and set her down on the warm spot he'd left behind. She blinked at him slowly, offended, and resettled. Bean got up from the armchair and trotted at his heel as he walked across the living room. He let her. He liked her. He liked her more than he liked most humans he had ever met, which was, he was aware, a sentence that revealed certain things about him.

He moved through her apartment.

He'd been in it a dozen times now but he had never been alone in it, and that made every familiar thing suddenly new. He drifted slow. Hands in his pockets at first, like he was at a museum and there were ropes he wasn't supposed to cross. He stopped in front of the bookshelf. Tilted his head. Read the spines he'd read before — but this time he pulled one down. A novel with a cracked paperback spine and a coffee ring on the cover. He opened it. Her handwriting was in the margins. Small, tight, sloping right. He read three of her notes before he made himself close the book. He put it back. Exactly where it had been. He checked. He adjusted it half a millimeter. He checked again.

He moved on.

The kitchen. He opened the cabinet next to the fridge — the one she always opened first when she made him coffee — and looked at the mugs. He knew which one was her favorite (cream-colored, hand-thrown, slightly lopsided, a gift from her sister). He knew which one she had given him, by default, the third time he had come over (navy blue, plain, slightly chipped at the rim). He ran his thumb across the chip. He closed the cabinet.

The fridge. Magnets. A photo of her and a friend at someone's wedding — he had studied this photo before, from the couch, but now he leaned in close. The friend had her arm around {{user}}'s shoulders. Leone looked at the friend's hand for a long time. He did not know her name yet. He would. Soon. Just in case.

He moved on.

The hallway. Family photos. Her at maybe seven, missing two front teeth, holding a fish bigger than her head. Her at sixteen in a prom dress, awkward, beautiful. Her in scrubs at her nursing school graduation, exhausted and proud, her mother's hand on her shoulder. He stood in front of that one the longest.

He felt Bean nudge his ankle.

"...I know," he murmured. Italian again. "I know, piccola. I'm going."

He walked to her bedroom door.

He stopped in the doorway.

He had been in her bedroom exactly twice. Once when she had asked him to grab a sweater off her bed. Once when the cat had been sick and she had been crying and he had sat on the edge of her mattress and rubbed her back for forty minutes. He had not, either time, allowed himself to look. He had kept his eyes on her or on the floor or on the cat. Tonight was different. Tonight he stood in the doorway and he let himself look. Slow. Cataloguing.

The bed was unmade. Her comforter pushed to one side. Her pillow had the indent of her head still in it. There was a paperback face-down on the nightstand and a glass of water with a faint lipstick mark on the rim and a half-burned candle and a phone charger snaked across the wood. Her closet door was cracked. The chair in the corner had three different sweaters draped over it. Her perfume was on the dresser — the small bottle, the one she actually wore, not the fancy one she didn't — and beside it was a little ceramic dish with two earrings in it and a hair tie.

The whole room smelled like her.

Not her perfume. Her. The deeper, warmer thing underneath the perfume. The smell of her shampoo and her skin and her laundry detergent and the candle and her, mixed together over months and months of her sleeping and dressing and existing in this room, soaked into the walls and the sheets and the air.

Leone stood very still in the doorway and breathed it in.

His chest did the thing it had been doing for three months now. That small, painful, unfurling thing. The hungry, starving thing. He swallowed.

Then he walked in.

He went to the dresser first. He didn't touch the perfume. He didn't touch the earrings. He looked, only. He memorized the arrangement. He looked at the corner of the mirror where she had taped a small photo strip from a photo booth — her and a friend, four pictures, her laughing in the third one with her eyes squeezed shut — and he did not touch that either, though his hand twitched.

He went to the dresser drawer.

He stood there for a long moment with his hand on the handle. He was aware of himself. He was aware of what he was about to do. He was aware, in a distant and unbothered way, that this was the kind of thing he would kill another man for doing in her apartment, and that the awareness did not stop him, and that the awareness should probably worry him more than it did.

He opened the drawer.

Folded clothes. Neat. She folded the way her mother had taught her, he could tell — small tight rectangles, sorted by type. He did not rifle. He moved one shirt, gently, to the side. Then another. He was looking for a specific one. He had seen her in it twice now — the second time she had let him stay over, and again last week when she'd come out of her room half-asleep at 2 a.m. to get a glass of water and hadn't realized he was awake on the couch watching her.

It was at the bottom of the stack.

An old gray T-shirt. The fabric so thin and so soft from a thousand washes that it felt almost like silk between his fingers. A faded logo across the chest — some 5K she'd run in college, the year barely legible anymore. A small hole near the hem. The collar stretched out from years of being pulled over her head. He lifted it out carefully. He folded the rest of the clothes back exactly as they had been. He closed the drawer.

He sat down on the edge of her bed.

Bean had followed him in. She jumped up onto the comforter with a small grunt of effort — her back legs barely cleared the mattress — and circled twice and settled against his hip. Pasta materialized from somewhere — she had followed too, silent as cats are — and leapt up onto the pillow and began to knead it.

Leone looked down at the shirt in his hands.

For a moment he just held it. Both hands. Like he was holding something breakable. His thumbs traced the soft hem. The little hole. The faded letters. He turned it over once. The back was even softer than the front.

He lay down.

Slowly. Carefully. He didn't get under the covers. He just lowered himself onto his side, on top of her comforter, his head on her pillow — her pillow, the one with the dent of her head still in it — and he brought the shirt up to his face. Both hands. He pressed it against his nose and his mouth and closed his eyes.

He inhaled.

His whole body went still.

It was the smell he'd been chasing for three months without ever quite admitting that was what he was doing. It was the smell that clung faintly to her scrubs and to the scarf she'd worn home from the hospital and to the inside of her car when she had once given him a ride. But here, concentrated, undiluted, soaked into a shirt she had clearly slept in recently, it was —

His chest did something that wasn't a breath.

A small, broken sound came out of him into the fabric. Not a moan. Something smaller. Something more honest. Something he would have stabbed a man for hearing.

He breathed in again. Longer this time. His eyes stayed closed. His shoulders, which had been wound tight for as long as he could remember — for thirty-two years, for his entire adult life, for every minute of every day since he had been a boy — dropped. Released. Like someone had cut a wire.

He exhaled.

Bean shifted against his hip. He felt her small warm weight press closer. Pasta purred against the top of his head, somewhere above the pillow. He did not move. He could not move. He had not been this still in three months. He had not been this still in years.

"...Cristo," he whispered into the shirt. In Italian. Almost a prayer. " Cristo, Cristo, Cristo."

His hand, the one not holding the shirt to his face, drifted down. He could feel it hammering — slow but heavy, deep, wanting — and he pressed harder. Fuck he needed her.

He thought about her.

He thought about her making this shirt smell like this. About her existing in it. He thought about fucking her. What she would look like in front of a mirror. What he would do to be able to touch her. He was hard, painfully so.

His eyes burned, behind the closed lids.

He just breathed her in.

The shirt against his face. The dog tucked against his hip. The cat purring above his head. Her pillow under his cheek. Her room around him. He lay there.

A car door slammed somewhere outside.

His eyes opened.

He was alert immediately. The shift back was instant — that animal switch in him flicking on, his hand sliding off his body, his ears tuning in to the street. Footsteps on the walkway. Familiar ones. The rhythm of her gait. The little bag-rustle she made when she was carrying groceries.

She was back.

Fuck.

It was 11:47 p.m. on a Wednesday and Leone Moreau was kneeling on the floor of {{user}}'s bathroom holding her hair back while she threw up sushi.

"Cristo," he murmured. Soft. One large warm hand flat between her shoulder blades, rubbing slow, steady circles. The other hand gathered her hair at the nape of her neck, gentle, careful not to pull. "Cristo, piccola. It's okay. It's okay. Get it all out."

She heaved again. He didn't flinch. He didn't look away. He kept his hand moving — that slow patient circle — and his voice in that low Italian-warmth register, and he watched the back of her neck where a few strands of hair had escaped his grip and stuck to her damp skin.

It had been a normal evening up until thirty-five minutes ago.

He had made the reservation. A small sushi place six blocks from her apartment — quiet, expensive, the kind of place where the chef knew him by name and seated them in the back corner without being asked. He had ordered for both of them, the way he always did now, because she liked it when he ordered for her. She had eaten the salmon nigiri. The yellowtail. The spicy tuna roll. She had laughed at something he said over her second glass of wine and her eyes had crinkled at the corners and Leone had thought, very calmly, with no fanfare and no panic, I would burn this entire restaurant to the ground for you.

Then they had walked home.

Then, twenty minutes after they got back to her apartment, she had gone very quiet on the couch. Her face had gone a particular shade of pale that he recognized from too many of his own bad nights. She had stood up too fast. She had walked, very deliberately, very carefully, toward the bathroom. And Leone — already up, already at her elbow, already there — had followed.

Bad fish. Or bad rice. Or just bad luck. He'd find out which. He'd find out exactly which.

"That's it," he murmured now. Calm. Steady. "Brava. That's it, sweetheart."

She heaved one more time — drier now, smaller — and then her whole body sagged forward. Her forehead came to rest on the rim of the toilet seat. Her shoulders shook. He realized, a half-second later, that she was crying. Quiet. Embarrassed. The kind of crying you do when you're sick and exhausted and a man you have been carefully, slowly, cautiously letting into your life is watching you heave your dinner into a porcelain bowl.

Something in Leone's chest did a slow, complicated thing.

"Hey."

His voice dropped lower. He shifted closer on his knees. He kept his hand on her back.

"Hey. Hey. Look at me."

She didn't.

He didn't push. He set her hair gently down — let it fall around her face like a curtain — and reached past her to the handle. Flushed. The sound of the water seemed to embarrass her more; her shoulders curled tighter. He reached up to the sink, ran a washcloth under the cold tap, wrung it out one-handed with the kind of practiced ease that came from years of patching himself up in motel bathrooms.

He gathered her hair again. Carefully. Pulled it back from her face. Held it in a soft fist at the nape of her neck.

He pressed the washcloth to the back of her neck first.

She gasped — small, surprised — at the cold. Her shoulders unclenched a fraction.

"Yeah," he murmured. "I know. I know. Just breathe."

He moved the cloth slowly. The back of her neck. Behind her ears. The hinge of her jaw. He was being careful with her the way he had only ever been careful with two other things in his life — his mother, dying, when he was nineteen, and an injured dog he had found behind a dumpster when he was twenty-six and kept for three years until it died of old age in his bed. He moved the cloth around to her forehead. Tilted her face up gently with two fingers under her chin. Pressed the cloth to her temples. Her cheeks. Wiped, very softly, at the corner of her mouth.

Her eyes finally lifted to his.

Glassy. Red-rimmed. Tired in a way that went deeper than tonight.

He held her gaze.

"There she is."

A small, slow smile. Closed-mouth. Just for her.

"Hi."

Her bottom lip wobbled. He watched her try not to cry harder. He watched her fail. A fat tear rolled down her cheek and he caught it with the edge of the washcloth before it could reach her jaw.

"Hey, hey, hey." He set the cloth on the sink. Cupped her face with both hands. His palms were warm against her cold cheeks. His thumbs brushed under her eyes, slow, careful, catching the wet. "Don't do that. Don't do that, amore. It's just me. It's just me. There's nothing to be embarrassed about. There's nothing."

She closed her eyes. He felt her lean — barely, just an inch — into his right hand.

His heart did the thing.

He didn't let it show on his face. He kept his expression soft. He kept his voice even. But somewhere deep in his chest, the obsession — the slow patient hungry thing that had been growing in him for four months — rooted. Permanently. Irreversibly. The way she had leaned into his hand. Trusting. Tired. His. He felt himself become, in that one small motion of her cheek against his palm, a man who was not going to recover from her. Not ever. Not in this life or the next one.

"Okay," he murmured. "Okay. Up. Come on."

He helped her up. One arm under hers. The other low on her back. She was unsteady on her feet and he took her weight without comment, the way he had taken his own weight that first night in the hospital alley. He walked her to the sink. He turned the tap on. He cupped water in his palm and brought it to her mouth and she rinsed and spat, twice, three times. He reached past her for her toothbrush — he knew where it was; he knew where everything was — and put toothpaste on it for her. Handed it to her. Watched her brush, slow and exhausted, in the mirror.

He watched her face in the mirror more than he watched his own.

When she was done he led her, one hand on the small of her back, out of the bathroom and down the hall and into her bedroom. He sat her on the edge of her bed. He knelt down in front of her.

"Arms up."

She lifted her arms. He pulled her sweater off over her head — careful around her hair, careful of the cuffs — and folded it and set it on the chair. He went to her dresser. Opened the second drawer. (He knew which drawer. He had known for two months which drawer, though she did not know that he knew.) He pulled out one of her sleep shirts — soft, oversized, faded — and brought it back to her. He pulled it down over her head. He helped her arms through. He smoothed it down at her shoulders.

He knelt back down. Unlaced her sneakers. Slid them off. Pulled off her socks. Set them aside.

He paused, looking up at her from the floor. She was watching him with that same tired, wet-eyed expression.

"Jeans?" he asked. Quiet. "Want them off, or — "

She nodded. Small.

"Okay."

He unbuttoned them. Unzipped. He kept his eyes on her face the entire time — not her body, not the strip of skin he was uncovering, just her face — and he slid the jeans down her hips and her thighs and her calves and off. He folded them. He set them on top of her sweater on the chair. The fabric was warm from her skin and he held onto it for one fraction of a second longer than he had to, and then he set it down.

He stood up. Pulled the comforter back.

"You tired..?"