PART 5:

His voice stayed level through all of it. But there was something underneath the level. A pressure, an old pressure that she could hear. That’s not a justification. That’s what’s true. The car moved. Manhattan’s skyline fell behind them, replaced by the darker, lower profile of upper Manhattan neighborhoods. Quieter streets, a different kind of city.

Where are we going? She said. Somewhere safe. I need you to tell me where, Lucien. I’m not doing the thing where I just go along. My building on Riverside, he said. The penthouse. It has security and it has a view and it has a door that locks and nobody gets through without my say. He looked at her.

You can leave whenever you want. I’m not holding you, but tonight with your ribs and your phone dead and paparazzi who already have photos of your face, tonight I’m asking you to let me take you somewhere that isn’t a problem. She thought about the bakery, Nocturn, and its converted groundfloor space in Cobble Hill with the back office she’d been sleeping in since her budget had gotten tight.

The cot she’d put there 3 months ago, telling herself it was temporary. The way the radiator knocked at 4 in the morning, the way she’d started keeping her good knives locked up because she didn’t entirely trust the neighborhood kids who sometimes came in through the delivery door. “Okay,” she said. The building on Riverside Drive was not what she’d expected.

And she’d spent enough time adjacent to Lucian’s world to have recalibrated her expectations significantly. It wasn’t flashy. It was old, genuinely old, pre-war construction with the kind of limestone facade that required ongoing maintenance and quiet money. The lobby had original tile floors and a door man who nodded at Lucian without a word and looked at Ava’s condition without any visible reaction at all.

The elevator had brass fittings. The penthouse had floor toseeiling windows along the entire west face looking out over the river, the bridge. The dark bulk of the palisades on the far shore. It was 11 floors above everything, and the rain had finally stopped, and the city below was washed and glittering in the way it sometimes was after a storm.

Briefly clean, briefly honest. “Sit,” Lucian said. “I’m fine.” “You’re not. Sit.” She sat on a low couch because her ribs had decided to restate their objection and arguing with him was taking more energy than she currently had. She heard him moving in another room, water running, drawers opening.

He came back with a first aid kit, a glass of water, two ibuprofen, and a bag of ice wrapped in a dish towel. He sat across from her and opened the kit, and she thought about resisting and looked at his face and decided it wasn’t worth it. “The lip’s not bad,” he said, examining it. It’ll be swollen tomorrow.

He turned her chin to look at the cheekbone. His fingers were very careful, almost reluctant. No hematoma. You’re going to bruise. I know. She watched him work. His face in close proximity was familiar and strange at the same time. She’d spent 3 years filing it into memory, and now the original was here, and the memories version had been inadequate.

In some ways, she couldn’t fully articulate. There were lines around his eyes she didn’t remember. His hair was a little longer. He needed to sleep. She could see it. How long have you been up? What? Tonight. What were you doing when I called? He didn’t answer immediately. He pressed the wrapped ice gently against her cheekbone, and her free hand came up instinctively to hold it, and her fingers ended up over his, and neither of them moved for a moment.

“I was meeting with someone,” he said. “About my family?” indirectly. He sat back, let her hold the ice herself. There are people involved in what the Morettes have been doing who are not part of your family. People with connections that make the cleanup more complicated. What kind of cleanup? He looked at her.

You said make the cleanup more complicated. What are you cleaning up, Lucy? An I’m making sure, he said carefully, that the evidence that surfaces points in the right direction and doesn’t take you with it. and those people, the ones involved, are being managed. She heard the word the way he meant it, not bureaucratically. She’d heard him use that particular flatness before.

In moments where the specific meaning of a word was less important than the weight behind it, the implication that managed covered a variety of actions, and she didn’t need to know the full taxonomy. 3 years ago, that kind of answer would have been enough for her to leave the room. She was still in the room. She didn’t know exactly what that said about her.

She suspected it said several things. My father knows you, she said. Doesn’t he? He knows who you are. Not just the hotels and the nightclubs. Yes. Then why? She stopped. The question was forming and it was an ugly question and she wanted to make sure she had it right before she asked it. When you started coming to Nocturn, when you became a regular, did you know then about the account? About what he’d done? Lucenne was very still.

I had suspicions, he said, “And you came to my bakery?” “Yes, because of my father.” The word hung in the air between them. “Not a question this time.” He looked at her the way a person looks when they’ve been waiting for a particular door to open and it finally has and they’re not sure they want to walk through it anymore. Initially, he said, her jaw tightened.

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