Chapter 84 It's Over

Chapter 84 It's Over
Dante stood in the room for exactly thirty seconds.

Nico told me that later and I believed him because it was so completely Dante, that specific discipline of allowing himself a precise and finite amount of time to stand inside something before he picked up the next thing and moved toward it. Thirty seconds in a small room that smelled like cigarette smoke with the compound secured and the coalition holding every position and Viktor no longer a problem that anyone in this city would ever have to solve again.

Thirty seconds.

Then he took his phone from his jacket and called the estate.

I picked up before the first ring finished.

I had been sitting at the kitchen table with the phone face up in front of me for two hours and Elena had been beside me and Nico had been in the corridor and the radio had been going in and out and the evening had turned fully dark outside the window without any of us noticing it happen.

The phone lit up and I had it to my ear before the sound finished.

Silence for one moment.

Then his voice.

"It's done," he said.

Two words and I pressed my free hand flat against the kitchen table and felt the wood solid and real under my palm and breathed.

Elena looked at me from across the table.

"Come home," I said.

The word came out before I had finished deciding to say it and it landed in the phone call between us with a weight that was different from ordinary words. Not because it was dramatic. Because it was true and it was the first time either of us had said it and we both understood what it meant without needing to examine it.

Home.

Not the estate as a location. Not the house with the gates and the library and the fountain in the circular drive. The thing the word meant when you said it to a specific person at the end of a specific day and both of you understood without explanation what you were referring to.

He was quiet for a moment on the other end.

"Yes," he said. Just that.

The call ended.

I set the phone on the table and pressed both hands flat against the wood and Elena reached across and covered one of them with hers and we sat like that for a moment in the warm kitchen with the radio quiet for the first time all day and the evening dark outside and the estate completely still around us.

"He is coming back," Elena said.

"Yes," I said.

She squeezed my hand once and stood up and went to the counter and I heard her filling the kettle because tea was Elena's language for every significant thing and this was the most significant thing the house had seen in a very long time.

Nico appeared in the doorway.

He looked at my face and read everything he needed to read in it and nodded once with the expression of a man whose own relief was too large to show directly and was showing itself in the specific quality of his stillness instead.

"Convoy is assembling now," he said. "They will be on the road within twenty minutes."

"How long," I said.

"Forty minutes," he said. "Maybe less."

I nodded and stood up from the table because sitting was no longer something my body was willing to do and I went to the corridor window that looked out over the front drive and the closed gates and the dark road beyond them and stood there with my arms crossed and watched the night and waited.

The fountain was running.

The estate was completely still.

Somewhere in the city forty minutes away a convoy was assembling and Dante was in one of the vehicles and the thing that had started in an alley behind Benedetti Square on a Tuesday night was over and we were all still here and that was everything.

I stayed at the window.

Elena brought tea and set it on the windowsill beside me and went back to the kitchen without saying anything and I picked it up and held it and looked at the gates.

Nico checked in twice. Once at the twenty minute mark to tell me they were on the road. Once at the thirty minute mark to tell me they were through the city and moving onto the private road.

At the thirty five minute mark I heard the first engine on the gravel.

Then the second.

Then the gates opening with the specific sound they made when the mechanism engaged, a sound I had heard hundreds of times and had never once until tonight understood was the sound of something I had been waiting for.

The lights came through the trees.

Three vehicles coming up the drive.

I was at the front door before the first car had fully stopped.

He came through it and crossed the entrance hall and I met him in the middle of it and he pulled me against him with both arms completely and entirely without any management of how it looked or who was behind him or any other consideration in the world and his face came down against my hair and he held on.

I held on back.

Neither of us said anything.

The entrance hall held us and the estate held the entrance hall and somewhere behind him Nico and two coalition men stood in the doorway and found extremely important things to look at that were not us.

After a long time he pressed his lips against the top of my head.

"Home," he said quietly. Against my hair. To himself as much as to me.

"Home," I said back.

Neither of us moved for a long time after that.

Neither of us needed to.