Chapter 135 -
The estate was quiet by two in the afternoon.
The Don had taken his lunch in Leo's study, given his instructions, and left in the same black car he came in. The assembled men had dispersed. Santiago was somewhere past the city limits by now, the tracking team confirming his movement north with cold precision. The house had exhaled.
Nia found Leo in the east garden, the part nobody used in winter because the stone benches held the cold. He was sitting on one of them anyway, forearms on his knees, eyes on the far wall.
She sat beside him but neither of them said anything for a while.
"You should be sleeping," he said finally.
"So should you."
"I tried. I kept running through the building in my head. The angles. What I should have positioned differently."
"Everything came out," she said. "Isadora is safe. Santiago is gone. You can stop running it."
"I know. I can't stop anyway." He looked at her sideways. "How is she?"
"Eating Rosa's food and interrogating Micheal about his personality. She's going to be fine."
The garden held them in its cold afternoon quiet.
"Leo," she said.
"Yes."
"What are we?"
He looked at the far wall. A long beat.
"I don't know how to answer that in a way that doesn't sound like what I said in the beginning," he said. "When I was still trying to make myself believe I didn't have a problem."
"What did you say in the beginning?”
"That you were leverage. A means to an end. Someone I was managing." He paused. "I said it because I needed it to be true. It was a lot more convenient if it was true."
"And when did it stop being true?"
He thought about it. "The night you came to my door," he said. "Drunk and half-asleep and completely unafraid of me. You stood there and hugged me like I was a person instead of a problem and I didn't know what to do with that."
He turned to look at her properly. "I've spent most of my adult life being the thing other people were afraid of, but you just weren't."
"I was afraid of you," she said. "In the beginning."
"I know. But it changed, and I watched it change and I knew the moment it did because you stopped flinching when I walked into a room and started arguing with me instead."
"I've always argued with you."
"The first argument was different," he said. "The first argument was survival. After a certain point it was just you."
She looked at him for a moment.
"What do you want?" she said. "Not what makes sense for the Cimmera, not what the Don thinks, not what protects me politically. What do you actually want?"
He was quiet long enough that she thought he wasn't going to answer.
"You," he said. "Without conditions or caveats or anything else attached to it. Just you."
The garden was very still. A bird perched somewhere in the wall, while a guard was doing a perimeter check on the far side of the property.
"That is the most straightforward thing you have ever said to me," she said.
"I've been practicing," he said.
She looked at him. "Leo DeSanto has been practicing being direct."
"Don't make it a thing."
"It's already a thing."
"Nia."
"It's objectively a thing."
He reached over and took her hand the way he had in the car before the warehouse, the same steadiness in it, the same lack of performance.
"What do you want?" he said. "Same question."
She looked at their hands.
"I want to stop feeling like I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop," she said. "I want to have a day that doesn't begin with someone giving orders or pointing weapons. I want Isadora to be somewhere safe permanently. I want—" she stopped. "I want to choose you properly, with full information and no duress and nothing holding either of us in place except the actual choosing."
"That's what I'm offering," he said.
"I know."
"Then what's stopping you?"
She looked at him, at the grey of his eyes in the flat winter light. At the healing bruise along his jaw. At the man who had put a gun to her head in her own apartment and then spent months becoming someone she could not imagine not knowing.
"Nothing," she said. "That's the honest answer. Nothing is stopping me."
"Good," he said.
"That's all you have. Good."
“What did you want me to say?"
"Something more than one word would be a reasonable start."
He was quiet for a moment.
"You are the most infuriating person I have ever had to think around. You walked into a building full of armed men and bought me fifteen minutes with nothing but a sewn-in tracker and the ability to look at someone like they don't scare you. You argued with me when I was trying to be terrifying. You wrote seven pages of notes about your own life and handed them to me like it cost you nothing."
He paused. "You make everything harder and better at the same time and I don't know how to separate those two things anymore and I'm not sure I want to."
She looked at him for a long moment.
"See," she said. "That was more than one word."
He looked at her. Something in his face that had been controlled for so long that she had assumed it was just the architecture of him came loose, just slightly, just enough.
"Nia," he said.
"Yes."
"Can I kiss you when you're actually sober this time?"
She laughed. It came out before she could do anything about it, real and surprised and right there in the cold garden in the afternoon quiet.
"That," she said, "is the most you have ever made me laugh. But you have, at least more than once."
"Well… is that a yes?"
"That's a yes."
He kissed her in the winter garden with nobody watching and no crisis overhead and no ulterior motive attached to either of them. Nothing like the first time, which had been desperate and loaded and full of things neither of them had admitted yet.
When it ended he kept his forehead against hers for a moment.
"Oh boy are you such an excellent kisser." she said.
"Uhm… yeah, yeah. Most things worth having do," he said, laughing.
She pulled back and looked at him. "We have to tell Isadora."
"Why?"
"Because she's my best friend and she's already figured it out and she's going to be unbearable about being right."
"Then let's make her wait," he said.
"For how long?"
"Long enough that it's not satisfying for her."
Nia considered this. "Twenty-four hours," she said.
"At minimum," he said.