Chapter 39 ACCOMPLICE

Chapter 39 ACCOMPLICE
POV: Anna De'Leon

Victor clapped his hands once.

The sound of it in the post-violence silence of the clubhouse was its own kind of statement, the specific percussion of a man closing one chapter and opening the next, and the room responded with the forced enthusiasm of people who understood their role in the performance and were executing it with the energy of self-preservation.

Voices cracked into manufactured sound. Beer appeared. The music came back at a volume slightly higher than before, as though the increase in volume could fill the space that the last ten minutes had created, could cover the blood on the concrete with enough sound that everyone could agree it was not there.

Nobody looked at Eddie and Raul being helped toward the back office.

Anna looked.

She watched them go, the specific way they moved now compared to the way they had moved when they sat down in the corner booth twenty minutes ago, and she held the comparison in her chest and she breathed through it.

Victor came back to her.

She felt him before she heard him, the gravity of him arriving at her left side, and then his presence was close and his cologne was in her nose with the thing underneath it that she had learned to identify without wanting to learn it, and his lips were at her ear with the warmth of breath that carried the smell of what he was.

"See how useful you are to the organization," he said. His voice was very quiet, pitched for her alone, carrying the intimate approval of a man speaking to someone he valued in the specific way he valued things, for what they did and what they produced and what they allowed him to do. "See how your intelligence helps maintain order. You are becoming quite valuable, Anna."

The warmth hit her chest before she could stop it.

She had stopped being surprised by the warmth. It arrived the way it always arrived, involuntary and complete, the specific response of a system that had been conditioned and could not uncondition itself by understanding the conditioning, and it arrived now with his breath in her ear and the blood on the floor and the sound of Eddie and Raul being helped down the corridor, and it arrived in the same moment as everything else and coexisted with everything else in the specific way that things coexisted in her now, the things that should not be able to occupy the same space but did.

She looked at the water glass.

Her reflection was still there on the surface, trembling with the vibration of the music, and she looked at it and she felt the warmth and she felt the guilt and she felt the specific physical quality of Victor's breath on the skin of her ear, warm and close and carrying the intimacy of a man who had decided she was his and was using that decision.

Her stomach turned.

Not dramatically, not with the convulsive urgency of a body rejecting something toxic in the way that bodies rejected things. The turn was slow and deep, the specific nausea of someone who has understood something about themselves that they cannot ununderstand, the nausea of the mirror in the bathroom and the necklace at the throat and the name she had given before she finished the thought about the daughter.

She felt all of it simultaneously.

The warmth and the nausea and the guilt and the specific wrongness of his breath in her ear and the weight of his approval and the blood on the floor that she had produced with a sentence, and she sat on the bar stool and she held the water glass and she breathed through all of it with the specific discipline she had been building since the storage room, the discipline of a person who had learned that feeling things and showing things were two different operations and that the showing could be managed regardless of the feeling.

She managed it.

She sat perfectly still with Victor's approval warm in her ear and Eddie Santana's blood on the floor behind her and her own reflection trembling in the water glass and she breathed and she held herself together with the specific architecture of a person who had been taken apart and rebuilt and was discovering what the rebuilt version was capable of.

Victor straightened.

He moved away from her with the unhurried ease of a man satisfied with the evening's work, folding himself back into the room with the fluid authority of someone who occupied every space he entered as a matter of right, and she watched his reflection in the water glass moving away and she breathed.

Around her the performance of brotherhood continued.

The forced cheers and the manufactured enthusiasm and the beer and the music slightly too loud and the careful not-looking at the back corridor, all of it proceeding with the practiced ease of men who had learned to perform normalcy over abnormal things, who had developed the specific skill of treating the extraordinary as ordinary because treating it as extraordinary required an acknowledgment that none of them could afford.

She watched them perform it.

She watched them and she thought about her father at his table and the Sunday dinners and what the brotherhood had been when it was built on something other than fear, and she held that for the length of one breath.

Then she filed it.

She filed it in the place she was keeping everything, the place that was entirely hers, the place she had been building and tending and protecting with the same care her father had brought to Sunday mornings and engine maintenance, with the understanding that some things required maintenance to remain what they were and that the maintenance was its own form of survival.

She picked up the water glass and she took a sip of the warm tasteless water and she set it back down and she looked at her reflection on the surface.

She looked at the face of someone who had given a name and watched what the name produced and had felt the warmth of the approval that followed and had managed the showing of all of it with the specific skill that she had been developing since the storage room.

She was managing it better than she had managed it two months ago.

She was managing it better than she had managed it two weeks ago.

She looked at her reflection and she understood what the improvement meant and what it was going to keep meaning across the days and weeks ahead, and she breathed through the understanding with the same discipline she brought to everything now.

And the worst part was that she was getting good at it.