THE FIRST thing Lucas had noticed, after being shown into Dante’s office, was the pile of poster boards stacked against the wall next to the fireplace. The display boards from Avery’s memorial. With everything else that had gone on, Lucas had forgotten about them. Dante hadn’t, though.
The warmth of Dante’s office didn’t seem to be able to penetrate the aching cold that reached into Lucas’s bones. After he drained the last of his coffee, he was tempted to put his coat back on, but he wanted to make sure Dante understood, loud and clear, that he’d made up his mind. If Dante wanted him, Lucas intended to stay.
Dante had visited Lucas at the hospital daily. He’d given Lucas support and reassurance and asked for nothing in return. He’d even offered him a place to stay for his convalescence. (“There is a spare room, if that would make you more comfortable.”)
Lucas didn’t fully understand Dante. Why he’d done the things he’d done, why he’d bothered with Lucas at all. But through everything, he’d come to care for Dante. He could move past the wager and the surveillance. He just needed to know that from here on, Dante would be honest, that he would grant Lucas the trust that Lucas had placed in him.
Kit (or was it Lois?) sat silently on the sofa, eyes on the unlit fire. Ordinarily Lucas had an exceptional memory for faces, but the light was too low for him to discern finer features. The androgynous jeans and jumper also gave no clue.
“Kit?”
“Yes?”
“Did you know what he was doing?” Lucas pointed to the monitor screens.
“Not at first. But later, yes.” She hugged herself. “You must think we’re terrible people.”
“No.”
“You didn’t ask for….” She frowned. “He doesn’t mean to barge in. I don’t know why he can’t….”
“It’s okay. He’s got a good heart.”
Kit’s smile fell as Dante opened the door. Dante was wearing a pair of tailored trousers and a finely knitted black roll-neck, probably cashmere. It looked very soft, just like the man beneath—no matter how much Dante tried to convince everyone otherwise.
Kit and Dante crossed paths in the middle of the room. She squeezed his hand before she left. Dante joined Lucas at the desk, at a distance from his left shoulder. Lucas had regained some motion in his arm, though his fingers were clumsy and stiff. His arm remained in a sling to support his healing collarbone. The bruising in his face had dulled to a greenish brown, and the swelling had receded. All in all, Lucas didn’t look too gruesome, but he sensed Dante keeping his distance.
“Thank you.” Lucas motioned toward the poster boards next to the fireplace.
“I didn’t want them to be thrown away before you had a chance to collect them.”
“You’ve done so much for me. I really do appreciate it.” Lucas returned his focus to the monitors. “And that you kept up the surveillance. That’s my house. There, and there. And where’s that? Shaw’s house?”
“Yes.”
“Anything to report?”
“No.”
“What do you think it means?”
Dante didn’t answer.
Lucas ran his fingers over the dark wood of the desk. It had some dents and scratches in the surface that had been lacquered over. On the corner, next to the lamp, stood a silver-framed portrait photograph of Dante with Kit and Lois, which must have been taken a good ten years ago. Other than that, the desk was empty.
Over the growing sound of his pulse in his ears, Lucas said, “Maybe it’s time I contacted him.”
“I have to talk to you about that.”
Dante had been adamant in his reassurance that Lucas had nothing to fear from Shaw. Worryingly so—to the point that Lucas had frantically scanned the local news, dreading, and in some terrible part hoping, that Shaw had met an inexplicable and untimely end. Judging by the cameras trained on Shaw’s house, it seemed Lucas’s worry had been misplaced.
Dante went to the drinks cabinet in the corner of the room and poured himself an amber-colored drink from a decanter.
“Do you want something?”
“No.”
Dante sat on one end of the sofa. Lucas rose from the desk chair and sat on the wingback chair opposite, exactly as they had when Lucas came to ask Dante to plan him a murder.
Had it only been four weeks ago? It felt like a hundred years.
“You should lie down. On here.” Dante patted the sofa, then came over to Lucas and removed Lucas’s shoes. His hand lingered on Lucas’s ankle. His thumb grazed his shin. “Please. Get comfortable. Are you warm enough? I could put on the fire.”
Lucas was slowly thawing, but his hands and feet were still cold. “That would be nice.”
Lucas moved to the sofa, resting his head on a plump cushion. Dante lit the fire and hovered by the mantel, looking at Lucas but not quite looking at him. The scene was so markedly different from the last time Lucas had been here. Dante had lost none of his poise or his attractiveness, but like his old desk, he seemed to have lost his shine. His cracks and scratches stood in sharp relief against in the orange glow of the firelight.
“Sit with me,” Lucas said. “Tell me why I don’t have to worry about Shaw.”
Lucas bent his legs, making space. Dante hesitated, then sat on the offered seat. He lifted Lucas’s ankles onto his lap and let his hand rest there, on Lucas’s leg. The fire’s coppery light and heat lulled Lucas. Were it not for the dread—Lucas couldn’t deny the pinpricking notion that Mr. and Mrs. Shaw were lying dead in their beds, their bodies as yet undiscovered—he could have closed his eyes and slept.
Silently, Lucas berated himself. He was overreacting.
Until Dante told Lucas why he no longer needed to worry about Richard Shaw.
Dante might as well have been reading a shopping list. His voice didn’t rise or fall. He expressed no pride or remorse. He didn’t even look at Lucas, to register if Lucas might care, or perhaps feel grateful.
Lucas should have been relieved. Dante had confessed to the relatively minor charge of breaking and entering, the greater charge of threatening the Shaws with a deadly weapon, and the heroic rescue of the gun, now cleverly tucked away in his basement safe. Lucas should have felt grateful this sorry mess was over with. Shouldn’t he? Shouldn’t he?
Once again, Dante Okoro saves the day by spectacularly breaking the law. Not two days after Lucas nearly got himself killed by doing the exact same thing. Did the man have a death wish of his own? Did he not care about trying to salvage something worthwhile from the catalog of mistakes they’d both made over the last few weeks?
Lucas’s stomach churned, and his blood suddenly warmed, like the onset of a fever. He struggled into a sitting position, drawing his legs under his body, as far away from Dante as he could get. Dante didn’t budge, and that only made Lucas angrier.
“Are you insane? Are you actually fucking insane?”
Dante’s head snapped round. His nostrils flared. “No. If I was, I would have killed them both. His wife first, then him.”
“Oh my God.” Lucas could hardly breathe. “You thought about it, didn’t you?”
“No.” Dante twisted his body toward Lucas and jabbed his finger in the air. “Not for one second. All I did was clean up after you.”
Lucas’s jaw dropped. The absolute fucking gall of it. Did Dante really think…? Lucas dropped his feet to the floor and stretched out his legs. If he was going to have to walk out of there, it would help if the blood was circulating around his entire body.
He’d come ready to try to understand Dante. He understood perfectly well now. Dante was a law unto himself. Lucas be damned.
“I honestly don’t know what to say to you.”
“How about thank you?”
The last of Lucas’s chill and tiredness vanished. Inside, he positively flamed.
“No. I’m not going to thank you. When someone asks for your help, that’s one thing. It doesn’t give you the right to spy on them or to interfere in their private business. It doesn’t give you the right to just plough ahead and do what you think’s best without discussing it. The end doesn’t justify the means.”
The tendons in Dante’s jaw tightened. He opened his mouth to speak.
“Don’t say a word. I haven’t finished.” Lucas stood, but he felt lightheaded and had to sit back down on the arm of the sofa. He really didn’t have the energy for a fight, but he would say his piece if it was the last thing he did. “When we first met, I was so enamored with you. A part of me even liked the fact that you seemed to be a take-charge kind of guy. It felt really nice to be with someone who wanted to take care of me for a change. But you know what? It’s a fine line, Dante, and you crossed it.”
Lucas’s mind whirled.
In the hospital, Dante had told Lucas about a wager he’d had with his friends in the summer. Kit had broken into one of their houses and managed to open the man’s safe, stealing its contents before the alarm company had been alerted. Dante had bet that with the proper research and equipment, it could be done, and he’d been right.
Lucas had known at once that there was more to it, but they’d had so much to talk about he hadn’t had the chance to ask.
“Fuck. Fuck. Did Avery know about you and Kit burgling your friend’s house?”
Dante might have seemed distant, as if he had closed himself off from Lucas’s verbal onslaught, but he wasn’t. He answered quietly, like a man worn down to the bone.
“No.”
“But she knew what she was doing, sending me here. It wasn’t a misunderstanding, was it?”
Dante sighed.
“Come on.” Now he’d started, Lucas couldn’t stop. “You can answer that one.”
“She said it was a ‘misunderstanding.’”
Maybe she did, but Dante didn’t sound as if he’d believed her.
“There’s more to this. I know it. What else are you not telling me?”
“There are a lot of things I haven’t told you. Everyone has their secrets.”
Avery had known exactly what she was doing when she sent Lucas to Dante. A dreadful knot of heat spiraled from Lucas’s gut to the tips of his fingers and toes. Even the crippled digits in his left hand. He held onto himself. He didn’t need to ask. He didn’t need the answer. Still, the words were out of his mouth before he could stop them.
“How many people have you killed?”
Dante sat motionless, like a statue crafted in bronze, except for the slow heaving of his chest against his jumper. Lucas waited. He held his breath. He wished against futile odds to be wrong.
“Dante?”
“Is that what you think? That I make a habit of murder whenever it suits me? That I get some sort of thrill out of killing people? That everything I said to you when you first came to see me was a lie?”
“I don’t know what to think.”
“I’ve killed one man. One man. A long time ago.”
Lucas’s heart hammered in his chest, and his vision blurred. It was as if the months were flying past him in reverse, back in time. Or perhaps time stood still and it was Lucas hurtling back in time. To Avery. To that night in the bar when she’d given Lucas a gilt-edged business card that had led him here, then to Adam, then to madness.
“Avery knew.”
“No. She didn’t.”
“Then why…? How…?”
Dante aged a decade in the time it took him to face Lucas. “She knew I could plan a crime. That’s all.” His brows furrowed, further darkening his eyes into two pools of infinite sadness. “A long time ago, before I got Lois and Kit, I used to plan burglaries for a gang on the mainland. Avery wasn’t a part of it, but she knew what I did.”
Dante, part of a gang? Lucas didn’t buy it, but he didn’t say so.
“What do you mean, before you got Lois and Kit?”
The depth and length of Dante’s sigh seemed to span an age.
“Tell me.”
“Why? Why tell you anything when you’ve already decided I’m a psychopath? When you’re going to leave anyway?”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“You will.”
“You don’t know that. For Christ’s sake, give me some credit.”
“All right,” he said, again more quietly. “All right.”
Dante stood like his bones were lead and returned to the drinks cabinet, where he refilled his tumbler. He kept his back to Lucas, and it was plain to see the weight of the burden he carried pressing on his shoulders. He drank a long mouthful of the liquor, refilled again, and returned to the sofa.
“When I was nineteen, I met a man called Flynn. He owned a nightclub on the mainland. Also, he and his crew robbed jewelers, stately homes, and anywhere else that took his fancy. We were already lovers when he recruited me.”
Dante looked at Lucas, searching his face. Lucas nodded for him to continue.
“For seven years—more—I loved every minute of it, and I loved Flynn. Planning crimes was a game. A riddle to be solved. An escape from the inevitable.”
“The inevitable?”
Dante cast his eyes around the room, to the ceiling where the rose motif had been continued from the shop, in the cornices and the plaster molding around the light fitting.
“Inevitably, one day, I was going to inherit this business. The shop.”
“I thought you liked the shop.”
“It’s grown on me, with time. But back then, I had other ideas. I wanted excitement and glamour.” He shook his head. “I was young, and I worshipped Flynn. He was forceful, charming, and he used to tell me he couldn’t do without me. I was his right-hand man.”
Lucas sensed bitterness—that it had been an ugly parting. “You were his right-hand man? Not the love of his life?”
“He loved me. In his way.”
“But not as much as you loved him.”
Dante took another sip of his drink. “No. Not as much. Not until I stopped loving him.”
“What went wrong?”
“My father died.”
“What’s that got to do with…? I don’t understand.”
“I made a promise to my father, before he died, that I wouldn’t sell Le Plaisir. Running the business on my own left me less time to work for Flynn. We argued, and I thought he might be finished with me. To try to keep him, I agreed to plan riskier jobs.”
Lucas tried and failed to picture this younger Dante, in his twenties, a little younger than Lucas. Desperate to please his lover. Prepared to do anything to keep him.
Dante continued, “A businessman from the north end of Roseport Island wanted to take out some of his competition. The goods to be stolen were undocumented. Uninsured. But Joon Kim didn’t have the cash to pay Flynn upfront, so he signed over ownership of four terraced houses in Roseport, with the rest in cash to follow after the job.”
“Bloody hell. That must have been some job.”
“It was worth several million.”
As Lucas’s eyes widened, Dante downed the last of his liquor. “I thought I’d hit the jackpot. I was supposed to get half of the proceeds.”
“Supposed? What happened?”
“Joon Kim was killed a week after Flynn got the deeds. The official word was a car accident.”
“Unofficially?”
“Someone took his head off with a meat cleaver.”
“Flynn?”
“No. Not him personally. He never got his hands dirty. I didn’t know what happened, and I didn’t ask. As soon as Joon Kim was last week’s news, Flynn sent me to check over the houses. He planned to sell to a developer. It was the easiest money he’d ever made, and he couldn’t wait. I couldn’t wait.”
Joon Kim was a Korean name. Lucas’s mind started to leap ahead. He reined himself in. Dante’s speech was slow and slurred and raw with emotion. The firelight illuminated his skin, like flames on burnished metal. Lucas longed to touch him, to reach out to him, but he was scared that if he moved, Dante would stop talking.
Dante returned his tumbler to the coffee table and eased back, his eyes still fixed far away on the past. “All four houses should have been unoccupied, but two children were living in the fourth, alone. Their mother had gone out a fortnight before and never come home.” A look of desperate sorrow passed over his face. “At the time, Lois was nine and Kit eight.”
“Lois and Kit?”
“Yes.” Dante cleared his throat. “They hid in a cupboard when I entered the house. I wouldn’t have known they were there, except when I was standing in the kitchen about to call Flynn, Lois pushed open the door and reached for me.” His expression softened. “She told me afterwards, she didn’t mean to. Kit had wriggled and accidentally pushed her out.”
“They must have been terrified.”
“They were. But they were also hungry. I took one look at them, and I don’t know. I was twenty-nine. I wasn’t thinking about children. But at that moment, I had the strongest, overwhelming thought. Flynn was never going to settle down with me. He wasn’t even faithful anymore. If I stayed with him, I was never going to get to have children, and I wanted them.” His voice broke as he said, “I wanted to rescue those frightened girls and keep them safe.”
“Did you bring them home with you?”
“No. I called the police, and they sent an ambulance. Social services took them.”
“Was their mother ever found?”
“No.”
“So you adopted them.”
Dante nodded. “In time. Initially they went into foster care. I was a single man with no previous experience with children, let alone ones who’d suffered neglect. It took me almost six months to prove I was serious. Then there were visits and counseling and weekend stays and a year before they were mine.”
Lucas couldn’t begin to imagine how Dante had coped, raising two traumatized children. Running a shop. Planning crimes.
“How did Flynn react?”
“As soon as I was sure I wanted to adopt the girls, days after I found them, I tried to break away from him. We each had enough on the other to walk away without having to look over our shoulders. Quid pro quo. Only Flynn wouldn’t hear of it. He’d cleared over a million from the houses, and he was hungry for more. He threatened to keep my share of the money if I left him.”
“What did you do?”
Lucas slipped back onto the soft seat cushions on the sofa, as Dante’s shoulders relaxed and his chin lifted. This was the man Lucas recognized. The man he was falling in love with.
“I told him I didn’t want the money. I also made the mistake of telling him why. I thought… I hoped he still cared enough for me to let me go and have the family he didn’t want.”
The clock on the mantel chimed, and Dante paused for it to finish. “I was wrong. He threatened to have the girls and their foster parents killed. He said he had a man who could do it. Who’d done it before. That’s when I realized he’d arranged the hit on Joon Kim.” Dante clutched the back of his neck and frowned deeply. “I was very scared. Up to then, it had always been burglaries, the old-fashioned way. No one had ever been hurt.”
Barely above a whisper, Lucas asked, “What did you do then?”
“I followed him to his latest twink’s place, on a run-down council estate in Maldon, and I cut his throat in the alleyway running along the back of the houses.”
The words were said and done before Lucas could process them. Dante had killed Flynn with a knife to his throat.
Each silent second echoed louder than the last.
“Did you hear what I said, Lucas? I killed Flynn in cold blood. I killed him, and I walked away.”
“I heard you.”
“And if I had my time over, I would do it again.”
His tone sounded like a warning.
Lucas bristled at the same time as his heart broke. He understood. He understood as clearly as if the black words that marked Dante’s heart were also written in neon on his sleeve.
“You did what you had to do. But you know, there’s no need for you to keep on doing the stupid things you do. You don’t have to keep on paying for what you did to Flynn. You don’t have to save everyone to save yourself.”
“It’s not that.”
Lucas reached for Dante, and—fuck—he hadn’t thought about how much stretching across the width of the sofa was going to hurt his shoulder. “Then what?”
Dante shook himself free and stood. Backed away. Lucas had never seen him so scared.
Lucas repeated, “Then what?”
Dante paced, the tendons in his jaw pulled tight, his fists clenched. “I want you to be happy and safe. I want you to mourn your sister and Avery and not let the loss destroy you. I want you to look me in the eye and tell me you’ll keep away from Shaw, because you know inside here—” He slammed his fist to his chest, over his heart. “—that if you don’t, you’ll lose every good thing that makes you who you are. I want you alive. I want you to live.”
“But what do you want for yourself? Do you want me? Do you want us?”
Dante covered his face with his hands. Lucas went to him. He wrapped his one good arm around Dante, but Dante slipped down through his grasp to his knees. Lucas went with him. He kissed the top of his head, his ear, anywhere he could find skin, until Dante slipped his arms around Lucas’s waist and kissed him, gently, oh so gently, in return.
Then, between his stuttered breaths, like the words in his throat were strangling him on their way out, Dante spoke his quiet plea into Lucas’s neck. “I don’t want to lose you. I can’t.”
With Dante shuddering in his one-armed embrace, Lucas whispered, “You’re not going to lose me. I’m not going anywhere.” He tipped Dante’s chin upward. “You don’t scare me. I see you, and you don’t scare me.”