her appointment, and what her plans are for the company going forward.
When Alexis finishes, she paints on a polite smile. “I hope that eases some of your concerns, Victor.”
He dislodges his eyebrows from the ceiling. “Yes, I suppose it does.”
The rest of the interview goes smoothly. Victor tries to throw a couple other curveballs, but Alexis nimbly bats them away. I realize by the end of it that my being present was pointless. Alexis has a remarkable capacity for dealing with troublesome reporters on her own.
That shouldn’t surprise me, considering that she used to be one.
I take my time walking up the front steps and through the door. My body aches. The front of my shirt is warm and wet, and I can feel a bruise blooming on my cheek. All I can think about is a hot shower and a long sleep.
“Jesus.”
I look up and see Alexis at the top of the stairs. She’s wearing an expression of horror and also the little pajama shorts I like so much.
“What happened?” she asks in a hushed voice, bounding down the stairs.
“Why are you still awake?” I counter as she crosses the foyer toward me. I don’t know the exact time, but I know at least it’s very late.
Alexis lifts a hand to my face, prodding gently at the cut on my cheek. I wince.
“I was waiting for you,” she says. “I saw you go out with Silvano earlier, and I was worried when you hadn’t come home.”
I’m not used to being fussed over like this after a fight, and I stand stock-still as she tugs open my shirt buttons and hisses when she sees the wound on my chest.
“You should see the other guy,” I joke, but it’s not really a joke. The other guy’s dead.
Alexis presses her lips together in a frown, unimpressed by my attempt at humor. “Let’s get you cleaned up,” she says. “Is everyone else okay?”
“As far as I know,” I say. “I haven’t heard back from Silvano’s team yet, but they were just doing recon while we distracted the Irish. I’ve got a first aid kit in my office.”
Alexis and I go upstairs, and I sit in my office chair while she hunts through one of the cabinets for the first aid kit. I watch her, searching for any sign of stress, but find none. I have just come home covered in blood, and yet it doesn’t seem to faze her at all.
“Doesn’t this upset you?” I ask.
“What?” Alexis grabs the kit and lays it out on the desk. She starts to ease the ruined shirt from my shoulders.
“The blood. The implied violence. The fact that you are patching me up while our son sleeps just down the hall.”
Alexis grabs a wipe from the kit and starts to swab at the slash on my chest. It’s not deep, but it stings like a motherfucker when the disinfectant hits it. I hiss in pain.
“Should it upset me?” Alexis asks, eyes trained on the task at hand.
“It would have before.”
Before what, though? When did Alexis first become desensitized to the realities of mob life? Was it when she was kidnapped? When the Irish hit man tried to kill her? Or maybe even before all of that?
Alexis glances up at me briefly. “Let me make this clear—I don’t like this. It worries me when you don’t come home, and it would worry me a lot more to see you come home covered in blood if I didn’t know that the alternative was so much worse. But I am a part of this now, and if I’m going to be a part of this, I need to toughen up.”
She finishes wiping the wound and quickly presses a bandage to it before it starts to well with blood again.
“Do you resent that?” I ask. “Do you resent that the only way for us to be a family is for you to descend into the underworld to join me?”
“How much blood have you lost?” Alexis jokes. “You’re getting awfully deep.”
I grab her chin and lift it to face me. I look deep into her blue eyes, my own expression deadly serious. “Answer me, Alexis.”
I think she might hesitate, but she doesn’t.
“No, I don’t resent it,” she says. “I thought I would, but I don’t. I never wanted this life, but I’m not ashamed of it. Your world exists in a dozen different shades of gray, but there’s good in it too. We’re the only people who can fight back against the