Page 108 of Kept in the Dark
I feel my brows come together. “You have to ask permission to leave?”
“No!” she shakes her head, hopping up into the chair next to mine and taking a bite of her own slice. “No, not permission. It’s not like I ask and he says no—well, I guess one time he said no, but that was because he was worried about an active shooter in the area that I didn’t know about. We just decide together on the specifics, like how long I’ll be gone. It’s more like sharing a car than asking for permission, if that makes sense. You have to consider what the other person needs. There are… stipulations, like I said.”
“Like what?”
She ticks them off on her fingers. “Well, there’s a tracker in my car and my phone and my purse. And in something I wear, because he’s paranoid and overprotective. We can’t leave together, and we can’t have routineslike Wednesday date night or something. We do go out, but it has to be somewhere we won’t be seen, or most people won’t recognize either of us. It’s not like a normal relationship.”
“But you don’t care,” I guess, observing the faraway, dreamy look in her eye.
“Nope,” she says brightly, taking a bite of a different slice on her plate. Her eyes widen, and she drops her jaw to breathe emphatically around the bite. “Fuck. Hot.”
“So, you have to be careful about being seen together?”
She nods, fanning her open mouth, then chews and swallows quickly. After washing it down with a few gulps of her Diet Coke, she continues, but her voice is a little strained. “When you’re in love with a dangerous man, sometimes you have to take it on faith that he’s doing what it takes to keep you safe. Plenty of people want Mac dead, or they’d try to hurt him by hurting me. Took me a while to come to terms with that, honestly, but here I am. At terms. Again, it’s just part of what you sign up for.”
“And the other stipulations are designed to keep this place a secret, right? So, no one can link this location to those guys.”
“Yup. If I had friends, I wouldn’t be able to invite them over—”
I straighten in my seat. “Wait. You don’t have friends? Youcan’thave friends?”
“I mean…” she grimaces. “I probably could if there were someone important to me I really wanted to go see. But truth be told, I’ve always been kind of a loner. My sister lives in Pittsburgh, so we always had more of a phone-based relationship. I drifted apart from my friend Harrison, I suppose, but he got a girlfriend, and it probably would have happened anyway. He and Mac didn’t get along—bad first impressions on both sides,” she confesses.
“So, you moved in, you left all your friends behind, and you quit your job? All to live here and be with him?” I ask. I know I soundjudgmental, but I never realized any of this. Even knowing about the dangers, what she’s describing sounds more like being in a cult than being under someone’s protection.
If I lived here, I couldn’t have friends at work? I couldn’t have my own space or adventurous hobbies or leave whenever I felt like it?
In the name of safety, sure, but… I’m a nomad. I’ve lived on my own since I was 18. I value my freedom. I know I told Dimitri that the goal was always to settle down, but I never thought twice about having the autonomy to choose where that was and move if I wanted to. I’ve built my life intentionally, depending on no one but myself.
Living the way she’s describing seems stifling. Even the thought of sharing a car with someone is making me itch, and that was just the metaphor she used.
She winces, correctly interpreting my tone. “Well… yes, but not in the way you’re implying. I didn’t just drop everything to be with him because he made me or something. He’s a controlling asshole sometimes, don’t get me wrong, but he doesn’tmakeme do things I don’t want to.
“I didn’t mind quitting my job—I hated that place. Same thing with my apartment. It was tiny and crappy, and I was stoked to move out. Mac’s the one that encouraged me to start my business. Living here honestly feels like a dream sometimes; this place is, like, a million times better than anywhere I would ever have been able to afford. He didn’t take my independence either. I chose to be with him, and we work around the limitations the way you would in any relationship. The limitations are just… different, because the stakes are higher.”
I turn that over in my head, trying to see how the pieces of my own life compare against the broken remnants of what hers used to be. “Could you have kept your job and your apartment if you wanted to?”
“Um…” she scratches underneath her bangs, leaving them in disarray. “Maybe? I’m not sure. It’s not something we had to talk about.”
I drop my eyes to my plate and grab another slice, but I don’t lift it to my mouth. I’m not sure I’d be able to taste it right now.
“Why?” she asks, eyeing me and taking a bite. “You thinking about moving in?”
“Maybe,” I admit.
She gasps and immediately begins choking on what was in her mouth. “Oh my”—cough—“God! That’s”—cough—“so amazing!” She dissolves into a fit that ends with her running to the sink and pouring a glass of water.
I watch her to ensure she’s not going to actually choke, alert and ready to administer back blows or abdominal thrusts. She’s probably fine because if you can cough, you can breathe, but it never hurts to be ready. “You okay?”
Having gotten herself mostly back under control, she wipes some tears from under her eyes and joins me back at the island. “Yes, fine,” she sputters. “But oh my God, what?! You’re going to live here?!Yay!”
“No, no… It’s not like that,” I object, grimacing because I’ve gotten so far ahead of myself that I’m all the way moved into the pool house without an invitation. “I was just… um, thinking about what happens next for me and Dimitri. Logistics and stuff. Obviously, it makes sense for me to stay here while they deal with the bad guys, but I don’t know what happens after. Like a transition back to reality.”
She nods, goes to take a bite of her pizza, then eyes it like it offended her and sets it back down. “It’s a tough situation, for sure,” she says. “It’s definitely easier living here than anywhere else.”
“I guess it’s a moot point until I’m out of Hitman Witness Protection, anyway.”
“Right. Yeah, until then it’s definitely more… um…”
