1
The first time I saw Adrien Lavières, I filed him under harmless and ruined the paperwork.
I knew how men announced harm. Some did it with shoulders. Some with watches too expensive for the room. Some kept two fingers near a pocket and smiled at your reflection instead of your face. The worst ones touched nothing until they owned it. Adrien did none of that.
Back then, I didn’t know the weight of him yet, the way he would settle into my thighs like he had every right to be there. I hadn’t felt the friction of his skin under my hands, or the way he would breathe against my neck, low and steady, like a machine built to run too hard and cool too slow.
Stupid thing was, he went looking for the job anyway.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Afterward, everything points backward.
Not every kind of harm bothers to show its teeth. Some of it talks too much, makes itself useful, and gets invited inside anyway. That was Enri.
Summer made Lyon honest. Stone sweated. Drains soured. Men loosened their collars and got uglier by noon.
Two months before I met his brother, Enri pulled me into an overpriced café like we were on an assignment. He said it was urgent. Said it mattered. He had that look on his face, the one that meant the world had offended him personally. This time, the offense was espresso.
The café windows were fogged with steam. Somewhere inside, according to him, was a barista who made it properly. He pushed through the door ahead of me, acting like milk and expensive furniture were signs from God.
I let him talk.
He was already on crema, temperature, the French ruining everything they touched. I heard maybe half of it as he slowed just long enough to sweep the room like he was inspecting a crime scene.
“Not that charred swill they pass off outside Italy.”
He had never been to my country.
That never stopped him from talking like he’d been appointed to defend it.
With Enri, even coffee could show up dressed as cause.
He needed a mission. I let him make one.
Enri, busy fighting small battles, was easier to steer away from real ones.
This time, his target was Lisel Hartmann.
She had the kind of stillness a press gets right before it takes a finger. Small, blond, pale-eyed, no wasted heat. Enri watched her like she came with tolerances and a warranty. Three months tracking her shifts, shoving profile photos in my face, pitching her to me like a luxury asset instead of a woman running her own place.
I gave him the green light. He moved before I finished speaking.
She was alone that day, and the queue kept growing. She handled it without smiling, correcting orders in a voice so calm people apologized before she finished the sentence. She never repeated herself.
Enri tipped his chin toward the woman at the machine.
“Look at her hands on the wand, Roc,” he murmured over the hiss of steam, leaning so far across the marble he was practically vibrating. “That’s engineering.”
“She’s making coffee, not rebuilding a transmission.”
He recoiled like I had slapped him. “You have no soul. She’s German. I bet she files her anger alphabetically.”
Once Enri fixated, choice left the room.
“Buy the espresso,” I said. “We leave in five.”
Naturally he didn’t listen. He slicked back his hair and stepped up with that charming, punchable smile he used whenever he was about to ruin someone’s afternoon. Lisel glanced at him once like she was deciding whether public humiliation counted as customer service and kept tamping.
“Are you helping,” she asked, “or are you in the way?”
“Depends. You hiring, or glaring?”
I left him to get cut down to size and took up position by a support pillar. Shoulder to stone. Helmet hooked over my elbow. Back covered.
I tucked the wraparounds into the collar of my shirt and let instinct do the rest.
Four regulars. Five tourists. One man stirring an empty cup long after the sugar was gone. Two blind spots. The mirror by the pastry case gave me half the room for free. The man in the reflection had stopped pretending to care about the cup. Every time I moved, his eyes came up.
I ran a hand over the beard I’d trimmed that morning and turned just enough for him to catch the scar along my jaw. Then I looked back at him. Blue looked meaner in daylight.
He found sudden interest in his food.
Good.
I kept clocking anything that could shift the balance of a slow Tuesday.
You don’t grow up working for my uncle without learning to spot a threat. A bakery bag too heavy for bread. A rosary wound tight around the wrong hand. Sweat blooming where metal warmed the ribs. The debt came first. Violence only collected it.
“Rocco!” Enri shouted from the sugar station, waving a tiny white cup like a stolen prize. “Miracle, the caffeine is drinkable!”
A French café producing drinkable espresso was either a revelation or an insult. He knew that. That was why he was grinning.
I stepped beside him and took the cup.
He leaned in like my answer might settle a border dispute.
“Well?”
I almost told him to go fuck himself. But I took a mouthful, swallowed, and looked over the rim.
“Hot bean water in a very small container.”
He recoiled in theatrical loathing. “I bring you culture and you answer with fascism.”
Behind him, Lisel looked him over. “You know the register?”
“Enough to keep your civilians alive,” Enri said.
“Then stop talking.”
He lit up again, all bright attention and counterfeit sincerity snapping back into place. She rolled her eyes so cleanly I almost liked her. Then he launched into another performance of devotional idiocy.
That should have been all I remembered about that noon: tile throwing every sound back twice, too many bodies between me and open air, Lisel refusing to thaw, my shirt sticking to my spine.
It wasn’t.
Mara came in two minutes later.
I saw her through the windows before she noticed me, her white coat cutting through the glare outside, one honey-toned hand lifting, wrist neat and precise, to push her amber-brown hair back.
I stayed behind the column and let her take the room.
Her perfume reached me before she did. That stillness made men correct their postures and lower their voices without knowing they had done it. Even Enri looked over, just long enough to decide she was not his kind of cold.
For a moment, the room belonged to her.
I lowered my head and watched her from the corner of my eye, scratching at my beard before I caught myself.
She went straight to the line and never looked my way.
I didn’t meet Adrien that afternoon. Not really.
That came months later, back in the same café, after dark, with rain on my shoulders. By then I’d understand the woman who didn’t love me was never the real mistake. It was the boy behind the chrome of the brew bar, stacking cups.
Nineteen. Quiet. Nothing declared. That was how bad cargo crossed borders.
Then he straightened.
Not tall. Not broad. Ink-black hair fell into his eyes, and he didn’t push it back. He only tilted his head and looked at me with calm curiosity, like he had found something worth studying and didn’t need to move closer to cut it open.
My fingers closed around the helmet strap.
I should have scanned him twice. Should have noticed he didn’t flinch, didn’t posture, didn’t ask the room for permission to exist. Instead, I let those black eyes, too tired for the rest of him, get under my skin.
That was on me.
The first night I had Adrien under my hands, I would remember that look. By then I’d be pissed off, soaked through, running on a depleted battery, and still too stupid to understand what I had hit.
At the time, he was only a brief obstruction in the corner of my vision.
Not the first fault.
The one that held.
A year before Lyon, I treated Marseille like a rented garage. Park the body. Keep the keys. Don’t unpack anything that could bleed.
That was the joke. Grease under my nails. A cigarette between my lips before breakfast. Wraparound black lenses I almost never took off because it was easier when people couldn’t tell where I was looking.
I kept one bike. One room. One gym where nobody asked what I did after midnight. Sleep if the body stopped arguing. Keep your head down. Don’t get attached. Don’t need more than you can carry.
French bureaucracy wanted copies of documents I had already handed over twice. The degree demanded hours I did not have. The woman I had left behind still came back in flashes: her hair caught in an old shirt, her voice on a bad phone line, the silence after she stopped answering.
Then Enri came in like fire through bad wiring.
He was the bastard keeping me from turning the bike south and crossing back over the Italian border.
A reckless anchor. Bad design, but functional.
He knew the parts of Marseille that didn’t make the brochures: the docks in La Joliette dark enough to move freight no one wanted traced, the Noailles backstreets to avoid when I was looking for trouble, and the basement salles where men kept swinging after blood hit the mat.
That was where I went to burn it out.
The plan was simple: graduate, keep the bike upright, don’t get killed. Family waited in Brescia. What was left of it. So I stayed on the international program. Lectures by morning. Drop points by night. The same deadlines. The same routes. The same lie that repetition could pass for a future.
Enri’s sarcasm was abrasive and impossible to shut down. It scraped at everything and somehow kept me moving.
It didn’t hold.
I was violence with paperwork. Stamped, enrolled, temporarily legal, wearing scuffed biker leather, thick through the shoulders, my thoughts jammed behind broken Italian and worse restraint. Too many nights moving consignments that weren’t supposed to exist. Too many mornings sitting under fluorescent lights, pretending I belonged while professors spoke at me like I was already the slowest man in the room.
It didn’t take much.
One wrong word, and someone’s jaw would have paid for it.
Of course it broke.
And because I have always had a talent for finding the weakest point and kicking through it, I compromised the degree. The friendship. The one thing I should have kept my fucking hands off.
His little brother.
I met Enri in July, at a gym near the docks, in a concrete box with bad lighting and worse ventilation. The place stank of sweat, industrial cleaner, and salt off the water. The lockers didn’t close properly. The floor always looked sticky, even after someone mopped it.
I was twenty-four, swinging at a heavy bag the way it had been drilled into me. Absorb impact. Return it. I had started too early, before I understood what it was for.
Enri was twenty-five and strolled in wearing a leather jacket two sizes too big, white earphones still in, dragging a gym bag that hit the floor without looking down. It stayed where it landed, like the place would adjust around him.
Short black hair, slightly rumpled. Dark, reckless eyes that always promised collateral damage.
He took the heavy bag next to mine and threw one cross.
The angle was wrong. Thumb loose. Wrist soft.
The bag didn’t care. The wrist did.
He hissed, grabbed his arm, and swore under his breath.
I exhaled once through my nose and hooked his gym bag clear of my feet.
He stopped. Watched me.
“What is so funny, l’Italien?”
His French came quick and nasal. Arrogant enough to need medical supervision. His chin stayed up, as if pain offended him.
“Tuck the thumb,” I growled, my accent dragging through every word. “Or break it and be useless for a month.”
“Vaffanculo,” he spat.
That got my attention.
My taped hands tightened. I looked at his reach, calculating how fast I could drop him.
“Who taught you that?”
He rolled his sore wrist once, still wincing. “Bad company. Your people, I assume.”
He stuck out his good hand a little too late to count as polite.
“Henri.”
“Enri,” I corrected automatically, swallowing the H whole.
His hand stayed there a second too long before he dropped it.
His grin widened. “Already improving me. You?”
“Rocco.”
He nodded like my name was only a checkpoint.
I gave the hand one look, then put another round into the bag.
He spilled the rest in one breath, like he had expected something else and found this better. “My uncle’s shop is down the street. Plastic junk for idiots with luggage. My parents think I’m here for a law degree.”
I caught every word. Didn’t know why.
“You look like the devil’s collections department,” he said. “We should get a drink.”
“Finish the round,” I said, driving another shot into the leather. “And don’t sprain your ego.”
Enri did not become a friend. He became a habit I kept pretending was logistics.
He arrived smoking at the edges. I should have let him burn out alone.
For the next few weeks, he kept coming back to the ring, though he hated everything about it. He complained while he wrapped his hands. Complained when the tape pulled at the hair on his wrists. Complained when sweat got in his eyes. Hated bruises. Bitched about the chafing. Couldn’t box for shit.
He still showed up.
I had been raised inside a ring with four older brothers, bigger and faster and mean enough to make speed matter. By the time I was old enough to hit back properly, I had learned to put weight behind it. Rage, aimed right, was useful. Hitting things was the only language I spoke clean.
So we circled each other. His footwork was loose, half-lazy, half-fast. I stayed planted. Enri flicked jabs that landed without conviction. I drove through mine. By the end of most rounds, he looked worked over and offended by it. I was usually still breathing through my nose.
One evening after sparring, he peeled off his sweat-soaked shirt by the lockers and turned just enough for me to see the bruise spreading dark across his collarbone, right where my glove had clipped him in the second round.
“You’re getting sloppy,” he said, poking it with two fingers. “This one will ruin me.”
“You did that to yourself.”
He glanced over. Damp hair stuck to his forehead. His chest was still rising hard.
“No, that one is yours. I remember your face. Very cruel. Very ugly.”
Ugly. Fair enough. My mother’s eyes. My father’s jaw. Beard already coming in thick enough to make me look meaner than I had to be.
He looked worse than I did. I was barely winded.
“You keep coming back.”
He pressed the bruise again, eyes on the darkening skin. “I like bad decisions.”
“Why?”
He caught me staring and let his shoulder fall against the locker. “Because you hit like a villain in a bad film, Rocco.” His mouth twitched. “And I keep wondering if that face does anything else.”
I said nothing.
He got better. Not pretty, just useful. The punches came straighter. Less wrist, more shoulder. He was still easy to hurt if you timed it right.
When he landed on me, he stopped taking the sting off at the end. I answered with the same weight I used on my brothers, trying to knock the sarcasm out of him and see what was left.
But he never gave me anger.
He gave ground. He praised me like it was something he’d been waiting for.
The next time, he stopped treating sparring like a joke.
“Not tonight, Roc.”
“Preserving your beauty?”
“Go ruin somebody else’s evening.”
“Having a date?”
He fussed with the wraps on his wrist, not looking at me. “Yeah. You should try it sometime.”
“I don’t have time.”
“You wouldn’t know what to do with one.”
I shifted half a step.
He flinched. “Hey. Fuck you.”
Whatever Enri had come looking for, he had either found it or decided it cost too much. After that, the punches gave way to cigarettes outside the gym, our shirts stuck to our backs, smoke salted by water. Then cheap beer against rusted railings and the kind of silence that only happens between men who’ve already bled on each other.
He cupped the lighter against the wind and looked at me through the flame. “You’ve got manners for a man who looks like homicide.”
“I’m preventing the whining that comes after.”
“You’re a tight knot, Roc.” He pointed a half-empty bottle at my chest. “One day somebody’s going to find the loose end.”
I took a pull first. Let the smoke sit there. “I’ll tie it back.”
He laughed like that answered something.
By the end of summer, the beers had hardened into a stupid loyalty that settled in my system. I didn’t know then that he’d be the one to put the thread in his brother’s hands.
By autumn we were riding the Mediterranean coast with engines screaming at redline until the air scraped our skin. Nights ended near the Vieux-Port, in bars where the glasses smelled of soap and old gin. Enri spent money he didn’t have, talked to everyone, and pulled eyes in every room.
I watched from corners and made sure no man got too brave around him.
We were badly matched in every practical sense. Enri preferred to be seen. I wanted walls and clean lines of retreat.
“Why are you standing over there like a bouncer?” he shouted from the middle of a packed bar, already halfway into a conversation with three women.
“Because someone has to watch the exits.”
He spread his arms dramatically to the blondes. “You see? Emergency infrastructure.”
The redhead inspected me. “Does he ever smile?”
“Only when something breaks,” Enri said.
That was not entirely wrong.
It was during one of those nights, tucked into a booth that smelled like a century of spilled alcohol, that I picked up his father’s vice.
“Here,” Enri said, sliding a thick, dark cigar across the scarred wood. “Stop chewing on your own mouth. You’ll annoy me less.”
I picked it up. Dense. Oily.
“I need you to shut up for five minutes.”
The owner pulled down the shutters, metal clattering against the pavement. After that, nobody cared what we lit.
“Then light it,” he said, flicking his silver lighter.
Of course I knew how. I’d stolen enough from my old man’s humidor back in Italy. I cut the end with my pocketknife, the blade catching on the dry leaf, and leaned into the flame.
The first pull hit thick. Coated my throat. Left dirt in my mouth and smoke in the leather. I didn’t care. Some women did. They moved away.
Enri was in his element. Choking stories between puffs, never stopping, never questioning his own volume. Paris. His uncle’s useless shop. Women he’d never actually have.
“You’re too quiet,” he said, waving the cigar like a conductor’s baton. “You know you’re supposed to let that out.”
“I was using it.”
For a second, the grin slipped. He held the cigar in his mouth and studied the ember like it had said something worth arguing with.
Then he dragged once, hard.
I liked the way smoke blurred him out. Covered the parts of the night I didn’t want to account for. The family I’d left behind, the static in my head.
By late November, Enri finally put his hands on the wrong part of me.
We were on the rooftop of a dilapidated squat in the 3rd arrondissement, spitting smoke over the Marseille skyline. Enri was half-dead on cheap Merlot, propped against a rusted chimney, talking like it was all true. For ten minutes, he had been trashing Léa, a Brazilian from the club, because she called him mou.
“Too soft, Roc? Me?” He dragged a hand down his face, then stabbed a finger at me like I was personally responsible for his reputation. “Can you believe the nerve? Me. A disgrace to all of France.”
Before I could answer, he shoved his palm into the center of my chest hard enough to force me back half a step.
“Maybe she read you right.”
“That woman is blind,” he barked, lurching forward like a wounded soldier reenacting his final stand. “I’ll show her. I can finish a bottle and still—fuck, you’ll see.”
He cut himself off with a sloppy sigh. His hand stayed on my sternum, warm and heavy through my shirt.
I didn’t move. I looked down at his hand, then back at his bloodshot eyes. “Easy. You’re drunk, not invincible.”
His head snapped up. “Moi? Soft?”
“You look soft,” I added, mostly to annoy him. “Maybe she was right. Maybe you’ve got no torque left.”
He shoved me again. This time with intention.
My back slammed into the railing. The metal let out a hollow groan that vibrated through my spine. My stomach dropped. One sick second of bad math: my weight, bad steel, his hand.
“Alright,” I said, pushing off the rail and stepping into his space. I was a head taller and fifty pounds heavier. “Try that again and I’ll drop you off this roof.”
He grinned, unhinged and delighted. “Finally. A challenge.”
He swung at my shoulder to prove a point. I caught his wrist midair and yanked him forward just enough for him to stumble into my chest.
His breath hit my cheek, warm with wine. His free hand curled into my shirt, knuckles pressing into my muscle as he tried to find his footing.
“You hit like a grandmother,” I said, pulse starting to thrum.
“Oh?” His fingers tightened, his grip turning from a stumble into a hold. “Maybe you’re worth more effort.”
I kept my breath even, pretending his weight was just another load to manage.
“You’re the only one worth the trouble,” he whispered.
The slur was gone. His voice dropped. His forehead hovered close to mine, smoke hot between us.
“The only one I’d ever show the hard part.”
His grip stopped feeling like a joke.
I let go of his wrist.
He let go of my shirt.
Neither of us stepped back fast enough to make it harmless.
A few weeks later, we packed our lives onto the bikes and headed for Lyon, carrying the same trouble with us.
The following academic year, Enri enrolled in political science, naturally. The man loved the sound of his voice and the idea of getting paid to argue. I got stuck in Supply Chain and Logistics, learning how to move products, build contingency plans, and avoid the chaos Enri treated like oxygen.
That became the shape of us.
I filled out his registration papers when he lost them or blew past deadlines. Dragged him out of bed for exams like I was jump-starting a dead engine. Covered him when he ran short on cash. He laughed through all of it, as if my reliability were one more vice he could use.
He hauled me everywhere like he owned the sprawl. Cafés where he knew every waitress by name. Rooftops that smelled like weed. Parties where the bass rattled my molars while someone puked in the corner at four in the morning.
He leaned his full drunken weight against my shoulder as we stumbled home.
“Incompatible specs, Roc,” he said. “That’s why we work. You hold the line, I make it interesting.”
“You’re a leak in the tank,” I grunted, catching his belt loop to keep him from swaying into traffic.
He threw his head back and laughed. “See? Devotion.”
“You die, I lose my deposit tonight.”
He looked away, then back at me.
“You are deeply romantic under all that fascist muscle.”
I let go of him harder than necessary.
He pulled me into motion. I kept him upright long enough to enjoy the damage.
That was the worst of it: he trusted me with his back.
He moved through rooms as if every door had already been opened for him. He flirted the way other men breathed. Women laughed before he finished speaking. His taste never changed: glossy, northern girls who giggled when he switched accents halfway through a sentence.
While he chased girls built for display, I looked for women with more structure. The kind who didn’t mistake pressure for devotion. I didn’t need attention. I liked the ones who didn’t believe me when I offered. My reputation kept distance. Tourists never asked for directions. I kept my back to the wall by choice. Wraparounds hid my eyes. Smoke did the rest.
Enri liked to say I looked less like a student and more like someone hired to dispose of problems.
That was not entirely wrong.
Mara never mistook my quiet for decency. Most people needed longer. Not that she wanted a version of me that didn’t exist. Not that things ended badly in Greece. It was how quickly she understood what I was doing when I called it control.
I saw her again in a club near the river, months after Thessaloniki. Not at first—only the outline of her through the bodies, her skin keeping that same warm gold bad lighting always dragged out of it. One shoulder angled toward the bar. Drink untouched. Dressed for the room without ever belonging to it.
My chest tightened before I could call it anything useful. She noticed me halfway through turning her head. Her mouth did not move, but something in her posture locked.
I crossed the room anyway. Enough alcohol to sand down the good sense.
I took the stool beside her and tapped two fingers against the bar. “Whiskey,” I told the barman.
The barman glanced once between us, decided against curiosity, and reached for the bottle.
Mara kept her eyes on her drink for a second too long. Then she turned her head the rest of the way.
“You following me?” she asked.
“Bad luck for both of us.”
That almost got a smile out of her. Almost.
The barman set the whiskey down. I picked it up, but didn’t drink.
“Thought you were done with this country,” I said.
Mara lowered her glass and looked at me properly. “That’s what you told yourself?”
That was not correct. I had left her in an apartment with a balcony over the water, two days paid, and a number to call for a car. I had done it fast, before she could turn the last night into something heavier than it was supposed to be.
“You were safe,” I said.
She gave a short laugh and looked down into her drink like she was checking whether she still had the patience to throw it at me.
“Safe. Right.”
The bass moved through the floor. Around us, people kept pressing shoulder to shoulder, sweating through their shirts, smiling like idiots. Mara stayed still. That was always the danger with her. She never reached for volume. She just held her ground until the silence started saying ugly things for her.
“You left me with money,”. she said, looking up at me. “That’s different.”
There were a dozen things I could have said. That Greece had gone bad too fast. That staying one more day would have made the whole thing harder to cut clean. That I knew myself well enough by then to understand that when a woman started mattering, I got cruel in advance.
Instead, I said, “You kept it.”
Her expression changed. Small but permanent. Like I had put pressure on the wrong point and heard the crack too late.
“I was angry in Thessaloniki, Rocco,” she said quietly. “This is what’s left.”
She stepped past me before I answered, her shoulder brushing mine.
I caught her arm.
“What are you doing here?”
“It’s not your business.”
A man came up behind her and shoved my shoulder hard enough to make me let go.
“What’s your problem?” he asked in French, but his accent was strong. Naples, maybe Calabria. Same weather in the vowels.
I didn’t bother looking at him. Mara was still moving away. I went after her anyway. She dismissed me with one look. Her man stepped in front of her and pushed me back.
I was already set to drive through him when Enri appeared out of nowhere and opened his arms between us.
“Eh, this is not a ring, boys. Save it for outside. Have a drink first.”
“Who’s the clown?” the man said.
“Depends,” Enri answered, easy as ever, though his body stayed angled toward me, not him. “Who’s asking?”
Mara caught her man by the wrist. “Move, Vittorio.”
Enri had put himself there because he knew exactly what I was about to do.
I watched her disappear into the crowd and understood, too late, that whatever we had ended long before I left her in that apartment.
Maybe that was why Enri kept turning up at my apartment after midnight, whenever the night ran out of places to hold him. Sour wine. Bad decisions. Cigarette ash on my kitchen floor like he was doing me a favor by being there.
I always let him in.
“Good,” he said. “You’re home.”
“It’s two.”
“I know how clocks work.”
“Do you?”
He looked at me once, quick and sharp. “Still pissed about the woman?”
I said nothing and dragged my cigarette.
He pushed off the wall and breezed past me anyway. “I had a terrible evening. There was a girl with opinions.”
“There are many. It’s not a public emergency.”
“It is when they are directed at me.”
He headed straight for my fridge, opened it, and frowned inside. “This is depressing.”
“It’s food.”
“It’s punishment.” He pulled out a beer, twisted the cap off against the counter edge, and drank half of it before looking around. “Do you ever feel joy in this apartment?”
“Leave.”
“No.”
He took off his shirt and wandered through the place as if he lived there, careless and exposed like he had nothing to hide. I tracked him without thinking. The straight line of his back. A weak point built into it. I knew exactly where to hit. The “hard part” he’d bragged about on that rooftop meant nothing from behind.
“Why are you here?” I asked.
He leaned against the doorway like he paid rent. “Because you never ask first.”
“I just asked.”
He looked past me into the room before he answered. “And you still let me in.”
He stayed until three-thirty, talking about politics. Music. How he missed Marseille and whether it smelled better in the rain. He talked until his voice roughened and the beer bottle went warm in his hand.
He brought up Camille from nowhere. She had accused him of emotional laziness.
“Can you imagine?” he said. “As if feelings are administrative duties.”
His uncle’s latest tantrum came next.
“Nine o’clock and he locks the door like he’s sealing a bank vault,” Enri said, slipping into Bastien’s voice. “Very provincial. Very stupid.”
“You’re always late.”
He didn’t hear me.
Then his father’s snobbery.
“He paints ruins nobody buys,” he said, sharper now. “Still talks like he’s designing cathedrals. Still thinks Adrien needs protecting from the rest of us. Says I’m bad company.”
That pulled me back.
I took one drag first.
“Sounds accurate.”
Enri looked at me. “Are you listening?”
I was. I just kept looking at his mouth.
Dry. Split at the corner. The way his jaw worked, the weight of his lower lip. A different kind of target. I wanted to shut it with my hand.
At some point, he sat on the edge of my desk and dropped his lighter into my notes.
“You’re staring, Roc,” he said. “Did you find a defect?”
“A mess that needs clearing.”
I stood.
He smiled without moving. Not kindly. Never kindly.
I looked at the lighter. Then at him. Too close. Always too close.
“You do that again, and I’ll break one of your fingers.”
“Which one?”
I loomed over him, making him deal with the scale of me, the frame I’d built to survive the docks while he was out making a fool of himself.
He laughed, ugly and grating.
“You’re a goddamn monster. What are you putting in that frame, mon frère? One day you’ll seize up and call it discipline.”
“I’m the wall you’re leaning on.”
He exhaled like he’d just come up from underwater.
“Relax, brother.”
He called me that when it suited him. Then he smiled like he knew exactly where the bruise was and pressed there on purpose.
He came back the next week. And the next.
Soon it became normal for him to appear at impossible hours, bringing rain into the apartment and trouble with him. Sometimes cheap wine. Sometimes cigars. Sometimes nothing except himself and the assumption that I would let him in.
Two weeks before the move, in my kitchen in Marseille, I finally told him.
“Look at her,” Enri barked, shoving his phone under my nose. The screen showed Léa’s sister, all blonde hair and filtered skin. “Tell me she isn’t exactly what you need to fix your mood. One more night. Just one.”
“I don’t need anything.”
“You know her type. Rough men. Men who don’t explain themselves. In your case, it works.”
“I’m not interested.”
I didn’t look at the phone again. I focused on the mechanical click of my lighter.
“Non, non, non.” He waved the phone like a flag. “You haven’t even looked properly. You get in there, have sex with a nice woman, and you’ll—”
I stopped playing along and set the lighter down while looking him in the eye.
“I fuck men, Enri.”
The words hit the table.
He didn’t blink.
My spine pressed against the hard plastic of the chair. My hands curled tight enough to strain the old tape scars. I held.
Part of me wanted him to swing. Wanted to see the blood in his eyes, the scrape of the chair, the familiar, honest shock of a fist in my jaw. If he hit me, I had permission. I could put my hands on him, drive his sarcasm into the floorboards, and finally feel the heat I’d been swallowing for months.
But the punch never came.
Enri just sat there and looked at me. Once. Flat.
Then reached for his cigarette.
Somehow, that was worse.
I realized I’d been bracing for the wrong thing. No one was pushing. No one was giving me a clean reason to break.
That should have changed the route. It only updated the damage report.
The real impact was already in Lyon, waiting in my blind spot.
I wasn’t prepared for Adrien.
