Chapter 96: Normalcy
The echo of Sophia’s words lingered in the marble hallways, a new and peculiar silence in their wake. Beth retreated to the opulent, sterile guest suite that felt less like a room and more like a display case. She stood at the floor-to-ceiling window, watching the security patrols move like clockwork ants in the gardens below. The compound’s hum was a physical thing—the low drone of climate control, the distant whine of a sports car on a private road, the sheer weight of watched silence.
She felt scraped raw.Sophia Rossi now knew the origin story. It was a tactical disclosure, perhaps, but it left Beth feeling perilously seen. She needed a breath of home that wasn’t scented with jasmine and concealed weapons.Without overthinking, she picked up her phone. The time on the screen glowed: 2:17 AM New Jersey time. That meant 1:17 AM in Texas. Dove would be asleep, tangled in the thick cotton sheets of the ranch house, probably wrapped around the solid, steady heat of Jackson.Beth hit the call button anyway.
It rang six times. She pictured the phone vibrating on the rustic nightstand, fighting against the deep, exhausted sleep of people who’d been hauling hay bales since dawn.A click. A rustle of fabric and a soft, mumbled curse. “Bell?” Dove’s voice was thick with sleep, concern cutting through the fog instantly.“You okay? Those damn Rossis finally drive you to drink, or is this a worse-off kind of call?”
The sound of her childhood nickname, spoken in that familiar, sleepy drawl, was a lifeline.Beth leaned her forehead against the cool glass.
She didn’t answer in English. The words that came out were low, gravelly from the night and the cigars, and in the language of her mother’s lullabies and curses. “Ya prosto khotela uslyshat' tvoy golos.” I just wanted to hear your voice.There was a beat of silence on the line. Then a shift, the sound of a body turning over, a whispered, “Hang on, Jack, it’s Beth,” to a murmured grumble in the background. A door creaked softly—Dove moving to another room, granting privacy.
When Dove spoke again, her own Russian was softer, more fluid, a language reserved for secrets and sisters and a mother behind glass. “Moy golos slushayet.Chto sluchilos'?” My voice is listening. What happened?“Nothing. Everything,” Beth sighed, switching back to a hybrid, the Texan-Russian cadence that was theirs alone.“I just talked to Sophia Rossi on a balcony. She gave me a cigarillo.I told her about Mama. About Papa.”
A low whistle, purely Texan, despite the language.“You armed the old dragon. That’s either brilliant or the stupidest thing you’ve done since marrying the son.”
“She was… decent about it.Said she was sorry she missed out on knowing me. Called me a ‘formidable variable.’”
Dove’s laugh was a warm, rich sound.“I like her. She’s scary, but she’s got eyes. Not like that blockhead father-in-law of yours.”
“Ex-father-in-law,” Beth corrected automatically.“Please. You’re in his fortress at midnight. Semantics are dead and buried.” Dove paused, and Beth could hear the soft clink of a glass and the splash of liquid—probably the cheap whiskey Jackson kept in the kitchen for long nights.“So you’re having a crisis of lineage. Feeling the Novak-Montgomery dissonance in a house of made men.”
Beth closed her eyes.“Something like that. It’s just… the air here is so processed.I can smell the polish on the guns. I needed to hear something real. Something that smells like horse shit and diesel.”
“Well, you’re in luck.Jack’s boots by the back door are ripe as ever. And the Miller’s prize bull got loose again today. Took us three hours and a bale of rotten hay to lure him back. Real enough for you?”
A genuine smile touched Beth’s lips for the first time in hours.“Yeah. That’s perfect.”
“You wanna talk about Damien? Or is this a strictly parental-identity, earthy-texas-scent therapy session?”
“No Damien.He’s… orbiting.Being charming and dangerous and predictably unpredictable. I can’t think about him right now.”
“Which means you’re thinking about him non-stop.” Dove took a sip, the sound clear through the phone. “You called me speaking po-russki.You only do that when you’re feeling cornered or… homesick. You’re in a palace, Bell. You’re not homesick for a place.”
Beth was silent, tracing a phantom pattern on the cold windowpane.
“You’re homesick for a person,” Dove said, her voice gentler now. “And it terrifies you that the person you’re homesick for is the one who broke the home in the first place.”
“I hate it when you’re right.”
“I know.It’s my worst trait.” Another rustle. “Jack says hey, by the way. He’s glaring at the bedroom door like he can teleport through it and break Damien’s kneecaps with his mind. It’s very supportive.”
“Tell him I said hi back.And don’t let him do anything stupid. We don’t need a range war between Texas and New Jersey.”
“Too late. The thought’s already planted.He’ll be cleaning guns with extra vengeance tomorrow.” Dove’s tone softened. “You gonna be alright there tonight? Or do you need one of us to suddenly develop urgent business in Trenton?”
“No,” Beth said, drawing a steadying breath. The tightness in her chest had eased.“No, I’m okay.I just… needed my sister. Needed to hear the ranch in your voice.”
“Well, you got it.The full package. Crickets are loud as hell tonight.Smells like rain coming. Mama’s old rose bush by the porch is buddin’. And your stupid paint horse, Balthazar, still tries to bite my ass every time I walk past his paddock.Nothing’s changed. It’s all right here waiting for you.”
Tears pricked Beth’s eyes, hot and unexpected. She blinked them away.“Thanks, D.”
“Anytime.Even at one in the damn morning. Now go to bed.Or go flirt with your morally-complicated ex-husband. Either way, stop thinking so much.You’re a Novak and a Montgomery. You belong in places like that just as much as they do. Probably more.”
They hung up with a final, soft exchange in Russian—a childhood phrase meaning stay safe.Beth set the phone down. The suite was still too quiet, too perfect. But the ghost of her sister’s voice had chased out the hollow chill. She could almost smell the coming rain, feel the rough wood of the porch railing under her palms.
She peeled off her dress, let it pool on the immaculate floor, and pulled on one of the oversized, brutally soft hotel bathrobes. She was pouring a small, neat finger of whiskey from the sideboard—not Rossi top-shelf, but something older and smokier she’d requested—when she heard the faint sound in the sitting room.Not an intrusion. A presence.She didn’t turn.“The walls are thicker than that, Damien. I know you’re there.”
He stepped into the doorway, having entered through a panel she hadn’t noticed. He’d discarded his jacket and tie, his shirtsleeves rolled up to his forearms.He looked tired, the charming mask for once not perfectly fitted.
“I wasn’t eavesdropping,” he said, his voice quiet.“I was just… checking. Making sure you were still here.”
She turned then, leaning back against the sideboard, the glass cool in her hand.“Where else would I be?”
“Gone. It’s what you do. What I’ve taught you to do.” His green eyes swept over her, taking in the robe, the loose hair, the slight redness around her eyes from her conversation with Dove. “You’ve been crying.”
“Talking to Dove. It’s a different thing.”
He nodded, accepting the distinction.He stayed in the doorway, as if respecting an invisible boundary. The space between them felt charged, but differently now—not with the usual tension of their games, but with the weary weight of shared history and too many revealed secrets.
“My mother,” he began, then stopped, choosing his words with uncharacteristic care. “She came to find me after she spoke with you.She said you were… remarkable. She never uses that word.”
Beth took a sip, let the whiskey burn a path down her throat. “She’s a surprising woman.”
“She also said I’m an idiot.Several times.In Italian. It was a whole thematic aria.”
A faint, unwilling smile touched Beth’s lips. “She’s not wrong.”
He took a single step into the room.Just one. “I don’t want to be an idiot tonight, Beth.I’m tired of being the villain in your story. I just…” He ran a hand through his dark hair, a gesture of pure, frustrated exhaustion. “I just want to be in the same room with you. Without it being a battle.”
The raw honesty in his words disarmed her more effectively than any grand gesture or sly compliment. She saw the boy she’d fallen for, buried under the armor of the man he’d become. The man she’d helped create, for better or worse.She didn’t answer. Instead, she pushed away from the sideboard, walked to the vast, plush sofa, and sat down, curling her legs beneath her. She took another sip of her drink and stared into the cold fireplace.An invitation.Not a surrender.A ceasefire.
Damien watched her for a long moment. Then he moved, not to the sofa, but to the armchair adjacent to it, keeping a careful distance. He sank into it, the lines of his body finally relaxing into something that looked like defeat, or maybe just relief.
They sat in the deep quiet, the only sound the faint whisper of central air. Two former lovers, bound by a tangled web of crime and family and a love that refused to die, sharing a silence that was, for the first time in years, not a weapon.Beth looked at him over the rim of her glass.