Page 57 of Lady and the Butcher

“I can’t afford?—”

“You can,” he said, calm and lethal, “because I did. For three months.”

“Atticus.”

“Don’t fight me on this part,” he said, and somehow it wasn’t a command. It landed like an invitation. “You bleed for everyone. Consider it a transfusion back.”

Emotion hit in a way I didn’t expect. Not the grateful, tidy kind. The messy kind that makes your face hot without your permission. I swallowed it hard. It didn’t go anywhere.

“I didn’t ask you to fix my life.”

“You didn’t,” he agreed. “You let me in the room where you care for strangers like family. Call this payment for watching you do that.”

“You were in a lobby,” I said, wiping at my eyes with the heel of my hand. “You sat in a chair and drank bad coffee.”

“And translated it into the language I speak,” he said. “Infrastructure. Protection.”

I laughed once, the sound catching on something. “Protection from what?”

He tipped his head. “From collapse.”

The word threaded through me and caught like a hook. I’d been running on fumes and grit and a little magic for years—proud of the wreck I hid behind cheerful Instagram squares and color-coded schedules. The idea that someone else had seen the wobble and braced the weight without humiliating me felt like standing under a downpour and realizing my body had been thirsty.

I breathed, shaky and slow. “I don’t know how to say thank you without also saying you can’t do this.”

His mouth curved. “Try, ‘You can put your hands on me as a tip.’”

The laugh came out easier that time. “You’re outrageous.”

“Accurate,” he said.

I set the phone down. “Who are you?” I asked, not coy. “Really?”

He didn’t move from the window. He didn’t pace or perform. He pressed his palm to the glass like he was measuring the temperature of the morning and thought for a long beat.

“I manage logistics,” he said finally. “I keep schedules and promises and certain … corridors … running the way they’re meant to.”

“Corridors,” I echoed, trying the word on. “Like hallways?”

“Like routes,” he said. “Water. Road. Paper. People.”

“Is there a job title for that?”

“Not one we print on business cards,” he said, and the flicker of humor didn’t soften the steel under it. “Sometimes, I solve problems with money. Sometimes, with my mouth. Sometimes, with a phone call that reminds someone who their friends are. Sometimes, by being the friend who shows up in person.”

“And if they don’t want a friend?”

His mouth didn’t change. His eyes did. They went flat and cold for a second—river-water over stone—and then warm again. “Then I’m not their friend.”

My skin prickled in a way that wasn’t fear. Not exactly. Recognition, maybe. I knew men like that from the margins of friends’ stories—men who organized the chaos the city pretended didn’t exist, the ones restaurants owed favors to and dock workers didn’t cross. I thought of the way the private room at The Mariner’s Table had emptied like a tide going out. The way the carriage driver didn’t argue. The way Stephen had looked at him.

“Is this the part where I ask if you’re dangerous?” I asked, light because that’s how you test the thin ice.

“This is the part where you decide if you prefer a nice man who can’t move anything,” he said, “or me.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever preferred nice,” I admitted, which earned me that slow, private smile that made my stomach lose track of gravity.

“Then we’re aligned,” he said.