Page 26 of The Woman at the Funeral (Costa Family #11)

Nico

Back at the safe house, we did exactly what I said we would.

We ordered food. We ate together on the couch. We took Goya for a couple of walks.

Then she took my hand and led me down the hall toward the bed.

Her hands were all over me, taking her time removing my clothes, tracing over my chest, my stomach, closing around my cock.

We fell into the bed, bodies tangling, breaths syncing, moans mingling.

Everything was too much and not enough. Every second stretched. Every sensation built, compounded, then we both shattered under the pressure of it all.

Afterward, she let me pull her onto my chest, her body draped over mine, her fingers tracing over my chest, making little shapes and words that I couldn’t quite make out.

At some point, Goya woke up from his four-hour nap on his dog bed to come and hop up on the bed to keep our feet warm.

It was the most content I think I’d ever been.

Was there some part of me that was concerned that this was just distraction and comfort for Blair?

Sure. There was a possibility that once this was all finally over and we went back to our lives, Blair was going to want nothing to do with me.

Once she had time to really think about the whole mafia thing, the danger, the reality of what that meant I was often involved in.

She might decide she’d had enough of uncertainty with Matt and move on from me.

She might never grow to care for me the way I’d cared about her almost since the moment we’d met.

But the fear of losing her wasn’t a good enough reason not to fully immerse myself in her while I had the opportunity.

To let my hands, lips, and tongue get to know every inch of her.

To memorize her sighs and shivers. To revel in the way her face lit up when she laughed, and knowing I was the one to give her that brief moment of joy.

Maybe all we would have was a weekend, a week, a month together. But I was going to slow down time so it felt like a fucking lifetime.

That was part of the reason I found myself reaching for my phone anytime I caught her in a moment of unguarded beauty: standing in the window with her steaming mug as the sun streamed in, sitting on Goya’s bed with him, her cheek pressed to his head, in the kitchen flipping blueberry pancakes in one of those silk pajama sets I never thought I’d love as much as I did.

In case there came a day when the memories started to fade around the edges, I would have the pictures to look back on.

“What has that intense look on your face?” Blair asked as she reached for her coffee.

Her plate in front of her was a soupy mess of syrup and a few swimming blueberries. She’d finished off the last of the stack after declaring a few moments before that she was going to burst.

“I was just thinking about art,” I admitted.

“What about art?”

“I guess I just never considered before that each canvas is a moment frozen in time. I know that most of them were likely done over weeks of posing. But still. It captured a moment that would never happen again in the exact same way. And there’s something really poignant, but sad, about that.”

“Exactly,” she agreed, eyes going all gooey.

“What is your favorite piece?”

“Of all time?” she asked, looking panicked.

“What comes to mind first?”

“ The Lovers by émile Friant. Have you ever seen it?”

“No.”

“It’s a man and a woman stopping on a bridge to, it seems, admire the landscape, but they are caught up in each other instead.”

“Why that one?”

“I don’t know. I think… it’s the simplicity of it. How it shows so much intimacy and vulnerability with just a shared look. There’s something… delicate about it. Like love, I guess.”

“New love, maybe,” I said, watching that vulnerability overtake her features again.

“Hm?”

“New love is delicate. Real love is… resilient. It’s built on something strong enough to help it weather the inevitable storms.”

Her gaze cut away at that, staring out the window at the rain clouds chasing away the morning sunshine.

“I guess I’ve never had love like that,” she said, seeming to speak to herself.

“You’ve never received love like that,” I clarified. “I think we both know you gave it.”

She was silent for a moment. Then, in a barely-there voice, she asked, “Can I confess something awful?”

“Sure, but I doubt it’s as awful as you think.”

“It is.” There was another long pause as she fought with herself, sucking in, then releasing a deep breath.

“I don’t think I loved Matthew. Not the way you should love your spouse, anyway.

I… I think I was infatuated at the beginning.

So much so that I mistook it for love. But it couldn’t have been love.

I barely knew him. And then, I don’t know.

I think it was… commitment and dedication, not love.

I was all in, you know? And if he was even halfway in, I think I would have let that be enough forever. ”

“You deserve more than to settle for halfway.”

She gave me a sad smile before rising to her feet and grabbing our plates. “So are we heading to the storage unit after walking Goya?” she asked, seeming glad to have her back to me as she ran hot water to melt the sticky syrup.

“Yeah. I don’t want to waste any time if the laptop or tablet is in there. Or any other copies of this information. The sooner we get our hands on everything, the better. I’m going to have Gavino come with us.”

“Are you worried it’s going to be dangerous?” she asked, tensing as she turned.

Maybe.

“No. I think it will be good to have an extra set of eyes and hands. Plus, he will drive us.”

“I’m a little worried about leaving Goya,” she admitted, glancing over to where he was whipping his now fluff-free toy around.

“We don’t know how he’s going to do in an apartment all alone.

What if he barks and the neighbors complain?

” Then, her voice sadder, “What if he thinks he’s being abandoned again? ”

He would have to have that experience eventually. But I didn’t want her worrying about him, either.

“What if we drop him off with Zeno? He might eat more junk food, but he will be happy there. Zeno even invested in dog beds, bowls, and toys to occasionally dog-sit for my cousin Anthony.”

“I like that idea better,” she decided, giving me a sweeter smile. “Thanks. I know I’m being a pain in the—”

“There’s no world in which I’m going to think you’re being a pain in the ass because you care about your dog,” I cut her off. “It’s not that far out of the way to drop off Goya before we head to the storage unit.”

With that, she finished the dishes while I got showered and dressed, then she took her turn getting ready as I walked Goya again.

“Any new adventures?” she asked, meeting us down at the street. With a bag full of Goya’s toys, treats, and a brush ‘just in case he needs them.’

“Well, he scored a piece of hot pretzel when a toddler dropped it out of her stroller. So he was pretty happy about that.”

“You’ll eat anything, won’t you?” she asked just as a black sedan double-parked at our side, making her stiffen.

“That’s Gav,” I told her, reaching to open the backseat for her.

“Hey, Gav,” she greeted when we were all settled inside.

To that, Gav made a grunting sound.

“Don’t take it personally,” I told Blair. “Gav is allergic to social norms and good manners.”

“Luckily, I’ve had a lot of practice with curmudgeons. My father-in-law once didn’t speak to me for two months because I said I didn’t really care who won the baseball game,” she said, making Gav’s lips twitch the slightest bit.

“Don’t think I’m as bad as all that.”

“Oh, he is,” I countered. “What was it you said when I asked if you wanted to hit the gym with me? Something about you’d rather fight a raccoon in a porta potty.”

“In his defense, gym guys can be obnoxious.”

“See? She gets it. Besides, my luck, someone’ll be filming their reps or something and catch me in the background, looking as miserable as I feel, and it’d go viral and I’d get the nickname The Gym Reaper or some shit…”

“You’ve given that made-up scenario a lot more time than it deserves,” I said, shaking my head.

Whereas Zeno was our family’s optimist, Gavino was pure pessimism most of the time.

He had a list of things he disliked about his fellow human beings that was taller than he was and included petty shit like: grown men who referred to their friend group as ‘the boys,’ influencers who pop onto a video saying they just want to talk about something ‘real quick’ then prattle on for sixteen minutes, and people who post vague, cryptic social media posts; then when people ask if everything is okay, demand people DM them (“Just spill your lame-ass drama, the fuck?”).

And that wasn’t even including his “totally normal” reasons for hating people: loud chewers, close walkers, people who do video calls while walking around the grocery store, those who use internet slang in normal conversations, and—perhaps most egregious of all in his mind—couples who use the term ‘hubby’ or ‘wifey’ seriously.

If you gave the guy paper and pen and told him to write everything about people that annoyed him down, he’d have a list as long as a pharmacy receipt. Both sides.

Actually, the damn pen would run out before he was done.

“I went to a Pilates class once,” Blair said.

“And some girl chose a spot in the front and then set up a tripod. Which would, of course, film all the rest of us in our class. To, I imagine, post on her socials. It’s invasive.

I know there’s no expectation of privacy in public places, but I don’t love that aspect of modern society. ”

“See? She gets it,” Gav said.

And with those four words, I knew Gav had just officially given Blair his stamp of approval.

“Anyone else think it’s weird as fuck for him to have a storage unit all the way in Queens when he lived in Manhattan?” Gav asked after we dropped off Goya.

That was exactly what had been on my mind since Blair had told me the address.

“He claimed it was cheaper,” Blair said. “But how much cheaper could it be that would be worth hauling things on the subway or paying for cab fare?”

Yeah, that didn’t track.

What did track was it was far enough that he was sure it was secure, that he could be certain no one was following him there, that no one would think to look there.

We pulled up to the building a while later, all of us climbing out to go to the office.

After signing Gav up for a unit, we grabbed some bags out of the trunk—empty save for the bag in my hand that had new deadlocks and a bolt cutter.

Gav’s new unit was on the second floor, not too far from Matt’s one.

We all walked down the halls lined with hideous orange doors.

“How do people get to those?” Blair asked, pointing up to the much smaller doors positioned above the lower garage doors.

“No idea,” I admitted as we did a turn about the place, making sure no one else was around before stopping at Matt’s unit.

Gav and Blair stood around me, blocking the cameras as I made short work of the deadbolt with the bolt cutters before tucking them away and pulling up the door.

“Jesus Christ,” I sighed when the light spilled inside, illuminating endless piles of crap.

“Well, at least there were some things that were true about Matthew,” Blair said, speaking to herself as she glanced inside a box jam-packed with baseball cards. From a cursory glance, they were all useless ones.

“Yes, I know,” I said as Gav shook his head. “Overconsumption and all that shit. Just start looking for electronics. Or paperwork with our names on it.”

With that, we all got to work, digging to the bottoms of boxes, then moving them aside to reach for the next.

“The fuck was he doing with so many VHS tapes?” Gav asked, sliding the cardboard sleeve up to make sure nothing was hidden inside. He had to be on his fiftieth tape.

“He was convinced that there was going to be a wave of people wanting VHS the way vinyl came back around.”

“Difference being that VHS tapes are literally degrading as we speak and there won’t be any film left on most of these in a decade,” Gav said, tossing a copy of Weekend at Bernie’s into the already overflowing box.

“Is it just me, or does that look like a path?” Blair asked after stacking another box on top of her ‘checked’ pile.

We all turned to find a narrow path toward the back corner. From the wrong angle, it was easy to miss. But when I moved over behind Blair, it was obvious it was absolutely a path.

I moved down it, finding a small TV dinner table set up with just one box on top—one of those long ones that you got from the grocery store that the eggs came in.

I flipped open the lid, moving aside a few oddly placed flannel shirts.

Then there they were.

Matt’s electronics.

His laptop even had the stickers for his favorite bands and restaurants on the front.

“I thought the police had his phone,” Blair said from my side.

I glanced over at Gav, both of us sharing a tense silent conversation.

He had a burner.

That he had hidden with his fucking laptop in the back of a storage unit.

It was not looking good for the hope that he hadn’t made this information available online somewhere.

“They do,” I said, grabbing the whole box and passing it to Gav. “Put this in the bag. Then we will do quick looks through everything else here before heading out. I want Zeno on that laptop and phone as soon as possible.”

With that, we all silently went to work.

We weren’t sure if any of the tablets, flash drives, or external drives were actually Matt’s but we stashed them all in the bag too, just to be safe.

Finished, we were all sweaty and tired.

I closed the door and attached my new lock to the unit.

Then we headed back to the car in silence.

“Are you worried?” Blair asked after we dropped the electronics off with an already overworked Zeno, grabbed Goya, and headed back home so he could work in peace.

I sucked in a deep breath and looked over at her.

“I’d be lying if I said no. And I don’t want to lie to you.”

To that, she nodded.

“I’d rather know the truth. Even if it’s scary.”

“Then I’ll always give it to you. I think we’ve both dealt with enough lying in the past few years.”

“Brutal honesty then,” she agreed. “Unless I’m asking if I look all right when I look like hell. Then… lie to me.”

“Honey, you could never look like hell.”

“Exactly,” she agreed with a little nod. “Keep me delusional.”

She leaned in closer to me.

And I couldn’t help but lean down and steal a quick kiss. While I hoped like hell this little conversation was a sign that she was considering a future with me.

The problem was, we were so busy getting lost in each other that we didn’t realize how close danger really was.