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I cross to the console. He steps back and puts my hands on the wheel, one then the other, his palms over my knuckles for just a second before he lets go. He’s standing behind me, not touching, but close enough that I can feel the heat off his chest through my coat. My stomach pulls tight before my brain has processed that he’s there.

“If it pulls left,” he says, near my ear. “You correct before it happens.”

“How do I know it’s about to happen?”

“Your hands tell you before your eyes do,” he says. “Stop watching the water.”

I stop watching the water. The wheel is alive under my palms, the river pushing back through the hull. I compensate left on instinct, and he makes a sound behind me. My nipples tighten under my coat. I keep my face forward and have a brief internal conversation with myself about basic physiological responses that accomplishes nothing.

“Good,” he says.

I’m driving a boat. This is genuinely not something I planned for when I walked into his compound.

“Faster?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say.

He reaches around me, his arm brushing mine, and pushes the throttle forward. The bow lifts and the wind hits my face hard enough to make my eyes water. I grip the wheel and laugh, just once, surprised out of me by the speed, before I swallow it back down and focus on not driving us into anything.

“There you go,” he says, right behind my ear.

My stomach drops and I focus very hard on the horizon.

We run like that for a while, him behind me, me at the wheel, the city getting smaller. At some point his hand comes to rest on the rail beside mine, not touching, just there, close enough that I can feel the warmth off his knuckles. I leave my hand where it is. The river is dark and wide and nobody wants anything from me. I hadn’t realized how much I needed that until right now, out here where the only thing asking for my attention is the water.

He takes over when the water opens up, kills the throttle, and drops anchor. The boat rocks. The skyline stretches across the dark in one long lit line.

“Sit,” he says.

I sit at the stern. He sits across from me, elbows on his thighs, knees a foot from mine. No phones, no files, just water and cold air and the hull creaking under us. It occurs to me that this is an excellent location to dispose of a body. I’m in the middle of the river with a man who kills people for a living and nobody knows exactly where I am. I hold that thought for a moment before the quiet pulls my attention back to the water.

“You’re different out here,” I say.

He raises an eyebrow.

“Less like you’re deciding whether to have someone killed,” I say.

“Night’s young,” he says.

I press my lips together. He sees it, I can tell from the slight shift around his eyes, and he doesn’t comment, which is somehow worse than if he had. I think about my father briefly, about how many conversations he must have had with this man before the one that ended him, and whether any of them felt like this.

The thought about my father passes and the quiet comes back and I let it.

“Did you ever want a different life?” I ask. I don’t know where that came from. Probably the water. Probably the fact that he hasn’t said anything threatening in forty minutes.

He thinks about it for a moment. “Cook,” he says.

I raise my brow.

“I’m good at it,” he says. “Had to learn. No one else was going to feed us. Lavro could burn water and somehow make it your fault.” His jaw shifts. “I like the knives.”

“Of course you do,” I say.

“What’s wrong with knives?”

“Absolutely nothing,” I say. “Very soothing entry point into a passion for cooking.”

“A knife doesn’t jam,” he says. “Doesn’t run out of ammo. Does what you tell it every time. What’s not to like?”