“Employee wages. Benefits. Medical leave. All of it.”
There was a pause.
“Did something happen?”
“Something has been happening for years. I failed to notice.”
Bishop did not ask another question.
The danger arrived on a rainy Thursday night.
Mabel left Rossi’s after closing and entered the alley behind the restaurant. Two men emerged from the shadows.
Adrien recognized their movement immediately.
They were not thieves.
One blocked the alley’s mouth while the other approached her.
“We’re looking for someone,” he said. “A man who spends time near this restaurant.”
Mabel tightened her grip on her handbag. “I don’t know anything.”
“A tall man. Dark hair. Wears a torn coat.”
“I see many people.”
The man seized her arm.
Adrien crossed the alley in seconds.
He caught the attacker’s wrist and bent it until the man released her with a curse. The second reached inside his coat.
Adrien struck first.
His fist landed beneath the man’s ribs, followed by an elbow to the jaw. He turned, drove the first attacker against the wall, and pressed his forearm across the man’s throat.
“Who sent you?”
The man spat blood and smiled.
“So the beggar has teeth.”
Adrien’s pressure increased.
Mabel whispered his name.
Not Cain.
Only Adrian, the ordinary spelling he had given her.
But the fear in her voice reached him.
He released the man.
“Leave,” he said.
His tone held the quiet authority of a death sentence.
Both attackers fled.
Rainwater dripped from Adrien’s hair as he turned.
Mabel stood against the wall, cradling her bruised arm.
“You fight like that,” she said, “and expect me to believe you sleep on sidewalks?”
“I never said I slept on sidewalks.”
“You let me think it.”
He had no answer.
Her gaze traveled over his balanced stance, his uninjured hands, and the calm in his face.
“Who are you?”
“A man who would never hurt you.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“No.”
She waited.
He wanted to tell her.
He wanted to strip away the lie and place his real name in her hands, but the men disappearing into the rain had confirmed Bishop’s warning. Someone was watching him. Anyone close to Adrien Cain could become leverage.
“I served overseas,” he said. “There are parts of my life I don’t discuss.”
The lie came easily.
The shame did not.
Mabel looked toward the end of the alley.
“Were those men looking for you?”
“I don’t know.”
Another lie.
She pulled her coat tighter. “I trusted you because I thought you were honest.”
“I have never lied about how I feel when I am with you.”
Her breath caught.
The rain beat against metal fire escapes.
Adrien stepped closer but did not touch her.
“You make me remember a man I thought was gone,” he said. “A better one. That is the truest thing I have told anyone in years.”
Mabel’s anger did not disappear, but something in her eyes softened.
“Walk me home.”
He did.
A few nights later, a storm shut down the trains and buses. They waited inside a small café near his rented room, sitting across from each other while rain blurred the city beyond the windows.
Mabel told him about her father.
“He died owing money to people who came to our apartment after the funeral,” she said. “They took his truck and my mother’s wedding ring. I learned that promises mean very little when the person who made them is gone.”
Adrien looked down at their hands on the table.
“My father taught me that love made a man weak.”
“Did you believe him?”
