As usual, when I notice something appealing about him, I feel an equal compulsion to pull away.

“I’ve got it,” I say, taking control of the knife myself.

“Alright.” Raylan goes back to browning meat, well-seasoned with salt, pepper, onion, and garlic.

He cooks us pasta with tomato sauce made from scratch. It doesn’t look that hard when he does it, though I doubt I could replicate any of it. It’s delicious as hell, though. The right blend of rich, spicy, tart, and fragrant.

“Who taught you to cook?” I ask him.

“Everybody,” he says. “My grandpa, grandma, mom, dad, people I’ve met on my travels . . . it’s the universal language. Everybody likes food that tastes good. You can bond with anybody over a good meal.”

I guess that’s true. Even Raylan and I seem to get along when we’re eating together.

Raylan probably gets along with everyone, though.

I thought he was just a typical cocky soldier-type when I first met him. But he actually has a very calming presence. He knows when to talk and when not to. When to just have a companionable silence. He’s not always trying to fill the air with nonsense.

After dinner, we go sit out on the balcony attached to my living room. We look out over the city lights—the other high rises, each with their individual boxes of light representing offices and apartments, each containing some other person living their life. The streams of cars on the roads below are the same—each one carrying a person to their own individual destination. To them, what they’re doing is the most important thing in the world. To us, it’s just another light bobbing down the road, the same as all the others.

Usually that thought would make me feel isolated and insignificant. But tonight I think most of those people are probably going home to somebody—maybe to make pasta or watch a movie. And even if those activities are mundane, they’re peaceful and happy.

“Do you see your little sister much?” Raylan asks me out of nowhere.

“Nessa?”

“Yeah.”

“I do, actually,” I tell him. “I meet her for lunch. Sometimes I go see what she’s working on at her dance studio—she’s a choreographer.”

“Dante told me what happened with her husband—with the Polish Mafia.”

Nessa met Mikolaj when he kidnapped her. We were in conflict with the Polish Mafia at the time. In what I first thought was Stockholm Syndrome, Nessa and Miko developed feelings for each other. He let her go, which almost cost him control of his men and his own life. Nessa went back to him and they married.

“Do you know what’s funny?” I say to Raylan.

“What?”

“I actually like Miko.”

Raylan laughs. “You do?”

“Yes. I mean, don’t get me wrong—he’s intense. But he’s smart and ruthless, and devoted to Nessa.”

“What’s Nessa like?” Raylan asks me.

“Everybody who meets her loves her. She’s kind—like your mom, I guess. She’s always been that way. Even when she was little, she couldn’t stand to see anybody sad. She’d share anything with you.”