Chapter Two

“Kill people? Since when?”

Sal strode after Jack, spinning the toy bag up in the snow-laden air and catching it.

“Not kill people.”

Jack stomped down the skeleton of a stairway into the equally skeletal foyer. “Make jokes about killing people.”

“You make jokes about being tortured every time you climb into a bathtub. But I’m not allowed?”

Sal trotted down after him, slipped on the second from last icy step and jumped rather dramatically to the sub-flooring to keep from falling.

“That’s just a coping mechanism.”

“Who’s to say I’m not the same?”

Sal threw an arm across his shoulders, knocking off a film of snow that had settled there.

“You mean you need one?”

Jack stepped back to face him, frowning. “Does it bother you, the people you’ve killed? Does it keep you up at night? Do you have flashbacks? Nauseating guilt?”

“I’m sure I would if I’d ever finished off anyone who didn’t more than deserve it.”

“Which includes our contractor?”

“How many months?”

“Twenty-six.”

Sal looked around at the bones of their house, up at the open white sky, fat snowflakes falling in his eyes, making him blink rapidly. “You tell me when it gets to thirty.”

Jack narrowed his eyes.

Sal grinned and hit him in the chest with the bag. “Did you only come here to complain? Because I thought you had something else in mind.”

Jack’s shoulders sagged as he also regarded the house bones. “That was before I realized they’d not even started one corner of one room of roof before calling it quits for Christmas. And…”

He shivered and jammed gloved hands in his pockets. “I’m pretty sure ice-kink is not my thing.”

“Pretty sure?”

Sal brushed past him. “A year ago, would you have said shibari was your thing?”

“A year ago I wouldn’t even have said sex was my thing.”

“My point.”

Sal exercised caution on the next set of stairs down, but they were mostly wet, hardly slushy or icy.

A little Christmas Eve construction site inauguration before they both had to get dressed for tonight’s white-tie charity soirée had seemed like a dazzling idea at the time. Sal needed all the distracting he could get away from this particular holiday.

Christmas had been Catia’s thing, not Sal’s. While some people stressed about the holidays and others were all wrapped up in big families, for Catia Christmas was pure fun. Decorations and Christmas cards, always the real ink and stamp kind, never digital greetings, brought out her playful side, writing silly poems, sending Sal on advent-calendar treasure hunts, experimenting in the kitchen, until he’d learned to join in.

By their later Christmases together, Sal knew the game, embracing tree-trimming and alternating advent calendar days. He left her treasure-hunt clues like “Not Dasher, not Dancer, but it might be a Vixen, prowling the shelves for just the right mix-in.”

Leading Catia to race for Honey Fox Bakery, where the custom white chocolate, walnut, and rum Christmas cake waited in her name. In her wine-red dress, curled up by the fire place, she’d fed Sal bites on her fork and marveled at how far he’d come.

“Next time a woman tells me men are untrainable, I need only point out Salvatore Rausa.”

She kissed his lips. “You’re a credit to the species, Sal.”

He licked frosting off her nose. “Train me more.”

But that was then. That was before his wife had been murdered. Before Christmas had, once more, taken on a new meaning for Sal. How he’d learned to laugh through Christmas with her had never been about Christmas. It had been about Catia.

He might have been ready to embrace new traditions with Jack if Jack seemed to have any, or if they’d already moved into the new house together, or if his wife’s death didn’t still hurt like poison. Instead, Jack was living with him in his penthouse this winter, and they’d not even put a wreath on the door, or miniature artificial tree in the window—much less advent calendars and sending cards.

No, Christmas this year would be a non-event. They had the party tonight, an elegant fundraiser, then tomorrow to loaf and eat as much sugar and fat as they would normally consume in a season. Maybe meet up with Enzo and some of the boys for drinks later. That was enough.

The one bit of extra fun they’d thought they might have was here at the new house, which wasn’t a house, and was rapidly filling up with snow.

The basement, future home of workouts and a play room with their ropes and tie-downs and just the right lighting, was no more than a gray rectangle at this point. Roofed by the first floor, relatively dry, but somehow even colder than being out in the snow of the living room.

Jack wandered morosely to the walk-out part of the basement for another view of white, like a cat going from door to door, expecting to be let out, then disappointed all over again that it was still snowing out this door.

“The roads will get dangerous,”

Jack said. “We shouldn’t stick around.” He sighed, puffing out a great steam cloud, and turned, only to bump into Sal. “Sorry.”

“For what?”

“Walking into you?”

Jack started past.

“Oh.”

Sal flung out an arm to catch his chest like a fence. “I thought it was for the attitude problem.”

Jack coughed a little laugh. “Okay, sorry for being crap company.”

He turned into Sal, finally smiling. “This is one of those ‘sounded like a good idea at the time’ things that always ends up going wrong, isn’t it?”

“Nothing has gone wrong except that we don’t have a roof. And look.”

Sal looked up.

When Jack followed his gaze, Sal leaned in to kiss his neck. Jack shivered, pressing into the contact, soon returning another kiss.

“Too bad the walls are still blank,”

Jack said.

“Rebar sticking out of that one.”

Sal jerked his head at it, gaze fixed on Jack.

“So there is.”

His eyes sparkled. “You know what we need?”

“Thirty feet of rope?”

Sal lifted the bag in one hand. “Got you covered.”

“We need to run.”