I crossed the floor and we watched him together like strangers in a public place might have if they were waiting for the same bus.
“Unregulated,” Caldwell is saying, like a priest finding a stain. “Taxpayer dollars funneled through dark networks. Women, children, vulnerable populations—”
“—kept out of your campaign ads unless they cry on cue,” I finish under my breath. Reid doesn’t comment.
I could have thrown a glass at the screen. I pour a drink instead and let a half inch warm my mouth. I lift my glass vaguely toward the monitors because the toast I want to make has no language polite enough to keep the lawyers from breathing into their paper bags. “Try me,” I say, to Caldwell, to the half dozen men behind him, to the camera operators who aimed their lenses and felt important, to the power brokers texting their assistants five feet out of frame. “See how it ends.”
Reed excused himself and I sat back in my chair and allowed myself breathe for the first time in hours.
Somewhere, in a room I was not in, the bypass I’d approved with my thumb registered as time-limited and routine and very useful. A lattice that should have been a closed fist opened two fingers and called it kindness. A script that should have thrown an alert read the tags I’d allowed and did what good systems do: obeyed.
On the far monitor, Caldwell smiled at something that had just been fed into his ear and nodded as if he’d invented gravity and would permit us to use it for another term. On the near-left screen, the green light above Aurora’s door steadied, faithful as aheartbeat. In the half inch of rye left in my glass, the blue light of the room trembled and then went still.
Chapter 52 – Aurora
The studio is the only room that still believes me when I lie.
I tell the walls I’m fine. I tell the single bulb above my easel that the jitter in my hands is just too much coffee. I tell the canvases stacked like patients along the baseboards that I am not waiting to hear his step in the hall. The walls keep quiet. The bulb hums. The canvases stare back, their blankness more honest than I’m being.
Turpentine breathes from the jar beside the sink. Someone left a curve of ultramarine on the rim like a mouth. The floor carries the steady grit of dried paint under bare soles, comforting as a prayer bead. Outside, the Sanctuary sleeps in its mesh of cameras and codes. In here, a tank top, leggings, and the smell of oil and metal hold me together.
My phone buzzes on the floor boards by my foot, the screen washing blue across the underside of the table. Unknown number, again.
We can get you out. He’s not who you think.
I delete it, again. The messages feel like a hand tugging the hem of my dress in a crowd—insistent, impersonal, and too pleased with its own urgency. I could take it to Cassian or Reid. Instead I put the face down on the boards and tell myself that I’m going to paint until the sting in my body is something I can name and not just something that makes me pace.
A stroke becomes a palm against my throat. The canvas is cooperating and betraying me at the same time, as usual. My hand knows him. It paints him without permission.
I drag the flat of the brush down through the teal and into the black. The paint resists and then yields. His thumb was here earlier, low and back toward the hinge of my jaw. He insists I’m safe, and my body is a traitor who keeps believing him.
The brush skids. I put it in the jar and reach for the palette knife instead. Metal against paint, paint against canvas, the scratch of it as loud as the sound inside my head. I chase a strip of light along the imagined stairwell, meaning to widen it, and my hand slips off the edge and into my palm.
It’s a nick. The knife kisses the meat under my thumb and leaves a line, quick and efficient. I don’t gasp so much as sigh. I’ve been expecting something to split all night. It’s almost a relief that it’s this and not a thought.
The blood is bright and immediate, a red that doesn’t apologize for itself. It beads, then swells, then threatens the floor. I set the knife on the ledge by the canvas and press my other hand into the cut without thinking. Warmth slides between my fingers. The throb in my palm matches the throb in my throat. I lift my hand and drag the pad of my thumb down the painted rail. Red over teal. The line it leaves isn’t pretty.
Footsteps in the hall reach my ears too quiet for anyone but him.
I don’t turn until he’s in the doorway and the single bulb finds the white of his shirt cuffs and the edges of his forearms where the sleeves are rolled. The rest of him is shadow and attention. His eyes come to the knife, to the wet color on my hands, to my mouth. They flick once toward the phone on the floor and settle back on me.
“Rory,” he whispers.
“I’m fine,” I snap, and we both hear the lie.
He steps inside and leaves the door ajar. “You’re bleeding.”
“It’s paint,” I argue, even as more red gathers along the edge of my palm and spills over to my wrist. “It’s not—” I shake my hand once, as if that could fix it. The motion sends dots of red onto my tank top. They look like a constellation someone cruel would draw.
He crosses the room slowly, as though the floor is full of wires. He’s already reading the scene. When he’s close enough to lay his hand over mine, I shift back, my spine meeting canvas. The wet paint on the panel cold-kisses the back of my shoulder blades and climbs my skin.
“You make me crazy,” I tell him because it’s the first thing my mouth finds. It comes out wet and harsh. “I can’t sleep. I can’t stop seeing you. My head is noise and my body—” I bite down on the rest because embarrassment is pointless and also bottomless.
He glances at the knife where I left it perched on the canvas ledge. The blade has paint along one side. “Put that down,” he says softly.
“Maybe I don’t want to.” Which is ridiculous because it’s already down and because I don’t know whether the sentence means I want the knife or I want him to tell me what to do and have it work.
He’s close enough now that I can smell his soap and the long day still living in the thread of his shirt. Close enough that my breath changes to match his without permission. He doesn’t crowd. He knows better than to herd me into a corner unless I ask him to. But the canvas is already at my back, wet and patient, and the only way forward is through him.
