“Give me your hand,” he says.
I blink in confusion. “What?”
“Your hand,” he repeats. “Give me your hand and I’ll show you.”
Slowly, I extract my hand from my lap and hold it out in his direction. Moving just as slowly, he cradles my wrist and folds all my fingers into a fist except for one. Then, taking my extended pointer finger in his grasp, he touches it lightly to the page.
“This is the building,” he murmurs as he traces my finger along a rectangular path. “It’s three stories tall and Sage is on the second. The main entrance is here, on the south side.” He drags my fingertip down. “There’s a fire escape on the west—it’s rusted as all hell and there’s no telling if it’ll even hold my weight, but I don’t have much of a choice.”
He moves my finger back up toward the top of the page. “On the other side of the street, there’s a building I think we can easily get roof access to. I’ll get up there, then shimmy across on some power lines. Assuming I don’t fall to my death, get electrocuted to my death, or get spotted by the guards and shot to my death like a paper target at the fair, I’ll be able to get over to the roof of Sage’s building. Zeke will make a distraction of some kind on the other side. Then, while the security is dealing with that, I go in through the roof access, pull Sage out through the window, and haul ass down the fire escape before the guards come back and figure out what’s happening. You guys will be waiting with the car. We jump in and run like hell.” He settles back in his seat and sighs. “You can see why I’m not exactly thrilled with the plan.”
I pull my hand back, but the ghost of his touch lingers on my skin.“Not exactly thrilled”is a hell of an understatement; the plan isinsane. Suicidal, even. Power lines? A rusted fire escape? Guards with guns? Has he lost his ever-loving mind?
“It’s really good… if you have a death wish.”
He chuckles. “Got any better ideas?”
I think for a while. But in the end, I sigh. “No. Not really.”
“There you have it. Operation Death Wish it is.”
He goes back to clicking his pen. It’s become kind of an ominous sound and I like it less and less with every successivein-out.
I reach out and cup his hand in mine. The clicking stills. “Talk to me about something else,” I request. I turn toward him on my stool, tucking one leg underneath me. “Something that isn’t quite so grim.”
“There’s nothing else to talk about.”
“There’salwayssomething else to talk about.” It’s nice to touch him. The constant heat of his skin grounds me, calms me. The man is a furnace at all hours of the day and night, and touching him now just reminds me of how cold I’ve been for seven long weeks now. “Tell me about the before times. Something happy. A story with a nice ending.”
I’m sure he’s going to deflect again and throw up another wall between us. He’ll tell me to go back to sleep so he can return to his endless machinations.
But then he exhales, long and slow, and some of the tension bleeds out of his shoulders. “Happy,” he repeats. “You want happy.”
“Yes, I want happy. Give me something good, Bastian.”
The pen clicks once more—in-out—and then stops.
“I was seven, maybe eight. It was the beginning of summer.”
I wait. I don’t push. I barely breathe.
“My mother was sober that day. One of the rare times.” He pauses and scratches at his beard. “She’d scraped together enough money for ice cream, so we went down to the lakefront to walk along the shoreline. The three of us—me, her, and Aleksei. The water was still cold, but we didn’t care; we still took our shoes out and stepped in it. We were talking, and I don’t remember what I said, but it must’ve been funny, because she laughed in a way I never really heard much. I’ve tried for years to remember what I said that made her laugh like that, but I can’t. It’s gone. Just gone.”
He swallows. It’s the only sound in the still apartment.
“But I remember her laugh. And the ice cream melting down my wrist, all sticky and pink. I remember being happy.”
With a viciously on-point sense of timing, my nausea flares up again, hot and sudden.
I cry out and my hands fly to my middle instinctively. My stomach is rocking as it’s pummeled from within. It’s a strange thing, this sensation—like bubbles popping against the inside of my skin. A new kind of nausea for a new kind of chapter in my life.
Bastian stops his story at once. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong.” I keep my hand pressed against the curve of my belly as I wince. “The baby can’t kick yet, but they’re still intent on making me miserable. It’s like he or she is—is— Oh, to hell with it.”
Before I can think better of it, I reach out, snatch up Bastian’s hand in the dark, and lay it flat against my belly.
Every muscle in his arm locks up like he’s being electrocuted. I can’t see his face and I’m glad for that, because I’m starting to wonder if he hates me more than I’ve realized yet.
