Evie slips in like a shadow.She sets down a small velvet pouch on my tray—two keycards, a burner, and a hotel master override.“Your discharge gifts,” she says, grin sharp.Then to Lindy, conspiratorial, “If you ever want to disappear for an afternoon, I am an excellent bad influence.”
Elsie comes in last, snapping on gloves before the door shuts.She doesn’t bother with hello, just checks Lindy’s dressings with a surgeon’s hands, then angles toward me.“You tore two steri-strips,” she says, and I swear I hear Adrian smirk from the wall.She re-tapes me.“Quit fucking moving so much or I swear to you Cassius I will separate you two.”
“I will move more if you take her, not less.”
“God damn it.If you cough blood, don’t tough it out, call me.”Elsie grabs Lindy’s hand and squeezes it lightly.“Make him call me.”
“I will,” Lindy says.“I’ll call myself.I promise.”
At night, when the halls mute and the beeps slow, Lindy and I watch the city lights through the blinds and trade truths.She traces the edges of the bandage covering her shoulder and tells me what she remembers in pieces.
“I wasn’t hallucinating in that room,” she says.
“I don’t care what they are,” I say.“Bargain with anything that keeps you breathing.”
“Gideon’s the only one here now,” she says.I look at the door, if I don’t blink maybe I’ll see him too.“He always wears a black Bolo-Hat, an old suit, desert dust at the cuffs, and a turquoise oval wedding band that’s cracked through the middle like lightning.And he says this thing sometimes that makes me think of you.”
“What is it?”
“Pay the house first.”
Everything in me goes still.“Say that again,” I tell her.
She looks at me, unsure.“Pay the house first.”
My voice comes out rough.“Holy shit.You are seeing the old man.My mother kept a sepia photo of him in the hallway.Black Bolo-Hat, that same stone, crack and all.He built our empire on that saying.You don’t touch women, you don’t touch kids, and you pay the house first.”I drag a breath, something like awe and fury braided together.“You’ve been seeing my great-great-grandfather.”
Her fingers find mine under the blanket that stretches across both our beds.“Explains a lot.”
“Such as?”
“Such as why he’s the only one who doesn’t hate you,” she laughs.
“Fucking unbelievable,” I say.“If he’s with you, we follow his rules.”
“He’s never steered me wrong,” she whispers once, half-asleep.
“What’s he tell you anyway?”
She goes quiet.I know that look.Her mind’s circling something dangerous.
“Say it,” I tell her.“Whatever it is.I’ll never walk out on you again.”
“If Gideon says London’s alive,” Lindy whispers, “then we have to keep hunting.We never give up—not until I see her spirit too.”
For a beat, the world holds its breath.
“We?”I thread her fingers through mine, grounding both of us.Her shoulders ease, the first crack of peace I’ve seen on her face since Vegas bled red.
“Keep standing there, Gideon,” I tell the man I can’t see.“Keep her breathing.I’ll do the rest.”
thirty-one
Cassius movesthrough the kitchen barefoot, careful, like the floor might bite.He still has a bandage high on his chest.I still have one that takes over my shoulder.We look like a pair of badly mended books, spines taped and pages dog-eared.He kisses the corner of my mouth and steals half my toast, and when I roll my eyes he tells me to do it again because I’m “obnoxiously sexy when I’m sassy.”
We make lists of names and places and threads ofSpiderwebto tug until it gives way.We sit with our knees touching and our scars behaving and use the system Caleb and Adrian started to keep mapping out all the ways to stay breathing in a world that sometimes forgets how.
“Sit,” he says, sliding a mug within reach, then hovering, then pretending not to hover.He tucks a pillow behind my back, checks the edge of my dressing with two fingers that could break necks and barely graze skin.“How’s the pain?”
