Her face softens, and she doesn’t move away when I rest my forehead against hers. We stay like that for a minute, a quiet but deep moment for just us, before she draws away.
“Tell me the rest,” she says, and I know she means about Archer, about the drop. I tell her how it should go. The level of the garage. The way the cameras will stay blind because we paid for their cataracts.
“And then?” she presses. She’s relentless. She’s my favorite kind of exhaustion.
“Then we count,” I say. “Then I’ll keep a boy alive in a room that smells like oil for another night, and we’ll go to Bayonne to find the stolen pallets.”
“And in all that,” she says, low, “what am I supposed to do?”
“You eat and sleep.”
“And you?”
“I’ll come back,” I say, and decide that promising that one thing won’t get me killed any faster than not saying it would.
She turns her soft hand underneath mine and threads our fingers together. It is a small act of treason against the life that taught me hands are for making the world obey me. I memorize the feel of it anyway. If I let go, it isn’t because I want to. It’s because this life hasn’t given me another choice.
“That’s enough for now,” Alina says after a moment. It’s the one mercy my body will accept from anyone who isn’t me. “I need to change your bandage. You bled through it again, didn’t you?”
“I’m sure I can manage that on my own,” I tell her.
“Why do it on your own when you have me?” she asks, her mouth set in a stubborn line that’s somehow better than anything else in my world.
“For now.” The “for now” protects us both from the future.
I stay seated when she expertly changes the dressing. When she’s done, she says, “You should try to lie down and get some sleep.”
“For you I’ll pretend for a few minutes,” I offer as I stretch out so that my head is on the pillow that still holds her warmth, her lavender shampoo.
She pulls the covers over me and steps back, studies me like I’m a foreign language she intends to learn, then glances at the window. “You’ll tell me when you leave and when you return?” she asks.
“I will,” I agree. Before she leaves the room, I say, “You haven’t mentioned your flowers.”
She shrugs and turns around in the doorway. “The roses were pretty I guess.”
“Gavriil must have sent them up with one of the guards. At least there were only eleven,” I breathe out.
“Twelve,” Alina says.
“What?” I snap, sitting up and grinding my teeth together.
“There were twelve roses. I plucked the black one out and threw it away in the bathroom.”
“Throw all of them out. Now,” I order her.
“Okay, but it’s a shame to let them go to waste, even if they are fromhim.”
I debate whether or not to tell her about the superstition, then decide she has a right to know. “Even numbers are only for funerals,dikaya koshka.It was a warning.”
“Oh,” she mutters. “I’ll go throw them away.”
“Thank you,” I say as I lay my head back down on the pillow.
As soon as I do, my phone buzzes and Alina huffs as if it’s her sworn enemy.
I pull the device from my pocket.
RENAT:Drop’s set.
