Instead she stood there, staring vacantly at the curved basin in the sink where Mrs. Van had instructed her to wash her hands. St. Silas had left a few minutes ago, when everything had begun to settle and all there was left to do was mop the blood from the floors. The water was now a murky crimson, still disturbed and sloshing at the rim from how violently Leena had scrubbed her skin clean moments before.
It all reminded Leena too much of the night Rami’s arm had been amputated. She half expected to turn and see the surgeon packing his tools in a leather case, either too busy or too uncaring to wipe the remnants of Rami’s blood that clung to the dull blade. It was a staggering relief that when she finally did look up, it was only to find Mrs. Van returning to inform her that their young patient was settled.
Throughout this hideous night, Mrs. Van’s face had worn a lookthat was both deeply ancient and maternal, and Leena felt an odd homesickness settle in her chest without knowing why.
Mrs. Van caught her yawning. “Off to bed with you, madam.”
Just as Leena gave an incline of her head and was about to sweep from the room, Mrs. Van’s voice stopped her one last time. “Rest. You deserve it.”
Leena halted at the threshold, nearly swaying from exhaustion, unable to find relief in Mrs. Van’s words. This night had been long and brutal—the kind that would live in her mind in sharp detail even as other memories faded—but it was not yet over for her. Not until she spoke with St. Silas.
It was some minutes before Leena found him.
At first, her weary feet had carried her to his study out of habit rather than thought. Before she had even lifted her fist to knock, she knew it would be vacant inside.
As Leena stood staring at the doorknob, there was a merging of two realities behind her eyes—the past in which Rami had had his arm amputated on the kitchen table, and the present in which a boy had been healed on one. She remembered that it had been Baba’s arms that had carried Rami that time. Now it was St. Silas who had lifted the child, shepherding him from a house that would’ve seen the boy buried unmarked and forgotten in a field.
Moments passed in which Leena remained lost in her recollections. Finally, she stepped away from the study, heading instead toward the back door that led to the courtyard. She’d always hated the enclosed square cut entirely from stone with no flowers to soften its harsh exterior. Ruthlessly trimmed trees provided cover from the prying eyes of the neighbors and the streets beyond. If not for the single lantern that was lit in the center of this shadowy place, it would have been engulfed in complete darkness, for morning had not yet arrived.
As she made her way outside, Leena remembered that after the procedure had finished and Rami had finally fallen asleep, she hadmade Baba chai. Although her father’s blue-collared shirt had still been coated in blood, he had taken the chai outside to the front stoop of the house. She would never forget the way he had held the glass without once bringing it to his lips. The pads of his thumb and index finger must have been blistering from the heat, but he did not put it down. She didn’t think he had even noticed the burns on his fingers as he inhaled the crisp spring air. To Leena, it had looked as if he was trying to expel the poison of that night from his lungs.
That was why she was not surprised when she found St. Silas in the courtyard.
He was leaning on a windowsill beneath the sloping rooftop, sheltered from the rain that was slowing to a drizzle, giving the night a stonewashed smell. The dusky air roughened his skin, bringing slashes of healthy color to the sharply angled bones of his face, lending him a jarring vitality on a night Leena was sure was filled only with ghosts.
He had changed from his bloodied clothes, abandoning the waistcoat and wearing only a white muslin shirt undone at the collar, the sleeves rolled to the elbows, showing muscled forearms corded with veins.
Leena halted in the doorway, briefly bewitched by the way he looked standing within the moments between darkness and daylight. She was surprised to see a cigarette in his left hand, the very same kind imported from Algaraa; she had never seen him smoke before.
It was nearly unfathomable to her that even St. Silas kept bad habits to distract his restless mind. From the start, Leena had viewed him more as an executioner than a man, uncaring about whomever he dropped the ax on, lethal past the point of being human.
To see him this way, a cigarette held between slightly unsteady fingers, made him look like a touchable version of himself. Leena, whose bruised heart had been fractured and split open this night, wanted to find a shred of comfort in these changes.
The last few hours had bound them together in ways that went far beyond the words of a contract. Leena had known it would be like this from the moment she had seen St. Silas drenched in blood.
What she didn’t know was what would come out of this unholy bond. Already she felt the ropes between them chafing, creating friction where there had been none previously.
“It is late,” St. Silas said drily, without looking at her, his gaze still intent on the courtyard woven in fine mist.
“It is early.” Leena nodded at the cigarette. “I did not think smoking was a distraction you partook in.”
He glanced down at the cigarette in his hand dismissively. “Only very rarely.” He finally lifted his eyes to hers and his smile was faint, more a jeering twist of his mouth. “I tend to look for mydistractionselsewhere.”
Even though she should, by now, have been used to St. Silas’s implicit provocations, Leena still flushed deeply.
She could no longer deny that she was aware of him as a man. Even his voice, deep and full of inflections, did not seem strange to her anymore, in spite of all the distance that stood between them. And it would never feel strange again—not after he had used it to ease the hurt of a child.
Within the gloom of the night, St. Silas’s eyes lingered on her with an almost begrudging fascination. He dropped his spent cigarette and stamped it beneath his boot, jerking his expression into indifference. “After all the time you’ve spent in my company, I am surprised that such trivial commentsstillsend you blushing, Miss Al-Sayer. Should you see the actions that inspire such words, I believe you would perish.”
It was not hard for Leena to imagine St. Silas captivating any woman he should choose with his magnetic allure, his devastating beauty. For even a brief moment, she imagined that she, Leena, could be the sole object of his intense focus.
More heated than ever, she turned her face away.
He gave a short laugh. “Go to sleep, Miss Al-Sayer.”
I cannot,Leena thought to herself, even though she knew he was mocking her. Not until she made things right.
She didn’t know how to start without sounding banal or insincere. She took a deep breath, her mouth opening and closing uselessly, before she finally managed a trivial, “Are you well?”
