Then he draws the blade across the pad of his left index finger.
The cut is precise. Deliberate. Deep enough to bleed immediately, a bright line of red that wells up and spills over before he can contain it. He doesn't wince. Doesn't react. Just holds his hand over the centre of the sheet and lets the blood fall.
One drop. Two. Three.
He smears it with his thumb, dragging the red across the white in a streak that looks exactly like what the council expects to see. Then he presses his finger down again, adding more, building the stain with the focused concentration of a man signing a document.
I watch him bleed for me and feel something inside my chest crack open a second time, wider than last night, harder to close.
"This is what they want," he says, his voice flat and cold, but the coldness isn't directed at me. It's directed at them. At the system. At every person who decided that a woman's worth could be measured in blood on a bedsheet. "So this is what they'll get."
He folds the knife closed and pockets it. Then he slips his bleeding finger between his lips momentarily and sucks.
I don’t expect the level of awareness that punches through me. I don’t even know why it does.
Then he grips the sheet with both hands and strips it from the bed in a single, violent motion. The fabric billows and snaps, the bloodstain vivid against the white, and he bundles it under his arm with the efficiency of a man who has decided something and will not be questioned about it.
He turns to me. His eyes are dark, and the controlled fury I've been sensing since last night is closer to the surface now, visible in the set of his shoulders and the tight line of his mouth.
"No one touches you," he says. "Not the council. Not your father. Not me. Not until you decide otherwise."
My lips part, my brain still partially stuck on the way he sucked the blood from his finger, and now stumbling over the words that he just said like a baby deer taking its first steps.
“We should head down, Ma is making breakfast.”
Killian
I lead her down the stairs with the sheet bundled under my arm and a cut on my finger that stings less than the image of her face when I saidwe need to talk about the sheets.
Clinical. Resigned. Like she'd already calculated the cost of my decency and filed it underproblems I'll be punished for.
Twenty years old and she's already fluent in the language of consequence. Knows exactly how the machinery works. Who gets crushed first, where the blame settles, how quickly a woman's body becomes the map of someone else's failure. She didn't learn that from books. She learned it from standing in rooms with men who taught her that she was always the first expendable thing.
The kitchen is warm when we reach it. My mother is at the stove, her back to me, and the house smells like coffee and butter and bread. This is the scent that's been the baseline of every morning in this house since I was old enough to sit at the table. Ma cooks when she's thinking. She cooks when she's happy and when she's worried and when the world outside is burning, because Saoirse Orlov has always believed that you can't solve anything on an empty stomach.
She turns when she hears us, wiping her hands on a cloth, and her eyes drop immediately to the bundle under my arm.
She says nothing. Just looks at the sheet, then at me, then at the thin line of blood on my finger.
My mother is not a stupid woman. She raised six kids in a world that is dark and brutal, buried a husband who died badly, and managed to keep every one of us alive through a decade that should have destroyed this family. She knows what a bloodstained sheet means on the morning after a wedding.
“Let me take that for you, son,” she says gently, reaching for the sheets.
"I need this delivered to the council liaison," I say. "Today."
She nods with an encouraging smile that doesn’t reach her eyes as she takes the sheet from me. Unfolds one corner, just enough to see the stain. Her expression doesn't change. She dips her finger in a small glass of egg white and smears it over the bloody mark, making it run a little through the fibers. Making it look more realistic.
"I'll handle it," she says in the way that tells me she understands more than she is letting on. The way that says she can see I’m protecting Katya, and will protect her too.
"Thank you."
Her eyes shift as Katya comes up behind me, her face softening.
“Katya,” she says, placing the now folded sheet onto the very edge of the table before going to her and holding out both hands. She kisses Katya on both cheeks before pulling her into a hug. “Good morning, my darling.”
She pulls back, stroking her hands over Katya’s upper arms before pulling her to the table.
“Sit, sit. Breakfast is almost ready.”
