"Are you okay?"
No. I wasn't okay. I'd never been okay. I was a monster shaking from exhaustion and adrenaline withdrawal and the unbearable relief of being in the same room as her.
"Yeah," I said. "I'm okay."
She left her hand where it was. And I stood there and let her feel my heartbeat and I didn't move and I didn't speak and I didn't try to explain or justify or apologize for any of it.
Because there was nothing to explain.
I'd cleaned up after monsters my whole life.
Now I was one.
The only difference—the only thing that mattered—was that she was still here. And so was I.
She dropped her hand and stepped back.
"Come on," she said. "You need to sleep."
She led me to the bedroom. Navigated the hallway in the dark like she'd been born in this cabin, like the darkness was hers and she was just letting me borrow it.
I sat on the edge of the bed. She stood in front of me for a moment, close enough that I could smell the generic shampoo and the clean cotton of the shirt I'd gotten for her and, underneath it all, the scent that was just her. Just Raven.
She touched my face. Lightly. Her fingers traced my jaw, my cheekbone, the dark circles under my eyes that I could feel without seeing. Mapping me the way she mapped everything—by touch, by instinct, by the kind of knowledge that didn't need light.
"Sleep," she said.
Then she left the room.
I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the wall and listened to her move through the kitchen. The soft pad of her feet. The sound of water running. A cabinet opening and closing.
She was safe.
I lay down. Closed my eyes.
And for the first time in a very long time, the darkness behind my eyelids didn't look like a crime scene.
It looked like home.
CHAPTER 25
RAVEN
The piano wasn't a Steinway.
I knew that the moment my fingers found the keys for the first time. The touch weight was heavier, the action stiffer, the sustain pedal sitting a millimeter lower than the one I'd broken in over six years at The Silver Table. This instrument had been played hard and stored badly and loved imperfectly.
But I didn't care.
Because it was mine.
In this apartment, in this city whose name I was still testing on my tongue like a foreign word, in this life assembled from borrowed documents and cash and the deliberate erasure of everything I'd been—this piano was mine. Milo had found it and had it delivered to our apartment as a surprise.
That was three weeks ago.
In the first week, I'd only touched it in passing. Trailing my fingers across the fallboard the way you'd brush a hand over a stranger's shoulder.
The second week, I'd played scales. Just scales. Nothing that required feeling.
