"Sleep, Killian."
"Seamus," he says. The name is a curse. "He sold us."
"I know."
"We're going to kill them," he says. "Seamus. The Russians. All of them."
"Yes. We are."
"Good."
His breathing evens out. The tension leaves his body in slow waves. He drifts off.
I lie there in the dark, holding the man I was supposed to destroy.
The safehouse settles. The wind dies down outside. I can hear the river moving, a low, constant rush.
In this room, in the dark, the blood vow isn't a cage anymore.
It’s the only thing keeping us alive.
I press my face into the back of his neck. I breathe him in.
I close my eyes. I listen to his heart beat against my arm.Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
And for the first time since I was fourteen years old, lying in a parking lot with a knife wound in my side, I fall asleep without checking the exits.
Chapter Sixteen
KILLIAN
Something warm is pressedagainst my right side.
My first conscious thought is that I'm dying, and the warmth is whatever comes after.
My second thought is that heaven—or hell, depending on the paperwork—wouldn't smell like gun oil and expensive soap.
My third thought isn't a thought at all. It’s a physical recognition. The weight and shape of another body occupying the same narrow stretch of furniture, fitted against my uninjured flank with a precision that suggests the person responsible solved the spatial problem the way they solve every problem: methodically, completely, and without wasting a single inch.
Alessandro.
I open my eyes.
The safehouse is dim, lit only by the grey morning light filtering through the cracks in the boarded-up windows. Dust motes dance in the shafts of light.
Alessandro’s face is four inches from mine.
In sleep, the composure hasn't just slipped—it's been dismantled entirely. The sharp features have softened. The jaw, usually set to a tension that could crack walnuts, is slack. His lips are parted, and his breathing moves through them in a rhythm so steady it could calibrate a metronome. His dark hair, always combed back with architectural precision, has fallen across his forehead.
He looks young. He looks tired. He looks like a man who fell asleep beside another man's wound and didn't leave.
The stitches in my side announce themselves with a low, throbbing heat. I test the damage—a micro-contraction of the oblique muscle—and the pain responds with a bright, clean spike that travels from my hip to my shoulder.
The wound is closed. The bleeding has stopped. I'm alive because the man sleeping next to me put his finger inside my body and stitched me shut with skills he learned on a dead pig in the mountains.
His hand is on my wrist. Still. Loose fingers curled over the bone, the grip so light I could break it by breathing. He held on all night. Through the fever and the dark hours where my body was making its private calculations about survival—he held on.
I don't move.
