“You let me blame you for three years,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“That’s either very noble or very stupid.”
“I’ve been told it’s usually the same thing with me.”
She turned to look at him then, and he made himself hold it. Her eyes in this light were complicated—green shot through with gold, the hazel catching the amber of the late sun. She was searching his face for something, the way she had in that concrete room when Raines first walked in. Looking for the gap between what he said and what he meant.
He didn’t try to close his expression or manage what she found. He was done managing things when it came to Vivi.
Whatever she saw, it softened something in her. Not much. Barely perceptible. But he’d been studying this woman’s face for the better part of a decade, and he caught it.
“I’m still angry,” she said.
“I know.”
“Not just at you. At him. At the whole situation.” Her jaw tightened. “He didn’t get to make that decision for me. Neither of you did.”
“No,” Dom agreed. “You’re right.”
She blinked. He watched her recalibrate slightly, like she’d been braced for an argument.
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay,” he said.
eleven
Sabin had beenin the room long enough to name the cracks in the ceiling. The long diagonal one he called Bayou because it split and reconverged like a river tributary. He knew the floor was thirty-six tiles. He knew the fluorescent light flickered twice every forty minutes. He knew the guards rotated on a schedule that was either random or designed to appear random, which amounted to the same problem.
Sabin let out a slow breath, stared at the ceiling, and wished the Bayou crack was actually a bayou. He missed home.
The lockpick was still where he’d worked it after Vivi’s visit—tucked into the hem of his waistband, which had taken two hours of patience and significant discomfort. The little ceramic pick poked him whenever he moved, but he was grateful Vivi had managed to slip it to him.
Pride swelled, warm and familiar. Hisp'tite sœurhadn't lost her edge, no. Still sharp as ever, that one.
His left hand was wrecked. The two broken fingers were splinted and throbbing in steady pulses, and his grip strength on that side was all but nonexistent. But his index and middlefingers moved. His right hand was intact, zip-tied to the chair arm at the wrist but otherwise functional.
He’d picked locks in worse shape. He’d picked locks one-handed in the dark in a moving vehicle, drunk on Chartreuse, while Vivi kept watch from a window ledge three stories up.
Mais, two broken fingers and thirty-six tiles?C'était pas rien.Practically a vacation.
He let himself run through the escape in his head the way he used to run through a job — not rushing it, not skipping steps, treating it with the respect of a thing that would kill him if he got it wrong. Free the wrists.
There was one guard who had a conscience, or something close enough to one to be useful. He brought food when the others forgot, positioned himself slightly apart from the group when orders were given, and answered Sabin’s question about Vivi with a single shake of his head that he almost certainly hadn’t been authorized to give.
That guard was the variable. If the man could be convinced to look the other way—or better, to open the right door—then the escape became a problem of logistics rather than a problem of force. Force, in his current condition, with his hand wrecked and his body still not fully clear of whatever they’d given him in those early sessions, was not the play.
He tucked the thought away when he heard footsteps.
The footsteps were wrong. Not the heavy, even cadence of the guards.
The locks turned. The door opened.
A man in a white coat entered carrying a black case. He didn’t introduce himself.
Sabin watched him set the case on the metal table and open it with the practiced click of latches he’d operated a thousand times before. Medical supplies. Real ones, not the basic fielddressing the guard had brought before. Blood draw equipment. A pressure cuff. A penlight.
