“You told the truth in a room full of men who spend their lives sniffing out lies.” Another fragment. Click. “Every one of them believed you. You know why?”
“Because I had blood on my face.”
“Because you’re you.” The tweezers paused. His hand found the top of my head — not holding, resting. The weight of his palm against my skull. “My little fighter.”
The words landed in my chest. Warm. I closed my eyes.
He worked through the rest of the glass in silence. Methodical. Patient. Each fragment located and removed with the same unhurried attention he gave to everything that mattered—the brushing, the bath, the buttons on the moon pajamas. When he was done, he ran his fingers through my hair one more time. Checking. The final pass of a man who would not leave glass near something he loved.
Then he sat down across from me and pulled up his shirt.
The stitches. The wound at his ribs—the one from the Bratva fight, the one I’d watched him rebandage every morning. It had torn open in the car. The skin around it was angry red, the edges gaping, the careful work of whoever had closed it the first time undone by the impact of his body covering mine.
He laid out the supplies on the kitchen table with the casual efficiency of a man performing routine maintenance. Needle. Thread—the medical kind, thin, curved. Antiseptic in a brown bottle. Gauze. Tape.
“Hand me the antiseptic,” he said.
I handed it to him. Our fingers touched on the bottle. His were steady. Mine weren’t.
He cleaned the wound. Didn’t flinch. The antiseptic pooled in the torn skin and ran down his ribs in a thin clear line and he didn’t make a sound. I watched his face—the set of his jaw, the dark eyes focused downward, the particular concentration of a man who was sewing himself shut and treating it as no more significant than mending a shirt.
The needle went in.
I looked away. Then looked back. The sound of it—not a sound, really, more a sensation, the almost-inaudible resistance of needle and thread through skin—made my stomach turn. But I held the gauze. I held the tape. I watched his hands work because looking away felt like abandoning him, and I was done abandoning people.
“Breathe,” he said. To me. He was the one with a needle in his skin and he was telling me to breathe.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re turning green.”
“I’m naturally this color.”
The corner of his mouth moved. The almost-smile. The one that transformed his face from wanted poster to something I wanted to crawl inside and live in.
He finished. Tied off. Cut the thread with his teeth—a gesture so casual, so absurdly practical, that I laughed. The laugh surprised me. It came from somewhere beneath the exhaustion and the grief and the residual terror and it sounded real.
“Come here,” he said.
I went.
He pulled me between his knees. His hands found my face—tilting, examining, the dark eyes tracking the cut above my eyebrow. The one the glass had left. Still open, still seeping, the blood dried in a line down my temple.
The antiseptic stung. A hiss left me before I could stop it.
“I know,” he said. Soft. The Daddy voice. The register that made everything else quiet down. “I know. Almost done.”
He cleaned the cut. Butterfly-closed it with strips so small his fingers looked absurd handling them—the thick, scarred hands performing microsurgery on my forehead with a gentleness that had no business existing in the same body that had fired through a car window at sixty miles an hour.
“There,” he said. His thumb traced the edge of the bandage. Gentle. The way you’d touch something you’d just fixed and wanted to make sure would hold. “My brave girl.”
The bath was next. The ritual.
He ran the water while I sat on the edge of the bed with Midge in my lap and the rabbit under my arm and the ruins of the black dress still on my body. The steam curled through the doorway. The mirror fogged. The sound of water filling porcelain—the oldest sound, the pre-language sound, the one my body recognized before my brain and responded to by releasing things it had been holding.
He undressed me. Slow. The ruined dress peeled away—stiff with dried blood, embedded with glass dust, the fabric that had been poured onto me that morning now a record of everything that had happened since. Each piece removed and set aside. Not discarded. Handled. Even ruined, even done, he treated my clothes like they mattered because they’d been on my body and my body mattered.
The water took me. Warm. My shoulders dropped. My spine curved.
