Mikhail's other hand went into his stomach, short, low, the kind of punch that looks like a hug from any other angle in the room. The man folded over Mikhail's shoulder. Mikhail caught him under the arm, smiled at someone passing, and led him toward the back the way you lead a friend who has had one too many.
I caught her before she finished falling.
She was lighter than I had let myself imagine. My arm went under her shoulders and my other hand to her waist, and she came against my chest with no resistance at all, every ounce of her nothing, her hair against my jaw, the smell of her coconut and something green, a cheap drugstore shampoo I would have bought a warehouse of right then if it would have helped. Her cheek found the inside of my collar. Her hand, the one that had been losing the glass, closed on my lapel with the last grip she had.
"It is all right," I said, low, against the crown of her head. "I have you. I have you, sweet girl."
She made a sound that was not a word.
I lifted her. Not the way a man lifts a body. The way Mikhail had moved the other one through the room, easy, unremarkable, a friend helping a friend out of a bad night. The bouncer at the side door did not look at me twice. The cold of the street hit my face, and the Maybach was at the curb, Yuri behind the wheel, the back door open, no questions.
"Compound."
Yuri nodded once. The door closed. The car moved.
She did not stay on her side of the seat. Whatever they had put in her wanted skin, wanted closeness, and her body went after it without asking her permission. She turned into me. Her cheek found my shoulder again. Her hand slid off my lapel and down. Her palm came to rest on my thigh, flat and warm and absolutely without intention. Every muscle in my leg went to stone underneath it.
"Mm..." she said, into the wool of my jacket. "Smell... good..."
Sleep, ptichka, I thought, and did not say it.
I kept my hands where they belonged. The left on the seat beside me, fingers spread on the leather. The right on the door handle, knuckles white enough that Yuri's eyes flicked to them in the rearview and away again. I had taken apart a man last springwith less effort than I was spending on not moving my hand two inches to the left.
She murmured something into my collarbone. Half a name that was not mine. A breath of a laugh with nothing inside it.
I would have walked back into that club and broken every bone in the hand that had dosed her glass. I would have done it with the same face I wore to family dinners. And I was also the man who would sit in this seat with her weight against my ribs and not shift one finger, because what was happening to her was not a thing a man used. That was the one line I had ever been sure of in my life, and I held it while she breathed against my throat for forty minutes of the parkway.
The gravel of the drive came up under the tires. The headlights washed the fieldstone wall, the willow Lily had planted her first spring here, the old oaks throwing their shadows long across the lawn. The house was warm in the windows. Somebody had left the lamp on in the front room.
Yuri got the door. I lifted her from the seat. She did not stir. She was not asleep so much as elsewhere. I took the steps two at a time with her against my chest and shouldered the front door.
Lily and Jade were on the couch, a throw between them, a movie I did not look at long enough to recognize. Lily saw me first and was off the couch before her glass was on the table.
"Help me," I said. "She has been drugged."
"Oh." Lily's voice went small and real, no performance in it. Jade was already moving.
They took her from me, one on each side, careful with her head, careful with her hair. They turned for the hallway that ran to the guest rooms, and I followed with the phone already at my ear, the family doctor's line ringing once before he picked up. He did not ask the questions I would have had to lie about. He said twenty minutes. He made it in eighteen.
He worked over her for a quarter of an hour with the door half open. Pulse, pupils, the small light, the cuff, a few quiet questions to Lily about how she had come in and what I had seen drop into the glass. He straightened finally and pulled the stethoscope off his neck.
"Common sedative. Not a heroic dose. She will sleep it off and wake clear by sunrise. Water at the bedside. Someone with her until she opens her eyes."
"Thank you."
"Daniil." He paused at the door with his bag. He had known me since I was twelve. "Whoever did it..."
"Will not see morning."
He nodded once and went.
Lily and Jade stood in the doorway when I came back down the hall with a fresh glass of water. Lily had her arms folded. Jade had her head tipped, that physical-therapist look she got when she was reading a body that was not on her table.
"Are we meeting lover boy Daniil tonight, or are we still pretending you only saved her?" Lily said.
"Or do we have to say the word for you?" Jade said.
"I pulled her out of a bad room. Nothing more."
