I don’t want to seal the crack back up.
God help me. I think I want to see what comes through it.
19
CINDY
He’s in the car when I come down from the appointment.
I don’t expect him. Roma drove me into the city this morning, so I assumed Roma would drive me home. But when I cross the plaza on my newly reconstructable knee and the door of the Cullinan opens, it’s Sevastian sitting in the back, watching me through the dark glass like he’s been parked there for hours. Maybe he has. He doesn’t say a word about the surgeon. He doesn’t have to. It’s all over his face, the careful nothing he wears when he’s done something enormous and refuses to be caught at it.
I get in. The door seals. Roma pulls us out into traffic, and the silence in the car is so loud I can barely hear the city through it. He’s in the seat beside me with one hand on his knee, eyes out the window, jacket gone, sleeves still rolled from whatever the day did to him. Three feet of leather between us, charged like the air before a slot pays out.
I should let it sit. I’m good at letting things sit. But I just spent an hour learning that this man, this criminal, this captor I keep telling myself I despise, reached into the worst wound I own and tried to heal it without ever wanting me to know. I cannot let that sit. It’s too big. It’s been getting too big for weeks now, the gift, the rose garden, the desert this morning when I almost kissed him myself, and I’m out of room to put any of it.
“Thank you,” I say. “For the doctor.”
Something moves across his face and shuts down again. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t.” My voice comes out shakier than I want. “Don’t do that. I know it was you. There’s nobody else it could be. You found the one man in the country who could fix the thing that broke me, you did it in secret, and you didn’t even want me to say thank you. So I’m saying it anyway. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” he says, flat as the highway, and then ruins his own cover by looking out the window like the view did something to him.
“You’re impossible.”
“It was a referral. Men make referrals.”
“You flew a surgeon across state lines for a woman whose real name you learned from a drunk girl in a dive bar.”
“And I’d send the drunk girl flowers,” he says, quiet, “if I were a man who sent flowers.”
The whole car goes still around that sentence.
I watch him reach for the cold. I’ve seen him do it before, in the count room, in my apartment, the warmth draining out of hisface like someone pulled a plug, the flat voice coming down like a shutter. “It was a practical decision. An asset that can’t run is a liability. Don’t read anything into it.”
“You’re lying.”
“I don’t lie.”
“You’re lying right now. To me, to yourself, because I said thank you and it scared you.” The words come faster than my fear can catch them, all the careful distance I’ve kept burning off at once. “You can ice me out all you want. I’ve watched you do it three times now. The second anything gets real, you go somewhere cold and slam the door. I’m done pretending I don’t see it. You felt something doing that for me. I know you did. It terrifies you, and I am so tired of both of us being terrified all the time.”
For a long moment he doesn’t speak. His face is at war with itself, and I think I’ve lost. I think the shutter’s coming down for good.
Then he leans forward. His voice goes rough. “Roma. Pull off.”
We come off the highway onto a dirt track that runs out into nothing. The city drops away behind us. The Mojave opens up huge and silver under a sky crowded with stars, more stars than I’ve seen since the night this whole impossible thing began.
The day’s heat lifts off the ground like a lid coming off, and the air through the cracked door tastes of dust, creosote, cold. Roma stops the car where the track gives out. He gets out without a word, walks off a distance into the dark to give us the desert, and then it’s just us.
The engine ticking. Forty miles of the same sand where it all started in blood. Somewhere out in the dark, the most dangerousdriver in Nevada is standing guard over his boss’s love life with his back turned, and if Roma has opinions, the desert keeps them.
Sevastian looks at me across the back seat. The cold is gone. What’s there instead is raw, undefended, a little desperate, and it undoes the last of me.
We’ve done this twice before and both times he ran the room. The desert, where he held all the power. The count room, where it was a transaction we both agreed to call nothing. Out here there’s no power to hold and no transaction to hide behind. There’s just a man who flew a surgeon across the country to fix my knee in secret, looking at me like I’m the most frightening thing he’s ever faced, and I think that might be true. I think I scare him more than the men trying to kill him do.
“I’m not good at this,” he says, low. “Whatever this is. I break what I reach for. You should know that about me first.”
“First before what?”
