"I'm fine." The words are barely words at all, more breath than sound.
"You are the furthest thing from fine that I have ever seen in my life, and I have watched Killian try to set his own dislocated shoulder with a doorframe."
He doesn't answer. That scares me more than anything he's said since he appeared in the doorway of my cell like something conjured out of a nightmare.
I stop thinking about the men behind us. I stop thinking about the shouting, the lights flaring on in windows across the villa, thedogs finally waking up to bark at everything all at once. There's no room left for any of that. There's only this. His weight against my side. The blood I can feel soaking through his shirt and onto my hand where it's pressed to his ribs, hot and insistent.
I've spent what feels like forever in a cell learning how useless I am. Learning that my smile doesn't work here, that my charm is a foreign currency nobody wants to trade for, that everything I've ever been good at is worthless against a locked door and a language I can't speak.
I am done being useless.
"How far is it?" I ask, because he is getting heavier and heavier. "You said we need to get to a boat. How far is the boat?"
He grunts, which I choose to interpret as close, and then I drag him through a gap in the trees, my shoes sliding on gritty earth, my free hand fisting in his shirt because if I let go of him now I don't think I’ll get him back.
The shouting behind us picks up, a gun goes off, the sound flat and enormous in the dark. I don't scream. I want to. I want to scream until my throat gives out, because a week ago the loudest thing in my life was Katya laughing at one of my terrible dating profiles, and now there are men with guns thirty seconds behind me and the person keeping me alive is bleeding out against my side.
"Talk to me," I say, because if he stops talking, I'm afraid of what that means. "Say something. Anything."
"Iris." My name, rough, like it costs him. "Quiet."
"That's not anything, that's my name, I already know my name, I've had it for twenty-seven years."
"Quiet." But there's something under it now, something that might almost be the ghost of amusement, if he has room leftin him for amusement while he's leaking blood into both our hands.
We come out of the vineyard onto a dirt track that curves down toward a smudge of dark water, and for one terrible second his legs actually give, his whole weight dropping through my arms, and I go down with him because there's no version of this night where I let go of him.
"No." I get my knees under me, get my hands on his face, force his eyes to mine. They're dark and unfocused and trying so hard to stay on me that something in my chest cracks clean open. "You don't get to pass out on me. We are so close. I can see the water. Look, look at the water."
He looks. Or he tries to. His eyes drag toward the black glint beyond the dirt track and something in his jaw sets, some last reserve of will dragging itself up from wherever he keeps it.
I don't waste time being gentle. I strip my T-shirt off in one motion and wad it against the wound in his side, pressing hard, harder than feels kind, because Rafferty taught me that pressure stops bleeding.
"Hold this," I tell him, guiding his hand over the fabric, over mine, until I'm sure his fingers have enough strength to keep the pressure on their own. "Hold it there. Don't you dare let go."
I ignore the fact that I’m not just in my bra and jeans, and I get his arm around my shoulders again. This time I don't wait for him to find his feet. I find them for him, hauling him upright with a strength I didn’t know I had. It must be some deep animal reserve that's been sitting coiled in my body for a situation I’d never imagined myself experiencing.
I’m still here, I’m still alive, and I’m not going anywhere except home, and I’m taking him with me.
"Move," I tell him, echoing his own voice back at him, and something that might be a laugh, small and pained, huffs out of him against my matted hair.
We stumble down the track together, his weight dragging at my shoulder with every step, my whole body screaming with the effort of holding up a grown man while running on legs that haven't so much as walked anywhere in a week. Now’s the time I regret not eating more of the bread and cheese deposited into my cell every morning.
Mangia,Moustache’s voice echoes in my mind. Part of me hopes the man I’m lugging downhill didn’t kill Moustache, but since he rescued me, I suppose I can’t be picky about these things. I’ll have to ask him when he is in a better state. His daughter should know her father was a good man underneath the fact that he worked for a kidnapping shit stain of a human.
Behind us the shouting fractures into different directions, men searching the vineyard rows we've already left behind, buying us seconds I refuse to waste.
The water gets closer. I can smell it now, salt and diesel and something green underneath, and there, pulled up onto a strip of black sand, a small boat that looks like it was built for exactly this, for one desperate crossing in the dark.
"That's it," I say. "That's the boat. You said there'd be a boat."
"A boat," he agrees, and his voice sounds further away than it should, like he's speaking from the bottom of a pit.
I get him to the water's edge and my legs are shaking so hard I don't know how either of us is still upright. I don't stop to think about how insane this is, a Bratva princess in her bra and jeans, hauling a bleeding assassin toward a getaway boat in the middle of the night in a country she still hasn’t identified. I just move, because moving is the only thing I know how to do that mattersright now, and stopping to be afraid is a luxury that could get us both killed.
"Can you get in?" I ask, already guiding him toward the low side of the boat.
"I need you to push," he says, and it's the most words he's strung together in the last five minutes, which tells me exactly how much this is costing him.
