"Semantics." She says it like she's swatting away an insect. "You came into a fortified villa full of armed men and pulled meout of a locked cell in the middle of the night. I'm calling it a rescue."
I would argue the point if I had the strength for it. I don't. I let it go, the same way I've let go of a hundred small things tonight that would have mattered on any other job, in any other life. I watch her instead. The sure line of her shoulders as she fights the wheel, the set of her jaw that says she has decided, somewhere in the last ten minutes, that she will get this boat and everyone in it to land or she will die trying, and there is no version of that plan that includes me dying first.
Nobody has ever fought this hard to keep me alive. I have people who need me alive for what I can do for them, contracts and reputations and the value of a man who has never failed. Nobody has fought for the thing underneath that. Nobody has looked at the man instead of the function.
I think, distantly, that I should find this alarming. Attachment is how you die in this line of work. Caring about the outcome for reasons that have nothing to do with the contract is how a man hesitates at exactly the wrong second, how he takes a bullet meant for someone else, how he becomes predictable, findable, killable.
I already took the bullet.
"There," she says, and there's relief in it, sharp and bright. "Lights. I see lights."
I follow her gaze to a low smudge on the horizon, a scatter of small, warm points that resolve, as we get closer, into a harbor. Fishing boats. A dock. A scatter of buildings climbing up a dark hillside, most of them dark themselves at this hour.
"Lipari," I say. My voice is barely holding together now, and I know it, and I push the words out anyway because she needs the information more than I need to conserve strength for anythingelse. "Quiet. No harbor authority this late. Tie up at the far end, away from the lights."
"Copy that." She says it like she's practiced military phrases her whole life, like this is exactly the kind of thing an Orlova daughter is trained for from birth, and maybe, in some sideways fashion, it is. "Far end. Quiet. Got it."
The engine note drops as she eases back on the throttle, and the boat settles lower in the water, slower now, less spray coming over the bow. My eyes want to close. I let them, for one second, then two, and force them back open when her hand tightens on mine again.
"No," she says. "Not yet. You can pass out the second we're on solid ground and not one minute before. I need you upright long enough to get off this boat, and then you can do whatever you want. But not yet."
"Bossy," I manage.
"You have no idea." But there's something under the words now, something that trembles slightly at the edges, the first real crack I've heard in her since the villa. "Please, Yakob. Just a little longer."
I’ve been shot before. I’ve bled in ditches and stairwells and the backs of cars driven by men I didn't trust. Nobody has ever asked me to stay. Nobody has ever needed me to, not like this, not with a fracture in their voice that says my absence would cost them something they aren't ready to lose.
"I'm staying," I tell her, and for the first time since the courtyard, since the knife and the ring and the finger that’s still in my jacket pocket like a promise made in blood, I believe it might be true.
I hold onto the thought the way I'm holding onto her T-shirt, pressed hard against a wound that is trying to take more fromme than I have left to give, and I let the sound of her voice pull me forward through the dark.
Iris
The boat scrapes bottom, and the jolt nearly throws me over the console.
I cut the engine because the noise feels like a scream in the quiet, and the sudden silence is almost worse. The small, dark harbor spreads out in front of us, a handful of fishing boats nodding on their moorings, and somewhere above the rooftops, a single dog barking itself hoarse.
"We're here," I say, mostly to convince myself.
Yakob doesn't answer. His eyes are closed, his head tipped back against the hull, and for one long, awful second, I think I've lost him.
"Hey." I get a hand on his jaw, turn his face toward me. "You promised me solid ground. Don't you dare renege on me now."
His eyes open, and the relief in my chest unclenches so hard it almost hurts.
"Renege," he repeats, like the word amuses him from somewhere very far away.
A laugh startles out of me, entirely inappropriate for the situation. I press my palm flat against his cheek for one second because I need to feel that he's warm, that he's still here, and then I make myself move.
Pulling the boat closer to the wall, I manage to tie it to a post. Getting Yakob out of the boat is its own kind of nightmare.He can stand, gray-faced and swaying, one arm slung over my shoulders while I brace my legs the way I've watched Killian brace his when he's spotting Liam on the gym equipment at home. Like my whole body is a wall instead of a person. We stumble up a narrow stone ramp slick with algae, past the moored boats, into a warren of shuttered buildings that smell like salt and diesel.
I tow him into the shadow of a stacked pile of lobster traps and lower him down against the wall. For a second, I just crouch there, breathing, my hands shaking against my knees.
"Okay," I say. "Okay. New plan."
"You had an old plan?" he asks, one eyebrow raised.
"The old plan was don't die. We're keeping that one. This is plan is in addition." I peel his hand away from his side to check the wound and immediately wish I hadn't. The T-shirt I had balled against it is soaked through, black in the low light, and the smell of copper is thick enough to taste. "Plan two is I find you an actual doctor, because I have officially reached the limit of what I learned from watching my brothers get patched up at the kitchen table."
