"Yakob, I..." Her voice breaks apart, and I hold her through it, steady, devoted, greedy for every second of it and I ravish her.
Afterward I move up her body and she pulls me down to her, and I brace my weight on my forearms, careful of nothing anymore except her, and when she wraps herself around me thelast of it goes. The hollow. The haunted. The twenty years of being a loaded weapon in an empty room.
I'm not empty. Not anymore. I'm hers.
I press my forehead to hers in the dark.
"Thank you," I say, and I don't explain it, and she doesn't ask, because she already knows. She's known since the fever. She heard me calling into the dark and instead of running she lay down beside a ghost and made him human.
Iris
I wake up on the third morning wrapped around a professional killer, and my first coherent thought is that I have never slept better in my life.
His arm is still around me. That's the headline. I fell asleep on the very edge of his bedroll with my hand over his heart after everything we’d done, holding all his terrible history where he'd set it down. He could have moved me. He's strong enough now. He could have transferred me to the bedroll and taken the cot. Instead his arm is around me and his chin is near the top of my head, and under my palm his heart is beating steadily.
I’m naked, and I’ve never felt more alive.
The already small house now feels impossibly tiny. Two rooms, a terrace, a view that goes all the way to Africa if you believe hard enough. It fit us fine when we were surviving anextraction.
He stirs, his arm tightening around me briefly as he remembers what happened. If it weren’t for the way my body still felt so lax, I wouldn’t believe it myself. That’s the thing about Yakob. He is solid and real, and yet everything feels like it was possibly just a dream, and then I question what actually happened until my brain starts telling me it must have been a dream.
Last night wasn’t a dream.
I heard his story. I heard the human in him and it snapped what was left of my resolve. I’m sure psychologists all over the world have a name for what we did and why I did it. Some kind of hero rescuer complex and gratitude and relief all mixed up.
They wouldn’t account for the vulnerability. The way he looks at me when he doesn’t think I can see. The way he makes my insides quiver with want.
I took what I wanted. But he wanted it too.
Now he's up, moving through the rooms doing quiet useful things, and the house has shrunk to the size of a shoebox and the size of him takes up most of it.
We pass in the kitchen between the sink and the table, and when my shoulder brushes his chest, I feel it in my teeth. He reaches past me for the water jug and the inside of his arm crosses the outside of mine, and I stand there holding a spoon like I've forgotten what spoons are for. Dmitri the stove hisses at me twice, angrily, before I can get him to light.
And Yakob's no better. That's the part that's ruining me. I catch him looking, expecting the observational glances I've gotten used to, door, window, track, me. The security rotation of a man who counts me among the things to always be aware of.
This is different. This time his gaze stays. I'm plaiting my hair at the window with the sun coming in, working through it with my fingers because there's no brush in this entire building, and I feel his attention land on me like a hand between my shoulder blades. I look over. He doesn't look away. Three days ago he'd have looked away.
"You're staring," I say.
"Yes," he says, and goes back to the map he's marking like he didn't just take my whole nervous system offline with one syllable.
At noon he tells me the plan, because apparently, we have one now. His man with a boat, a real one, not the ferry, will be at the east cove in two days and he will take us to Italy. From there, a car to an airstrip on the other side of the country, then a pilot with a plane that will take me home. He lays out the coordinates and contingencies, and I listen and nod in the right places while a completely different sentence gets louder and louder inside my chest.
Two days. That's what's left of this. Two days, and then the world comes back, with my brothers in it, and his contracts, and whatever a bratva ghost does when the job is finished.
I've been kidnapped, caged, rescued, and shot at, and it's the wordstwo daysthat put a stone in my stomach.
I spend the day telling him about Ken and Vinny, and Slinky. Little snippets that will stay with me forever. Vinny’s dispassion, how Ken and Slinky were sneaking around having sex at any given opportunity, and how I’m pretty sure she was the head guy’s wife, judging by the size of the ring on her finger. How Ken attacked me and called metroia. That makes Yakob’s jaw clench in a way that sends butterflies through my stomach. How Mustache saved me and had a blistering argument with Ken.
I tell him about Moustache and how he took care of me as much as anyone could in those circumstances. How I hope he is okay now his boss is dead because from what I could tell, all he wanted was to look after his family. How it felt like he had got stuck working in a situation he never wanted to be part of, so made the best he could of it even though we couldn’t understand each other. The way he knew he shouldn’t have, but showed me a picture of his daughter and granddaughter anyway, by way of explanation as to why he wanted to help me. Why he regretted what was happening.
The dressing change is at nine. It has become the fixed point to end the day, and I've kept it clinical through discipline and sheer force of will. He sits on the edge of the cot and pulls his T-shirt over his head, I kneel between his knees with the med kit open beside me, and it is all extremely medical and fine.
The wound is good. That's the professional assessment. The edges have closed, no heat, the new skin shiny and pink, his body doing in days what would take another man weeks. Soon it will be just one more scar on the atlas, a place and a date. Sicily. This year. There was a woman. He got shot while rescuing her. Then he taught her what wanting someone actually feels like, and ruined her for the dating apps forever.
I smooth the last strip of tape down and my hands don't leave.
I watch them not leave. They're resting flat on his ribs, one on either side of the dressing, rising and falling with his breath. That’s when I notice his breath isn’t steady, and neither is mine. My eyes lift to his, the question must be obvious in them.
