Page 458 of Eight of Swords, Part Two

No one’s been above to check on Roman except Vasily, who gives a brisk nod when he comes back down.

‘Your room is damaged,’ he tells Riley as they stand outside Kade’s bedroom together. Lachlan is already inside. ‘Partially exposed.’

‘Doesn’t matter.’

Alone together, the silence between them is thick with all the necessary things neither of them can say.

Riley should apologise.

He should make excuses.

They should probably talk about… God, so much, in fact, but nothing comes up. Nothing forms. He just stares at the door, building up the strength to go inside.

Vasily asks, ‘Do you want me to wait for you?’

‘Huh?’

‘Outside.’

‘No.’ Riley frowns. ‘You’ve got better things to do.’

‘I have to see Blaire,’ he says more seriously. ‘I need to understand.’

‘Rike has her. I’ll take you there later. That work?’

Vasily says nothing, so Riley has to look up at him.

The downpour has left his long, dark hair in wild, wavy disarray, and he smells of the earthy forest they left behind. His skin is warm and carries traces of gunpowder, wet wool and watered blood, both that of others and the bright copper of his own on the left side of his neck, where Riley’s teeth broke skin. The bite sits livid above his cornflower tattoos, an ugly claim pressed into all that beautiful blue. The rhythm of his heart is already distinct to Riley, who can learn to hear a person coming before he ever sees or smells them. Every heartbeat has its own unique signature, independent of acceleration or resting rate. Riley thinks of it as heartsong. The spacing of its chambers, the force of the valves closing, the plush, wet depth of each contraction as muscle wrings blood through the body. They’re all completely different to Riley. He’s never heard two the same.

Vasily’s heart radiates a heavy, rolling cadence, a deep double-beat with the second stroke typically softer than the first, easily distinguishable even among dozens of others.

Riley thinks he could find it in the dark.

Messy, exhausted and spattered with death, Vasily Sorrenko has no right to be so beautiful, especially now. But that’s nothing compared to the way he looks at Riley, the depth of his gaze oddly knowing, as though he’s reading Riley when it is always… always Riley who reads people.

Riley opens the door. ‘Later, then.’

‘I will be around.’

The room is a gut-punch.

Lachlan is sitting on the floor beside the bed, holding Kade’s hand. His back is against the small bedside table. He’s staring blindly forward at precisely nothing, the brown study of a monster gone quiet.

‘Hey.’

Riley hasn’t seen Kade until now.

He doesn’t know what to say.

But he moves closer to his brother, who is still in uniform.

It’s unbearably strange. It creates a false hope in his heart that seeing him means he might wake him too. As though, if Riley just sat patiently enough, the way he did during those first few months when Jules was still deeply broken despite the Death Knot healing them, Kade would wake.

Riley is outside his body, seeing his little brother.

He’s back in the Tower seven years ago, when it was destroyed much like it is now and all he had was him. He wasn’t sure if Jules would ever get better. He wasn’t sure if he would ever speak properly again. Riley didn’t understand the curse then. He didn’t know why Jules was in so much pain all the time, but he knew why he kept saying Bodyguard over and over, because the memories were inside Riley.

Buried deep. Riley kept them separate, unwilling to infect his brother with his own poison, so they remained in the recesses of his mind, gold and lovely.