Chapter 56
Chapter Fifty-Six
BASTION
Her lips were the wrong color.
Not pink, not flushed from sleep or laughter. Blue almost like porcelain. When I touched them, my fingers went numb. When I pressed my mouth to hers, I couldn’t feel her breathing. No breath to steal. Only cold.
“Baby,” I said, and the word was already breaking. “Baby, wake up. Come on. Please?—”
Her skin didn’t give. I rubbed her arms hard enough to burn, tried to coax the color back the way I did after a nightmare or a migraine. Her wrists felt like stone in my hands.
“Em.” I leaned in. “Please.”
Silence.
There were flowers in there. White ones, too many. Wax candles everywhere.
The light was wrong, low and yellow, like an old chapel that had forgotten how to open its windows.
My knuckles bumped wood when I reached for her shoulder. Too smooth to be a table or a bench. I looked down and the world tilted.
A coffin .
I was standing beside her coffin.
My throat closed, and it wasn’t a sound that came out of me, not at first. More like an animal scream.
“No, no—no.”
I tried to lift her. But she wouldn’t move.
Whoever dressed her had done it badly; they didn’t know her, didn’t know where the fabric always rubbed. I ripped at the neckline like a man drowning, threw the stupid pearls so hard it bounced against the chapel kept rolling.
“Wake up.” I put my mouth over hers and breathed like I could force air her. “Emilia, wake up.”
Her lips stayed cold.
The silence got louder, which was a trick silence knew. It filled your ears with a pressure that felt like drowning.
I pressed my thumb into her sternum, searching for a rise, a betrayal. Nothing. I slid both hands under her shoulders and tried to lift her out of the box altogether. The coffin tilted an inch and slammed back.
“If she dies, I die,” I told the lid. I told the flowers. “Do you hear me?”
If she dies, we die. If she dies?—
If she?—
If—
I wasn’t good at prayers. I had learned the wrong ones. I had learned the kind that asked for blood. My hands shook so hard I had to lace my fingers together.
But I said them anyway, the ones with no words.
I kissed her blue mouth again.
“Breathe,” I begged into the cold. “Please, baby. You can have all of mine.”
There was no air without her. No reason to keep the gentle parts of me alive.
There were footsteps somewhere far away. Men who folded women into boxes and called it a rite. Men who would lower her and speak about legacy.
They would put her under and call it order. They would call it tradition and shake hands over the grave. They would pretend they hadn’t killed a living thing to keep a crest alive.
“You can’t have her,” I told the room, the candles, god, if he was skulking there. “You can’t.”
I pulled her hands out of the folded pose someone had forced on them and rubbed them hard, hating the way the fingers didn’t hold mine back. I pressed my mouth to each knuckle, to the lines where her rings should sit. “Come back. You hear me? Come back.”
The world tilted again.
The ceiling went dark. The flowers lurched at me
I jolted awake, my breathing sharp. The room—our room was quiet. There was a weight against my ribs.
Emilia.
She lay on her side between us, cheek pressed to the pillow. One knee hooked, the sheet caught at the top of her thigh.
“Feel,” Luca said, his hand was clamped on my forearm.
He took my shaking hand and dragged it, flat against her ribs. He pressed until my palm had to register it.
A beat.
Another.
Alive.
My mouth opened but I couldn’t speak. Luca’s hand stayed on mine, until he could feel my pulse come down, and the shake turned into a tremor into a hold.
“What,” he said, not asking. He didn’t need the words. He wanted me to say them. To make them small.
“She was—” The word stuck in my throat. “Coffin. ”
I expected him to flinch away from the superstition of saying it in the dark. He didn’t. He went still, the way he did before a trigger went, or a deal broke bad. Then I felt his palm on Emilia’s hip, grounding both of us. “Not here,” he said. “Not on our watch.”
The image would not be argued with. Blue mouth, stiff hands. Wax flowers. Her name on engraved on a coffin lid.
I slid lower in the bed because I couldn’t stop shaking. I hooked my arm around her waist and pulled her in until there was no space between us. She made a small sound. I buried my face in her shoulder and breathed.
She sighed only to roll slightly on to me. A choice her body made even asleep.
It undid me.
I pressed my mouth to her temple. Then the curve where her ear. Then the crown of her head. The kisses felt like triage, like I could shove heat into her with my mouth.
Luca’s hand stroked her side slow. I could hear the little sound he made when he counted breaths without meaning to, when he matched the rise and fall because that was how he had learned to hang on.
He used his other hand to smooth the hair back from her face, careful not to wake her. His ring tapped the bedhead once, a soft tick. I knew that sound. It meant he was keeping time. I knew it meant he would not let the night take us.
“She’s warm,” he said eventually. A fact. “She’s here.”
My chest tightened. “They’ll take her,” I heard myself say, and I didn’t know who the they was in the middle of the night—dynasties, men with rings, time, the idea of fate.
“They won’t. Because we break the hands that reach.”
The coffin wouldn’t leave me. I did what I could to burn new images over it. This one, her mouth parted against my shoulder. The small weight of her hand heavy on my chest .
“They’d lock her under and call it law,” I said into her hair. “They’d smile at us over it. They’d make it sound like mercy.”
He didn’t have to ask who they were now.
The dynasty. The way the city was taught to look at girls like her and see instruments, bonds, collateral, names that could be moved from ledger to ledger if you wrote small enough.
The way a crest thought a body was a thing.
All for the bloodline. Power to stay where they bred it.
“Then we don’t speak their language,” he said, his hand gently tracing her side. “We write our own.”
I nodded.
“I kissed her. And it was like kissing stone.”
He heard the thing under the thing. “Kiss her again.”
I did. Her temple again. Her jaw. My mouth touched the corner of hers.
“Feel,” he said again, and pressed my hand deeper into her ribs, to feel her breathing.
I catalogued her the way I always did when fear made my eyes stupid. The raise and fall of her stomach. The little twitch in her thigh. She rested her foot on my leg.
“I hate her in blue,” I said. “She only looks good in colors we give her.”
“Mhm.” Luca’ kissed the top of her shoulder. “She looks best like this.”
“Like ours,”
He came closer across her. Caging her between us. He wasn’t sleeping either. We were animals, ears up, not because there was a sound, but because there might be.
“Say what you need,” he said, quiet.
“I need the thirty days to go faster,” I said. I was not good at asking for mercy; I knew better than to think it existed. “I need her on the island with a ring and ink and a law that pretends to keep up. ”
“We move Damius in the morning,” he said. “He’ll hear it, he’ll see it, he’ll call it duty, which is just a different word for love when a man like that’s honest.”
“And the Adams?”
“We’re already closing that hand. They’ll sign because their neck is tired.”
“And then, they’ll try to kill her.”
He didn’t lie to me. “Yes.”
I pulled her closer because there was nothing else to pull. “Over my body.”
“That’s the plan,” he said, and somehow it was not dark humor. It was logistics.
We didn’t raise our voices, our girl needed sleep. We made vows under our breath and in the shape of our hands instead. I kissed her, again, and again. Each kiss a vow.
The dream still crawled at me.
“Tell me what you saw,” he said after a while. He wouldn’t let it stick. He was cruel in all the ways that saved us.
“Flowers,” I said. “The white kind that smelled like wax. Candles. Someone hung velvet and forgot to open a window.” The words came easier the more I made them stupid. “A stupid strand of pearls. A dress she would hate.”
He exhaled. “We’re burning those flowers in the morning. Just to tilt the scales.”
“She was cold,” That part had to be said because it was the part that would haunt me if I didn’t.
“Not now,”
“Not now,” I agreed. “Now she’s hot and between us where she belongs.”
He made a sound that was like a laugh. “There he is.”
Her breath marked time for a while. I felt her hand shift on my chest again, finding the place just above my heart.
“Bas, ”
“Mhm.”
“You want me to sleep?” He meant, did I want him to make his body go still in the way that told mine it was allowed.
“No,” I said, because the truth was messier. “I want to keep watch.”
He nodded. “We do that.”
The war room would be there in the morning.
Damius would sit and watch us say the part men like him heard in a different pitch. It wasn’t love, it was Dynasty, bloodline, the future of our crest and power our family hadn’t had before. The city would need violence and Luca’s control to put it back into line.
But none of that was allowed here.
“Bas,” he said again. “You hear her?”
It took me a second to know what he meant.
Then I did. The small noise that wasn’t quite a snore, the little catch on the second breath, the hush that followed when she changed sides in the middle of night and tucked closer to whichever of us was closer.
“Yeah,” I said, and I had to close my eyes because my chest squeezed. “Yeah.”
He tapped his ring once, twice. “Good.”
I thought of the chapel again, because I was stubborn and because you broke a thing best by touching it after you had learned its weaknesses.
Coffin. Blue. Brass. Then I layered over it, with her mouth parting under my kiss because she was breathing.
Her hand, asleep, moving toward me because that was where it belonged.
Luca’s hand pulling me from the darkness.
“They’ll call it a merger,” I said, voice gone rough because of these words. “They’ll write notices and put white flowers on tables and sip expensive drinks and pretend to discuss markets.”
“They can throw parties,” he said. “We take vows. ”
I nodded. “Ink.”
“Skin,” he agreed.
“Her name. On us. Shoulder to shoulder.”
He hummed, agreeing.
“And ours,” I said, kissing the top of her head again, “on her, where no one could pretend they could read around it.”
I felt him watching me in the dark.
She shifted. Her knee slid up my thigh and her toes caught my calf.
There was no room for a box here. There was only the hard work of staying alive next to the person you would ruin a city for.
“Sleep if you want,” he said. “I’ll keep time.”
“You sleep,” I said. “I’ll hold.”
“We’ll share,” he wasn’t not talking about the night.
I kissed the crown of her head again.