Chapter 12
NAOMI
The storm catches us on the climb to Ravello, fat drops first, then the sky opening all at once, and by the time the gates close behind the cars the road below us is a river with opinions.
The safehouse is old stone above a black drop of valley, shutters already banging somewhere, and I’m carried through the rain into a kitchen full of armed men trying to look domestic.
Someone has made coffee nobody is drinking.
Someone else is field-stripping a rifle beside a fruit bowl.
Carried, because my feet are cut, my heels are in a fish plant, and when I started to argue about walking, Khristofer picked me up mid-sentence, crossed the courtyard, set me on a long table like a delivery he’d signed for.
“Kit,” he says, to the room.
The room produces a first-aid kit at speed. The gray one appears with dry towels, assesses me like a structural crack, and vanishes to wherever gray men go, taking every other man with him. The generator mutters somewhere below. The lights swing once on their cords.
Khristofer kneels at my feet with the kit open.
“I can do that,” I say.
“You can’t see the soles of your own feet.
” He takes my ankle in one hand. His hands are exactly as I remember them.
I put the thought down and step over it.
He works in silence, tweezers, antiseptic, a grit of gravel in a dish, my blood on white gauze in thin lines.
He’s good at it in a way that has history in it.
The rain lands on the roof like applause that won’t stop.
“Alessia,” I say.
“Knows you’re alive. She was informed the moment you were in the car.” A pause, the tweezers steady. “She threatened my second-in-command with a notebook. He’s still discussing it.”
The laugh comes out of me sideways, half hiccup, the first one since the corridor, and it unlocks something dangerous behind my ribs, so I stop it. He looks up at me when it stops, one look, then goes back to my feet.
“There’s arnica for the wrists,” he says. “And a doctor an hour behind the storm, when the road reopens. You’ll see him tonight.”
“No doctor.”
The tweezers stop.
“No doctor,” I say again, flat in a way I need him to mistake for shock. A doctor means an exam. An exam means questions, a chart, the one fact in my body I can’t have travel through this house of professionals. “I’ve been checked for worse by better. I want a shower and a phone.”
“You’ll get both.” He closes the kit. “And the doctor.”
“I said no.”
“I heard you.” He stands, and the size of him arrives all over again, rain still darkening his shoulders. “You were taken from under my watch, held twenty hours, zip-tied. People decline doctors when they’re hiding an injury or hiding from the memory of one. Either way the doctor comes.”
“People decline doctors,” I say, “when the last four people who decided things for them had guns.”
That reaches him somewhere, a small change around the eyes. I hate that I’m using the truth as a tool, and I use it anyway. The alternative is a stethoscope, then the end of everything I still control.
“The shower’s through there,” he says finally. “The doctor waits until you ask. Nobody else decides. That’s the arrangement.”
“That’s the arrangement,” I say, and don’t let him see how much the winning weighs.
The shower is hot and endless. I stand in it until the fish plant runs off me into the drain, then longer, hands where they go, doing the count. Ten weeks, five days now, past midnight. Still just us. Still nobody’s business.
When I come out, wrapped in a robe built for a giant, the storm has settled into siege and the argument is waiting for me in the doorway of a bedroom with candles on the sill.
“The power’s about to go,” Khristofer says. “The line comes down the valley, the valley’s underwater. This is the reinforced room. You’re in it.”
I look past him. One room. One bed, wide as a runway. One window, shuttered, with the rain machine-gunning it. His jacket is already over the chair.
“And where are you?”
“Here.” No apology anywhere in it. “The guest wing isn’t swept, we arrived at speed, my men have the corridors.
This door is steel under the wood, and it locks from inside.
You’ll sleep behind it, and so will I, because the last time I left you in a room with one door, professionals came through it. ”
“So I’ve been upgraded. From a fish plant to a nicer cell with a nicer guard.”
“To the only room on this coast I can promise you wake up in.” His voice doesn’t rise.
It never rises, I’m learning, it just gets more exact.
“Tomorrow we talk about what happens next. Tonight the road is a river, the plant is burning paperwork, Stepan Pushkin is learning what tonight cost him, and you are alive, which is the only line on the whole night I’d sign again. ”
“I didn’t ask you to sign anything.” It comes up out of me hot and sudden, the whole day arriving at once.
“I didn’t ask for the corner cabana or the ballroom or whatever war I’ve been drafted into.
I had a life this morning. A job, a deadline, a flight home.
I’ve been zip-tied in a fish shed by men who knew your name, interviewed by a lunatic in a sand-colored suit who talked about me like a currency.
Now I’m in a stone fortress in a bathrobe being told which room I sleep in, and you want me to be grateful the cell has candles. ”
“And tomorrow, what? I vanish? I had four hundred words due on the award night. Clara will call. My mother expects her postcard. People notice when a person stops.”
“People are noticing tonight that you’re resting in your suite.” His voice stays level. “Your editor got an email an hour ago. Food poisoning at the tasting, terrible luck, recovering on doctor’s orders, copy to follow. Your byline sends its apologies.”
“You emailed Clara as me?”
“My second drafted it. He’s read your published work. He tells me your commas are distinctive.”
“That’s a violation of something.”
“It’s a violation of several things.” Not one degree of shame anywhere on him. “All of them smaller than a fish plant.”
“No.” He crosses the room until the candlelight has to choose between us.
“I want you angry. Angry means you understand it. What I don’t want is you under the illusion that any of it un-happens if I drive you home tonight.
They know your name, Naomi. They know your face laughing at mine.
That has no reverse gear. The only direction left is through, and through goes past me. ”
“And whose fault is that?”
“Mine,” he says, no gap at all, and it takes the floor out from under my next sentence. “Mine. One photograph, one night I couldn’t leave alone, and your whole life is standing in a bathrobe in a safehouse. I’ve run it all night and it comes out the same every time. You’re here because of me.”
The power goes.
Not a flicker. The house drops into candlelight, into rain-noise, the generator below coughing through a failed audition, somebody down the corridor swearing gently in Russian, and the two of us stand a foot apart in a small gold ring of light with the whole black storm leaning on the shutters.
“The fault was never the question,” I hear myself say, quieter. “I know whose fault it is. I was there when you kicked the door in. I’m asking a smaller question. Why did you come yourself?”
Rain. Candle hiss. His eyes in the low light are the only pale thing in the room.
“You had my men,” I go on, and my voice won’t stay level, it’s been such a long day, “you had the gray one, you had professionals. Stepan built the whole thing as a test, he told me so, he stood in my cell pleased as a landlord and said if you’re the once, he comes for you.
And you came. In person. First door. So either you’re bad at tests, Khristofer, or I’ve had two months of being wrong about what that night was. ”
The silence goes on one beat past bearable.
“I’m bad at tests,” he says, “where you’re the question.”
The distance between us stops existing. I don’t know which of us closed it.
I have his rain-damp shirt in both fists, his mouth is on mine, and it’s nothing like July.
July was champagne. This is the bottle broken against a hull, twenty hours of terror with somewhere to finally go, and he kisses me like a man taking something back from the people who touched it.
“Naomi Vale,” he says against my jaw, my name in full, both parts, the terms burning down between us. “Say it.”
“Khristofer Glazunov.” His name breaks out of me half laugh, half surrender, the name I paid for in a fish shed, and saying it does something to us both. The anonymous stranger dies right there, and this is worse, this is a person. “That’s everything I have. Two names.”
“It’s more than anyone else has.” His hands find the robe’s belt and stop, holding the knot, his forehead coming down to mine, breath ragged, the last checkpoint. “You can still...”
“Don’t you dare offer me the door twice.” I pull the knot myself.
The robe goes. In the candle-dark he takes one long breath at the sight of me, gold light, shadows, nothing else, and I’m glad past speech for the dark’s mercy even as his eyes move over me like they’re reading in braille.
My body is a changed country and only I know the borders moved.
Tonight the dark keeps my secret. Tonight I get to be only this.
He says something in Russian that I don’t need translated, low, wrecked, his hand flexing hard at my hip, and the last thing that leaves me before speech does is a laugh, because a man who runs two coasts just lost his second language to a bathrobe on the floor.
The bed takes us like the storm takes the coast.
It’s ferocious, wordless, then not wordless at all, his voice low against my ear telling me what twenty hours felt like in a language of grip and breath, my nails writing back.
In the gold light he’s rain-dark and enormous, the scar a pale stroke along his ribs that I set my mouth to on the way past, his breath catching once.
The watch ticks somewhere near my ear when his hand cradles my skull. I map what July was too greedy to memorize, the trench of his spine, the flat of his stomach going hard under my palm, the sound he makes when my nails cross it, low, involuntary, mine.
Claiming is the only honest word for it, both directions, my teeth at his shoulder over the collarbone, his hand splayed across the small of my back, pressing me out of the reach of the whole day.
Where July was a game with score-keeping, this keeps a different score, every mark an argument, you’re alive, you’re alive, you’re alive.
“Louder,” he says once, against my throat, when the thunder comes down the valley. “The storm’s covering for you.”
“The storm’s covering for you,” I manage, and feel him laugh for the first time all night, brief, real, into my hair.
Then neither of us is laughing, the rain strafing the shutters, the candle guttering sideways, and I come apart with his full name in my mouth like I’ve been saving it, which I have, since a wired window at dusk.
He follows with mine, Naomi, no title, no honorific, just mine, said twice, and the storm takes both sounds down the valley with it.
After, the candle is a thumb of light and the rain has gentled into long gray sentences. Somewhere below, a door closes, boots make one quiet round, the household of dangerous men settling around us like a tide going out.
We lie in the wreck of it, not touching everywhere, touching somewhere, his hand around my ankle above the gauze like he’s keeping his place in a book.
The watch is still on his wrist, ticking under the rain, the only schedule left in the building that anyone is keeping.
The generators stay dead. The dark stays kind.
“This doesn’t make me one of your assets,” I say, to the ceiling, because someone has to speak first after, and it isn’t going to be him.
“No.” His thumb moves once over the ankle bone. “Assets I know how to protect.”
The thumb settles. “Tomorrow there’s a conversation. About what your life looks like while I take his coast apart. You won’t like all of it.”
“Give me the headline.”
“You don’t go home yet.”
I stare at the dark ceiling and wait for the fury to arrive. It doesn’t come. That frightens me more than he does. “And the part I won’t like?”
“That was the part.”
“Then we’re already ahead.”
I turn my head. In the last candlelight he’s staring at the ceiling too, the scar a pale seam along his ribs, the watch still on, the most feared man on this coast lying in the dark next to everything he doesn’t know he’s next to.
“Sleep,” he says. “Nobody comes through that door tonight.”
“That’s what the last door thought.”
“The last door didn’t have me behind it.” It should sound like arrogance. In the dark, flat and quiet, it sounds like the first true bedtime story I’ve been told in twenty years. I hate how fast it works. I fall asleep angry, safe, hating that those two feel like the same thing.
I wake once, small hours, rain still going. The candle’s out. He’s asleep on his back with one hand resting over my ankle still, a man keeping custody of the smallest thing he could reach, and in the dark, under the blanket, my own hand is where it always is now.
Ten weeks, five days, I tell the dark. Bruised, fed on crackers, kissed back to life in a blackout. Both of us behind the steel door. All three of us behind it, only one of me knowing, and the rain writes it all down, keeping it.