Yakob
The pain arrives in waves now, and between them there is a strange, floating quiet, like the inside of my skull has been packed with wool.
I know this pattern. It’s not like I’ve never bled before. I know the stages a body moves through when it starts running out of what it needs. The way awareness narrows and expands and narrows again, the way the mind starts bargaining with things that can’t be bargained with.
I do what I can with the medical supplies from my bag, noting that the bleeding is already slowing down, thankfully.
Iris has the throttle open as far as it goes. Spray comes over the boat in cold sheets, and every time it hits me, I surface a little, blink the black at the edges of my vision back half a step, find her silhouette against what's left of the shoreline lights behind us.
Her hair is wild, her eyes are bright, and she stands there, guiding the boat in her bra and jeans and she’s beautiful. She is talking. She hasn’t stopped talking since the vineyard.
I don’t have the strength to answer most of it, but I’ve learned, in the space of the short time I’ve spent with her, that I don’t need to answer.
She doesn’t appear to require it. The words come out of her like something that has been dammed too long, splitting the water into a low current of half-sentences, jokes with no landing, a running commentary on the boat, the wind, the state of her hair, the fact that she is fairly sure this counts as boating without a license and her brother is going to have opinions about that.
I focus on staying conscious. It is, at this moment, the hardest job I have ever been tasked with.
Her skin is pale with the cold, glowing almost against the dark backdrop of the early morning hours. She is shivering. I manage to finally shrug out of my jacket, and throw it at her.
The wound in my side has gone past pain into something else, a deep, insistent throb that pulses in time with my heart, the bleeding finally slowing.
She puts my jacket on and zips it up while muttering something about stealing my warmth.
When I feel her soft, small hand slide into mine, I let her keep it there.
Blood loss makes a man stupid. I know this and I do it anyway, because the alternative is letting go, and some animal part of me has decided that letting go isn’t something I want to happen tonight.
"How are you doing down there?" she calls over the engine noise, not looking away from the water for more than half a second at a time. She has picked up steering faster than I would have predicted. Steadier hands than her voice would suggest.
"Fine," I say. It comes out like a crackle. My voice broken with the exhaustion of trying to stay awake.
"You said that already. It wasn't true then either."
The lights of Sicily fall further behind us, smearing into a single orange stain low against the black water, and somewhere ahead, unmarked, unlit, is an island I chose three nights ago from a map, a set of coordinates and reliance on a contact I haven’t seen for over a decade.
I didn’t plan for this. I plan for everything. But not one of those plans accounted for Iris Orlova's hand pressed against mine, holding a wound closed with a strength that has no business belonging to someone who spent the last week locked up, scared and alone.
We pass Vulcano far enough away not to draw attention. Iris keeps her eyes on the distance. Lipari is close enough to see.
"Talk to me," she says again. It has become a refrain. "Tell me something. Anything. I don't care what."
"There's nothing to tell."
"That's not true. Everyone has something to tell. Tell me your favorite color. Tell me if you hate cilantro. Tell me literally anything, because if you go quiet on me, I'm going to assume the worst, and I have a very active imagination, Yakob, you have no idea."
My name in her mouth does something to the soul deep ache in me that has nothing to do with the bullet wound.
Nobody has said my name like that in longer than I can remember. There’s no one else on this planet still alive who even knows it. It makes it feel more special, more…something.
It feels intimate.
"Gray," I say.
"What?"
"My favorite color,” I grunt. “Gray."
A laugh breaks out of her, short and startled, cutting through the engine noise. "Of course it is. Of course your favorite color is gray. You couldn't have said blue like a normal person. You had to pick the color of a rainy Tuesday."
"It's practical."
"It's sad, is what it is. When we get through this, I'm buying you something orange. A shirt. A very loud, very unnecessary orange shirt, and you're going to wear it."
I want to tell her that I don’t own shirts that aren’t black or gray or the flat, muted green that disappears into foliage.
I want to tell her that the last time someone bought me clothing I was nine years old and it was my mother, standing in a market stall in the cold, holding up a sweater against my shoulders to check the size.
I don’t tell her either of those things.
I don’t have the breath to spare, and some part of me understands that if I start pulling on that thread, I won’t be able to stop.
This is not the time or place to unravel my past.
The boat hits a swell wrong and the whole thing shudders. Pain lances up through my side hard enough that my vision goes white at the edges before it comes back in thin whisps.
"Yakob." Her voice sharpens instantly, all the humor gone out of it. "Hey. Eyes on me. Stay with me."
I find her face in the lightening sky. Pale, streaked with salt spray, her hair plastered flat against one side of her head, and underneath all of it, unmistakably, that same unguarded fierceness I first saw in the tiny window at the vineyard.
She doesn’t look away from me. She has one hand on the wheel and the other has found its way back to mine without either of us deciding it should, gripping hard enough to bruise.
An anchor thrown across the space between us.
"I'm here," I say.
"You'd better be. I already told you, I didn't drag your bleeding self out of a vineyard just to lose you to the ocean. That would be extremely poor planning on my part, and I refuse to be remembered as the woman who couldn't keep the man who rescued her alive for one boat ride."
"Extraction," I correct, out of reflex. "Not a rescue."
"Semantics." She says it like she's swatting away an insect. "You came into a fortified villa full of armed men and pulled me out 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 anything else. "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 from me than I have left to give, and I let the sound of her voice pull me forward through the dark.