CHAPTER 13 #4
He comes inside me when I am shaking. He comes with a long slow shudder against my back, his forehead between my shoulder blades, his right hand risen up over my breast and pressed flat to the small space below it — so that his palm covers the place where everything in me has gone hot and unguarded and overrun, the breath stacking high and shallow under his hand, the heat of it climbing my throat where I cannot make it behave.
He stays pressed there a long beat. He breathes against my hair.
He says my name one more time, low, into the skin of my shoulder.
"Eliza Quinn."
It is the only thing he says.
---
He holds me against him for a long count — my back to his chest, his arms around my waist and sternum — and stays there.
The lamp has steadied. The workshop iron has gone silent.
Luca has given up on his contact and gone to sleep, or has heard us and chosen silence; I cannot tell, and I am not going to ask.
After a while he lets me down gently. He refastens his slacks, picks up my shirt from the chair and lays it next to my palm, the trousers beside it. He does not redress me; he gives me my things and steps back half a pace.
I dress slowly. He watches the way he weighs a debt settled in his favor and cannot yet believe the books are clean.
When I am dressed he lifts me — arms under my thighs and behind my shoulder blades — and sits me on the bare brushed steel of the desk, legs over the edge.
He takes two glass tumblers from the fridge under the side cabinet and pours water into both with the deliberate ceremony he might give a thing that costs money.
He puts mine in my hand and keeps his own.
He says nothing for two minutes. He drinks. He watches the lamp.
Then he opens the bottom drawer and lifts out a small roll of dark blue velvet.
He unties the cord. Inside, in a row of careful pockets, are ten postcards — pre-Network by the cardstock, edges browned, the ink at the address blocks faded to sepia.
He lifts one with two fingers from the second pocket and turns it over.
"My father kept ten of these," he says. "I have kept them in this drawer since the back room.
I have not read them aloud to anyone. The man who wrote them was a friend of his — dead twenty years now, nine years before Kade ever got to Tomas.
The A. is his, not my father's. " He clears his throat and reads the back in a slightly affected period accent that belongs entirely to that man, twenty years dead.
"Tom — Lisbon is still warm in November. The lemons are the size of fists. Whatever else they tell you, the old port is the old port. — A. " The accent slides off his mouth. He looks at me.
"Would you like to keep one for the night."
The lamp catches the sepia along the edges and the small careful hand of someone who loved his father enough to write in pen.
"Yes," I say. "The Lisbon one."
He lifts it from its pocket, holds it a beat, hands it to me face down so the address-side is up. I rest it on my thigh.
He ties the velvet roll closed. The silver lighter is on the desk by my right hip; he picks it up, weighs it once, sets it flat against my open hand and presses my fingers closed around it. The metal is body-warm from the desk.
"Hold that for me a minute."
I hold it. His thumb rests against the back of my knuckles, light, then lifts.
---
We stay like that. The gas-jet flare of the lamp settles into a quieter pulse, and the room cools a degree now that two bodies have stopped working at it, the sweat going cool along my spine.
The corridor stays quiet; the Ops Room stays quiet.
Adrian has heard. Luca has heard. They have chosen to give Marcus this, and I understand suddenly what Standing Order Five means in practice on a small afternoon — the other two listen, do not walk into the corridor, and respect the door.
Under my thumb the lighter warms further; the engraving along the side, too small to read in the lamp's gold, picks up a thread of light and lets it go.
There is a man I have to stop being for, I think, and I do not have to be her in this room.
The Lisbon postcard is still on my thigh, and I think about a friend who wrote the old port is the old port to a man Kade would garrote nine years later — how Marcus has carried the proof of one grief in a velvet roll and the proof of another on the back of his throat, and set both in my open hand this afternoon to see what I would do with them.
The minute he asked for has gone. I open my hand; he lifts the lighter from my palm, weighs it the way he always does, and sets it flat on the steel between us, near the edge his thumb can reach without looking.
I slide the Lisbon postcard into my pocket to keep.
The bulb flares once more as the wiring shifts back across the hour, and his palm beside mine does not flinch at it.
He has hunted one man for eleven years and told no one; I have sent a signal to a dead woman for twelve and told no one; and for the length of one afternoon, in a four-by-three room under Sector-Six, neither of us has had to do it alone.
The thing I clocked on the cuff downstairs is still out there in the outer ring, on the same patient bearing, a half-sector nearer than the week before and no nearer than that — but it is a problem for morning, and morning can have it.
I leave my hand where it is, beside his, and let it.