Chapter 28
Artem
THE BOY'S HAND IS ON her shoulder.
The staff mess is below me, through the metal grating of the walkway floor.
Loud, crowded, trays and conversation. And at the far end of the long table, two people.
Star. Curtis. He's standing, his tray in one hand, and his other hand is on her shoulder, squeezing, and she doesn't flinch and she doesn't lean away.
She lets him touch her.
My hands close on the railing. The metal bites into my palms.
Curtis walks away. Star sits alone. She picks up her fork. She eats. She buses her tray. She stands and walks toward the corridor and I can see her face from above, through the grating, and her face is the thing that breaks me.
She isn't crying. She isn't angry. She's composed and professional and her chin is level and her shoulders are square and she's doing exactly what I told her to do.
She's being a professional. She's being twenty years old on a ship that doesn't belong to her, eating alone at the end of a long table, letting a boy with a good heart touch her shoulder because a man with a ruined one closed a door in her face.
I told Mila it didn't feel decent.
It doesn't. It feels like the worst thing I've ever done, and I've done terrible things.
Eleven years of military service. Three years of Bratva enforcement.
Things that keep me on upper decks at midnight and in engine rooms at dawn.
And none of them sit in my chest the way this does, because none of them were a choice I made to hurt someone who came to my door and asked what did I do and the answer was nothing.
She did nothing. She held a handkerchief and said it should be touched and made me smile and fell asleep against my arm in an engine room and she did nothing wrong and I let her believe she had.
Mila's voice: She'll recover. She'll be a story she tells her friends.
The boy touched her shoulder and she let him.
She let him because his hands are uncomplicated and his touch is kind and he doesn't bring coffee in ceramic mugs or track her laughter from doorways or say her name like he's tasting something.
He just puts his hand on her shoulder and it means exactly what it means and nothing more and she needs that right now because I took everything that was more and slammed a door on it.
The calculation I've been running for two weeks, the one where I weigh her safety against my need for her and my need loses because it should lose, because she matters more than what I want: the calculation is wrong.
The calculation was always wrong. I wasn't protecting her.
I was protecting myself from the terror of loving someone in a world that kills the people I love.
I took every true thing Mila told me and I used it as a wall and the wall was for me, not for Star, because Star was already on the other side of it, standing in the light, and I left her there.
And she ate standing up. And she folded her towels. And she stopped humming.
I'm moving before the thought finishes forming.
Down the walkway, down the service stairs, through the corridor toward the staff mess.
My footsteps are fast. I don't slow them.
I don't check whether anyone's in the corridor.
I don't run the calculation because the calculation is a lie, the calculation was always a lie, and the only true thing left is a girl with flat shoes and rolled trousers walking toward the spa with her chin up and her hands at her sides and I need to reach her before she gets there.
The corridor. Staff deck. She's thirty feet ahead of me, walking toward the spa, her flat shoes silent on the thin carpet, her hair pulled back, her uniform buttoned correctly because she's Star Thornton and she buttons her uniform correctly even when the man who kissed her in a gallery tells her she's reassigned.
She buttons her uniform and she folds her towels and she eats standing up and she doesn't cry and she doesn't hum and she does her job and she is, without question, the most valuable thing on this ship.
I stop. She hasn't heard me. She's still walking. Twenty-five feet. Twenty.
"Star."
She stops. She doesn't turn around. Her shoulders are straight and her hands are at her sides and she's standing in the corridor like she stood outside my door two weeks ago. Still. Absorbing.
Fifteen feet between us. Thin carpet. Amber light. The hum of the ship under everything.
I take a step toward her.