Chapter 32
Star
THE BALCONY IS EMPTY when I wake up.
Grey light. Early morning, the Mediterranean stretching to the horizon, the sky barely separating from the water.
I'm still in his chair, still wrapped in blankets (two blankets, he covered me twice, and that detail hits me in the chest and sits there like a warm stone), still wearing his shirt buttoned wrong.
The note is on the side table, weighed down by a coffee mug.
Gone to gallery. Back before you wake. Coffee is in the machine. Black, one sugar. —A.
He got the coffee order right. I hold the note for a second, pressing my thumb over the A, the single initial, the letter that contains his whole name and everything that name means to me now. Then I fold it and put it in the shirt pocket. His shirt. His pocket. Mine.
Planner entry: morning. Location: his balcony. Status: wearing his shirt, holding his note, drinking his coffee, having his feelings. Prognosis: terminal.
I make the coffee. I drink it standing on the balcony, bare feet on the deck, the morning air cool on my legs. The ship is docked, I think. The engines are lower than usual, the sixty-two hertz dropped to something softer, and through the railing I can see the pale edge of a port town.
He'll be back soon. Mila found something on the witness file, and he'll come through the door with whatever the information gave him and I'll be here, in his shirt, with coffee, and we'll figure out the next part together. That's how it works now. Together.
I rinse the mug. Find my uniform in the sitting room, crumpled where it fell last night.
I change. I button the tunic correctly this time, which takes three attempts because my hands keep pausing on the buttons to remember his hands unbuttoning them and that memory is NOT HELPFUL right now, brain, file it under "later," priority: low, status: definitely not low.
I fold his shirt. Leave it on the back of the chair.
Then I go to find him.
THE GALLERY IS DIM. Same warm spotlights, same shadows. I haven't been here after hours since the night of the Mayflower handkerchief, when his hands found mine over four-hundred-year-old lace and he kissed me against the display case and I tasted coffee and salt and the rest of my life began.
The glass door is unlocked. I push through.
Artem is at the far end, at the working table Mila uses for the manifests. He's standing, not sitting. His hands pressed to the table surface, his shoulders rigid, and he doesn't turn when I come in.
"Good morning," I offer, and my voice sounds like a girl who woke up in a man's shirt on a balcony with two blankets and a love note, which is what I am, which is what I was three seconds ago, and I'm already crossing the gallery toward him with a smile on my face when he turns his head and the spotlights catch his expression and my feet stop.
His face is dark. Beyond the cold distance of the reassignment.
Beyond the guarded blankness of the corridor.
Something worse. Something I've never seen.
And even though it's not aimed at me (I can't tell yet, I can't read it yet, all I can see is the rigid line of his jaw and the burning in his eyes), my body reacts before my brain does, a full-body flinch, because the last time his face changed without warning I spent two weeks eating bread rolls standing up and putting cedarwood at the back of a shelf.
Not again. Please not again.
"Artem?" My voice comes out thin. Small. The voice of a girl whose planner just crashed for the second time in a month.
He picks something up from the table. Papers.
Printouts. Holds them toward me, and I take them because my hands work when the rest of me doesn't, and the printouts are dense, columns of data, timestamps, routing codes, and the fragments swim in front of my eyes: placement confirmed, Cerulean schedule received, therapist cover secured, Almazov access established.
The words don't make sense. None of it makes sense.
I'm standing in the gallery with the jade figure glowing to my left and the Mayflower handkerchief behind glass to my right and my body is still humming from last night and I'm reading words like therapist cover and Almazov access and the room is tilting.
"I don't—" The papers tremble in my grip. "I don't understand what this—"
"Communications. Encrypted, routed through three servers. Between a shell company in Saint Petersburg and a device that matches your phone's hardware signature."
"My—" The word stalls in my throat. "My phone?"
"Mila brought them to me at four this morning."
And my body, my stupid, terrified body that learned two weeks ago what it feels like to lose him, doesn't hear the evidence or the accusation or the Saint Petersburg connection.
It hears: he's going to close the door again.
It hears: the coffee was the last coffee.
It hears: the note with the A on it is the last note.
And my eyes fill and my throat closes and I'm holding fabricated evidence I don't understand in hands that are shaking for the first time since I boarded this ship and all I can get out is—
"I love you. Please—"
His whole body changes.
Not softens. Shifts. The rigid line of his shoulders drops a fraction and he crosses the space between us in two strides, and his hands, his scarred, enormous, warm hands, close around mine, papers and all, and his grip is firm and his eyes are burning but not at me, I can see it now, not AT me, and his voice when it comes is low and rough and absolutely certain.
"I know."
"B-but the evidence—"
"It doesn't matter." His thumbs move across my knuckles, the same way my thumbs move across his scars during sessions, reading me, steadying me, and his eyes don't leave mine.
"Even if the whole world calls you a liar, I know you.
I know how you hold a handkerchief. I know how you can't hide a single thing you feel.
I know the sound you make when you're happy and how you stopped making it when I closed that door.
" His grip tightens on my hands. "You could never have done this. "
"Then who—"
"There's only one way to find out." His jaw locks. The burning in his eyes shifts to something darker, grimmer, the expression of a man who has spent three years hunting and just discovered the trail was poisoned from the inside. "But for now I need you to do one thing for me."
"W-what?"
He drops my hands. Cups my face instead. Both palms against my jaw, the same spot, always the same spot, and he tilts my head back and his eyes hold mine and his lips move without sound.
One word.
Duck.
I DUCK.
I don't understand why and I don't ask because it's what he told me on the balcony: if his world is dangerous, he tells me, and if he tells me, I listen, and his face when he mouthed that word was the face of a man who has heard something behind me that my ears haven't caught yet, and I trust him, I trust him the way my hands trust his scars, completely and without hesitation, and so I duck.
Everything happens at once.
A sound: footsteps, fast, the click of heels on the gallery floor. A voice, Mila's voice, sharp, stripped of every darling she ever gave me: "You shouldn't have—"
The crack of a gunshot splits the gallery open.
My hands fly to my ears. My eyes squeeze shut.
I'm crouched on the floor between the display cases with my knees pressed to the cold teak and my palms clamped over my ears and the sound is still ringing through the glass and the stone and my bones and I'm shaking, I'm shaking so hard my teeth rattle, and the silence that follows is the loudest thing I've ever heard.
Silence.
And when I open my eyes and turn, it's to see Mila slowly falling to the ground.