Chapter Ninety-Six
Two Days Later
Asher
Raine’s hair fans out across my shoulder.
I don’t move, letting all the various injuries report in. My side aches, the wound healing but still filing complaints in triplicate every time I twist or bend or try to lift anything heavier than a coffee cup.
The stiffness in my arms and shoulders makes cement look soft. My wrists are still raw from the cuffs and the positions they forced me into that left the metal biting into skin and grinding against bone.
My hands are the worst. They don’t like cooperating in the mornings. Or afternoons. Or evenings. I like to think they work while I’m sleeping. Though, if I’m not asking anything of them, does that count as cooperation?
I’ve been interrogated before. Taken more than one beating at the hands of people who thought I’d break. I knew the physical cost going in. I didn’t anticipate how much of the damage would be invisible. Mental. Emotional.
Yesterday morning, a door in the building slammed, and I broke out in a cold sweat.
The chairs in the kitchen are too hard, the table the wrong height, and my heart started pounding the moment we sat down for dinner.
Raine noticed the second I tensed up, and carried the bowls of leftover pasta to the coffee table without a word.
But I’ll deal with it all, because Raine is curled against me, her palm resting over my heart.
She told me in the quiet moments before we fell asleep last night that she needs to know I’m real.
That counting my heartbeats is proof I’m alive.
Proof she’s not still trapped inside Coherent Path, waiting to die.
I wanted to give her something of me in return, so I told her the mantra I repeated over and over again during the worst of the interrogation sessions.
My job is to give her time.
I couldn’t tell her anything else. Not yet. I’m not ready. She knows how GSD operates—operated. She knows the worst of it. The injection that rendered my vocal cords useless for eight hours almost broke me completely.
But the Global Security Directorate is finished.
Or will be soon. Congressional hearings start next week.
Ellen, Tessa, and four other women whose lives were permanently altered by Coherent Path are already set to testify.
As is Brett Wallburn, the contractor who administered the electroshock and the fatal injections.
Adams—the Commissioner—was led out of the building in handcuffs on the Ten O’clock News last night.
Voss is dead, and two additional Coherent Path contractors have come forward with their own stories of how he “convinced” them erasing people was a good idea.
I force my thoughts back to the present. To Raine’s steady breathing. To the scent of her shampoo and the soft sheets and the feel of the two of us pressed together in a bed where we can see the sky through the floor-to-ceiling window and no one’s actively trying to kill us.
I’ll stay here—completely still—as long as I can.
Because neither of us have gotten even a fraction of the sleep we need in the past few days.
So I stare at the ceiling. At the overhead light we never turn on because it’s too bright and too loud for her after eight days of complete darkness and utter silence inside Coherent Path.
Raine wakes the way she does everything else.
All at once. One moment her breathing is slow and even against my shoulder, the next, her hand presses flat over my heart.
I count to ten—she admitted yesterday morning she picked that number because we had ten days together after I pulled her out of Coherent Path and before I let GSD take me.
“Morning,” I whisper against her hair. My voice is mostly mine again, though it stages a walk-out if I get chatty. Doc said that might happen for a few days. He’s guessing, but I appreciate his attempt to reassure me.
A laryngeal nerve block shouldn’t have been possible. But the Public Integrity Project confirmed that Julian Voss had a whole medical research division running off book, so who knows what awful shit they’ve perfected. No one’s found their facility yet, but it’s only a matter of time.
Raine doesn’t answer me right away. She’s listening to the rain beat against the windows.
“We’re almost out of coffee beans,” she says, tipping her head up so I can see the flecks of gold in her brown eyes. “This isn’t going to end well. Me…going to the grocery store?”
I chuckle, then hiss out a breath as the stitches launch a protest march against any sudden movement. “Delivery. Much safer. For both of us. I’ll make a list.”
“Much.” She presses a kiss to my chest, to one of the few spots without a fresh bruise. “Sourdough is about the only thing I’m actually good at.”
“Not true.” I pull her closer, ignoring the various aches that would prefer I be surrounded in layers of fluffy cotton and bubble wrap. “You are an expert at dismantling institutional evil.”
“Oh, so we’ve moved beyond the hobby phase now?” It’s her turn to laugh, and the sound is perfect and reassuring and everything I want for the rest of my life.
“You turned pro the day you decided to fight them, Raine.” I cup her cheek, guiding her closer so I can seal my lips to hers.
The kiss sends all the blood in my body rushing south. And though we can’t do more than this—not for at least a week, according to Doc—I’ll spend each one of those days proving that everything I wrote in that goodbye letter was true.
Her nipples pebble under the soft sleep shirt. I swallow her moan, and my fingers decide this is the perfect time to listen to me. I pinch one tight bud between them, and Raine arches her back into my hand.
“Asher…we…can’t,” she breathes.
“I like to keep my skills sharp. For when we can.”
I gather her in my arms—stiffness and pain be damned—and settle for knowing that we’re still here. We’re still aligned. We’re still together.
By the time either one of us is ready to put even an inch of space between us, the rain has stopped.
She helps me with my t-shirt—the last time I tried to lift my arms by myself, I ended up on the floor without knowing how I got there—and we shuffle out to the kitchen. My steps are almost straight, almost steady, and that’s a win I’ll hold onto for the rest of the day.
Raine has to make the coffee. I tried working the grinder at lunch yesterday and it was an unmitigated disaster that sent at least an ounce of beans down the garbage disposal.
But soon, we’re on the couch together, Law and Order playing quietly in the background while Raine opens the laptop and checks out News Now Seattle for the latest updates.
“They spelled my name right this time,” she says over the rim of her mug. “But that photo is not me.”
I almost choke on my sip of coffee. The woman on screen has fiery red hair, freckles, and can’t be more than twenty. “Well, we don’t have to worry about you being recognized on the street.”
“No. We definitely do not.” Her thumb drifts to her index finger, stops, and stills. I refused to take my dad’s challenge coin back, and she keeps it close, but I know she misses her ring.
“I think we should file a complaint with the news desk,” I say, hoping to distract her from anything overly serious. “They haven’t covered the marjoram story at all.”
Her mouth opens. Closes. Opens again. Then she laughs, her fingers trailing over my cheek, and shakes her head.
“I need a new project now that this particular institutional evil has been eliminated,” she says.
“Maybe I’ll find every single recipe in the world that uses marjoram, and convince you to try all of them. ”
Her phone buzzes on the coffee table. Raine glances at it, then smiles. “That photo was apparently Inara’s doing. ‘Thought you’d appreciate being able to go out in public without that terrible hat.’”
The two exchange a few messages while I let my body absorb the nectar of the gods and try to decide if today’s the day I try to remain upright long enough to shave.
But then I remember the conversation we’d started the previous night.
Before the walls had started to blur and I’d passed out with only a couple mumbled words of warning.
“Raine? When this is truly over—when the hearings are done—have you thought about where we should go? We could stay here in Seattle. Or Boston. Canada. France. Italy. Anywhere.”
She mutes the television, and turns to me. “Somewhere new. Somewhere that’s just ours. Italy might be nice. I had an op there once. It felt…alive, but steady. The kind of place that’s been itself for a long time and doesn’t intend to change.”
“I’d like that. Life that’s figured itself out. We can start there.” I set my mug down on the coffee table with a wince, then wrap my arms around her. “I choose you, Raine. Always.”
“I choose you, too.”