Chapter 19
Grace
I wake up warm. His chest is under my cheek. His arm lies heavy across my back, and the fur covers us both. The lantern has been turned down to a dull glow on the far wall.
I don’t remember him getting on the cot. What I remember is surfacing in the small hours, cold and aching, and reaching out. Finding his shoulder in the dark. Pulling. He came up off the floor and settled beside me without a word, and I slept like the dead for the first time in years.
My hand is still resting against his chest, fingers curled in. I put it there. Nobody made me.
I check myself over before I move. The hip aches deep where the bandage sits, but the sharp edge is gone. My ribs only complain when I breathe in too sharply. My shoulder is stiff. The tear along my left side pulls, already knitting. The wolf worked hard all night.
Then I take a breath, and the scent of him is everywhere. In the fur. In my hair. On my skin. A whole night pressed against him will do that.
I should mind. I keep waiting to mind.
My wolf is stretched out inside me. She hasn’t been this content since before the facility. She decided about him days ago, and she isn’t interested in my objections anymore.
“Morning.” His voice moves through his chest, under my ear.
“Morning.” Mine comes out rough. “Your chest.”
“Dressed it.”
“When?”
“Around three. You were out cold.”
I try to remember three in the morning and come up empty. He sat here torn open half the night while I slept on him.
“You could have woken me. I would have—”
“You needed the sleep more.”
That’s the whole discussion, as far as he’s concerned. No fuss about it. He patched himself up alone in the dark and moved on, and something about that puts an ache in my throat that has nothing to do with my injuries.
Outside, wind pushes through the firs. I lie still and listen to his heart under my ear, and I do what I do every morning. I think about Serenity.
The list is different today. The phone is gone. The voice is gone. They sent something out of the sky to kill me. Whatever deal I had, I don’t have it anymore.
Which means nothing I do from here on buys her a single day.
I’ve spent months getting up and holding the line for her. Now there’s no line left to hold. Just me, in a cave, wrapped around the man who was sent to catch me.
The man who stepped in front of a dragon instead.
“You asked me a question,” I say. “Back at the start. You asked what the hold was.”
His arm doesn’t move. He doesn’t say anything. He waits, the way he does.
“Her name is Serenity. She’s my sister.”
The words land in the quiet, and there’s no taking them back. I keep my eyes on the crack in the far wall and keep going.
“She didn’t get out when I did. They’d moved her somewhere else.
Part of me wondered if she was even alive.
After I got to Aurora, a phone turned up where only I would find it.
There was a photo of her stuck to it. Her handwriting on the back.
Later they let me hear her voice.” I stop.
Start again. “They said she’d stay safe as long as I was useful. So I got useful.”
“The intel.”
“Small things. Schedules. Gossip. Nothing anyone could plan an attack with. I checked every piece before I handed it over.” A hard breath. “That’s what I told myself, anyway.”
“How long did that story hold up?”
“A few months.” My mouth twists. “Then I stopped believing it and kept going anyway. So there it is. Whatever Viktor’s building his case on, the trail is real, and it ends at me. And if it bought her time, I’d do every bit of it again.”
The lantern flickers. Nothing else moves.
He’s so still against me that for a second, I think I’ve lost him. That I’ve finally said the thing that proves he’s not on my side. Then his hand spreads flat between my shoulder blades, warm and steady, and stays.
“Where are they keeping her?”
I blink. Of everything he could have said, I wasn’t ready for that.
“I don’t know. I never knew. Everything went one way. They sent proof she was alive, I sent what I had, and that was it. I dug for months on my own. Careful, quiet. I got nothing.”
“Then that’s where I start.”
I lift my head off his chest so I can see his face. “Start what?”
“Finding her.”
He says it like it’s nothing. Just something he’ll do next. I search his eyes for the part where he’s managing me, softening the blow, buying my cooperation. It isn’t there.
“You don’t even know if she’s—”
“Finding what people want hidden is what I do. It’s all I’ve done for twenty years. The Syndicate is good at hiding things.” His jaw sets. “I’m good at finding them.”
“Just like that?”
“No. Not just like that.” His thumb moves once against my back, slow.
“It’ll take time, and you’re not going to like how much.
If anyone senses someone hunting for her, they’ll move her, and every thread I have goes dead.
So I work quiet, and you stay put, and you don’t do anything brave. That’s the price.”
“I’ve been sitting on my hands for months.”
“Then you’re already good at it.”
I huff. It’s almost a laugh. Trust him to turn the worst months of my life into a qualification.
“There are people outside Aurora who want the Syndicate’s whole supply line torn out by the roots,” he says. “I’ve crossed paths with a few. That’s a door I know how to knock on when I need it. But it starts with me, on the ground, doing what I do.”
“And Viktor? He thinks I’m—”
“Let me worry about Viktor.”
“He’ll bury me.”
“He’ll hear me out first.” Something flat and certain sits under the words. “I’m not done with the file he has on you. When I go to him, I’ll have something worth saying.”
I want to ask what that means. I don’t get the chance to, because it hits me all at once, the whole weight of it, and my chest cracks open around it.
Someone is going to look for her.
I swallow hard.
For months, the search was me alone, whispering into a burner phone at midnight. Now it’s him. This man, who tracked me when no one else could see me, who took a dragon apart with his hands, who is lying here with all that I’ve done and hasn’t flinched once.
The tears come up fast, and I don’t fight them. They just run, quiet, into the fur and onto his skin, and I shake through it while months of carrying her by myself work their way out of me.
He doesn’t tell me it’ll be okay. He doesn’t shush me. His hand stays flat on my back, and he holds exactly as steady as he’s held all night, and he lets me come apart against him without asking a single thing of me.
It takes a while. He never once checks whether I’m done.
When it finally runs dry, I stay where I am. Wrung out. Lighter. My face an inch from where his heart beats, slow and even.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
“Haven’t done anything yet.”
“You have. You just don’t know it.”
His breathing changes. A long, slow exhale, deeper than the ones before it, and beneath my palm his heartbeat picks up. Just a little. Just enough.
I go still.
His scent fills every breath I take, and my wolf rises through me, sure of herself. No pacing this time. No pulling. She knows before I do that the waiting is over.
His hand moves. It slides from my back to my waist, over the fur, and settles there. It’s not the grip of a man holding an injured woman together. It’s something else, and my whole body answers it before I can pretend otherwise.
I’ve been calling this thing by other names since the moment I first laid eyes on him. Fear. Nerves. My own head playing tricks in a locked cave. I knew better every time I said it.
“Grace.”
My name, low, in the dark. I feel it more than hear it.
I lift my head. His eyes are already on me, dark and steady, and there’s nothing careful left in them. He’s done holding whatever he’s been holding. Heat comes off him in waves, and the space between our mouths is nothing at all.
His hand comes up. His fingers slide along my jaw, rough and warm, tilting my face to his.
“You’re hurt,” he says. His voice is different. Rough. Restrained.
“I’m healing.”
“You should rest.”
“I’ve rested.”
His thumb traces the corner of my mouth. He holds there one more second, a last door left open for me to walk out of.
I close it.
I kiss him, and it’s nothing like careful.
His arm locks around me and pulls me up his body.
The fur slides off my shoulder, and the cold never reaches me, because he’s everywhere.
Heat. Weight. That scent I’m done running from.
He turns us, his body coming over mine, braced on his forearms, his mouth never leaving me.
The sound he makes low in his chest isn’t a word in any language.
He pulls back an inch. His breath is ragged. His eyes search mine, one last time.
“Your hip—”
“Is fine.” I slide my hand up the back of his neck, into his hair, and pull him back down.
Then he stops holding back.