Grace
I don’t remember deciding to move. I’m just up, jacket on, the burner zipped into the inside pocket with my hand around it through the fabric, and I’m opening my door into the corridor.
Marek straightens off the wall. It’s late, and my face must be doing something, because his hand drops away from his radio.
“I need Decker,” I say. “Now.”
He looks at me for a second. Whatever he sees, he doesn’t argue with it. “I’ll walk you.”
The yard is cold, and the gravel is loud under my boots, and I don’t feel any of it. I rehearsed nothing on the way over. There’s nothing to rehearse. I have two facts sitting hard in my chest, and the only thing left to learn is whether he’ll lie to me on top of everything else.
Marek knocks once and steps back to the corner of the building, out of earshot, which is the smartest thing he could do right now.
Decker opens the door. He’s dressed, boots on…he wasn’t sleeping either. He takes one look at my face and his whole body changes, comes up ready, eyes already going past me for the threat.
“What happened?”
“Is it true?”
“Is what true?”
“Serenity.” My voice comes out level, which surprises me. “They’re not keeping her. They’re bleeding her. Selling her blood off a drop at a time until there’s none left. Is that true?”
And there it is.
He doesn’t ask what I’m talking about. He doesn’t say “who told you that?” Doesn’t frown, doesn’t do any of the things an innocent man does when a mad question comes at him out of the dark.
His face goes carefully blank, and his eyes flick once toward the yard behind me, and I watch him understand that something has gotten past every wall he built.
He looks caught. That’s the answer before the answer.
“Come inside,” he says.
“Answer me.”
“Grace. Inside. Not out here.”
I step in because Marek doesn’t need to hear this, not because Decker said to. He shuts the door. The room is the same room. The bed is the same bed I slept in last night with his heartbeat under my ear.
“Who got to you?” he says. “Did someone—?”
“No.” I pull my hand out of my jacket and hold it up between us. “You don’t get to work this. You don’t get to find the leak and manage the leak. For once, you’re going to stand there and answer the question.”
He nods. “Okay.”
“Someone put a phone in my pack while it was locked in my room. There were messages on it. About Serenity. They said I couldn’t trust you. Is it true?”
A long breath goes out of him. His shoulders drop with it.
“Yes.”
One word. No dressing on it. The floor doesn’t move, but something in my legs thinks it does.
“How long have you known?”
“Since Viktor’s office. Before we came down the mountain.”
Before the mountain. I do the calculation, and it’s short, and it’s brutal. We’ve wasted so much time.
“Say the rest,” I tell him. “All of it. Out loud.”
“There’s a blood trade.” He says it flat, like a report he’s given himself a hundred times.
“Rare blood drives it. And the Sangrey line is rare. That’s where Serenity is.
It’s why they haven’t been trying to kill you.
They’re trying to take you. You’re not a loose end to them anymore. You’re stock.”
“And what they’re doing to her right now. Say that part too.”
His jaw works. For a second I think he won’t.
“They harvest her blood and sell it on. She’s probably been a source for months.” His voice doesn’t lift, but something under it goes thin. “A body doesn’t survive that forever. There’s an end to how long she lasts. But they’re not worried because they have another source.”
There it is, in his mouth, in plain words, the thing I’ve spent all evening trying and failing to unhear. My sister, running dry, while we’ve been here wasting time.
“You knew that.” I can hear my own voice going strange, too even.
“You’ve known it this whole time.” My throat tries to close, and I shove through it.
“There’s no time to get her out, Decker.
Is there? That’s the piece you left out.
There was never all the time in the world.
There was a clock, and it’s running down, and you let me act like we could take it slow. ”
“There is time.” He steps toward me. I step back, and his hands stop and fall.
“Not a lot. But there’s no guarantee she’s in imminent danger right now.
The best way to save her is to work carefully, keep it quiet, and let Vanya and her contacts track her down.
Nobody’s sitting on their hands. I swear to you nobody’s giving up on your sister. ”
“Then why couldn’t I know?” It rips out of me.
“If everyone’s working, if there’s a plan, if you’re all so careful, why is the one person you had to keep in the dark the one whose sister is dying?
Viktor’s not my lover. Vanya doesn’t sleep next to me.
You do. You had your mouth on me and this in your head, and you decided I couldn’t know it. Why?”
He doesn’t answer. His hands open and close.
“Why, Decker?”
“Because I know what you’ll do with it.” Low.
Rough. The level voice finally gone. “The day I found out, I went up that mountain, and I already knew how this went. You find out your blood buys hers, you find out she’s running down…
and you go straight at them. You trade yourself.
You put your own neck in the harvest to pull hers out.
Don’t stand there and tell me you wouldn’t. ”
“You’re right.” Flat. Cold. It stops him like a hand on the chest. “I would. I’d do it tonight.
If I walked out this door and knew where to go, I’d hand myself over before morning, because if they have me, they don’t need to drain her dry—two of us is twice the supply, and they can afford to keep us both breathing.
Me showing up buys her time. Maybe it buys her out.
That’s not nothing, Decker. That’s the only door I’ve got, and you knew it was there, and you locked it and put your body in front of it so I’d never find it. ”
“Because it kills you!” He’s louder now too, and there’s something desperate under it.
“It doesn’t save her. It kills you both.
You think two sources means they keep you?
It means the second they’ve got the trait mapped off you, the one who’s already half gone stops being worth feeding.
You’d be handing them the last thing they need to let her die.
You’d walk in there to save her, and you’d be the reason there’s no reason to keep her alive.
I ran it every way there is. Every way ends with both of you gone. ”
“Then we’d have run it together.” My voice cracks, and I hate it, but I keep going.
“That’s the part you can’t seem to hear.
Maybe you’re right. Maybe I walk in there, and it’s the worst thing I could do.
But she’s my sister. It’s my blood. It’s my life to spend or not spend, and the only person on this earth with the right to make that call is me.
And you took it. You looked at me and decided I wasn’t allowed to choose, and then you fucked me so I wouldn’t ask. ”
That lands. Something crosses his face like I hit him. He locks it down.
“I’d do it again,” he says.
Quiet. Not cruel. Worse than cruel. Certain.
“What?”
“Any of it. All of it.” He looks at me, and he doesn’t flinch.
“I’ll tear that place apart to get her out.
I’ll go in myself. I’ll spend everything I’ve got and everything I can borrow to bring your sister home to you.
I mean that, Grace. I am not walking away from Serenity.
But I will not trade you to do it. Not for her, not for anyone.
If it comes down to a night where the only way to get her back is to sacrifice you, then no.
It’ll be no every time you ask, for the rest of my life.
That’s the one thing I’ll never give you. ”
And there it is. The real wall. Not a lie he can take back. Not a bad man I can hate clean. A man who’d choose to stand between me and what I might need to do, and call it caring.
“You have no right to make my decisions for me.”
“That’s not what this is.”
“It’s the only thing it is.” I step back toward the door, and my body fights me the whole way.
Every step, something under my ribs drags the other direction, hard, and the wolf in me throws herself against the inside of my skin.
She doesn’t care what he did; she cares that he’s there and I’m going, and she wants to turn me around by force.
My eyes burn. My hand finds the door, and my wolf doesn’t want it.
I don’t care. A pull isn’t proof of anything except that I let him all the way in.
Look what he did with it.
“Grace.” He crosses the room, and his hand comes up to my arm, my face, trying to find the part of me that was his last night. “Don’t do this like this. Stay. Or don’t stay, but don’t decide anything tonight. We’ll talk in the morning with clearer heads and I’ll—”
“Sure.” I go still under his hand. Every muscle. I let the fight run out of me where he can see it go, let my voice come down flat and quiet and reasonable. “In the morning.”
His hand eases on my arm. I feel the relief come into him, feel him read the calm as the storm passing, as me cooling down, as sense coming back. He wants it so badly he takes it.
“Okay,” he says, softer. “Okay. Get some sleep, sweetheart. It looks worse tonight than it’s going to look tomorrow.”
“I know.” I even let him walk me to the door. “Goodnight, Decker.”
I don’t look at his face. If I look at his face, I don’t trust the calm to hold.
Marek falls in behind me, and the yard is colder now, or I’m finally feeling it, and I keep my hands loose and my chin level and my pace easy the whole way back. A woman who’s had a hard night and is going to bed. I hear Decker’s door close behind me, slow, reluctant. Believing me.
In my room I sit on the bed in my jacket in the dark, and I wait for the crying. It doesn’t come. That’s done. What’s left where it was is quiet and cold and very clear.
They want my blood. Serenity is running out of hers. Those two facts fit together and won’t come apart, and every person in this building who could have shown me spent these last days keeping it hidden. So I’ll do what I’ve always done. I’ll carry it alone.
I unzip the inside pocket and take out the phone. The screen wakes under my thumb, light in a dark room, her question still sitting in the thread where I left it.
You want to know what’s happening to Serenity?
I know exactly what I’m going to do about it.
I start to type.