Iris
The vineyard rows blur past in strips of dark green. All I can hear is my own heartbeat slamming against my ribs and the wet, uneven sound of Yakob's breathing beside me.
He's slowing down.
I feel it in his hand before I understand it with my head, the grip that was iron a minute ago going soft, his fingers loosening around mine like he's forgetting why he's holding on.
His steps are dragging now, one boot catching on a vine root, and I catch him before he goes down, my shoulder jamming up under his arm, my knees buckling with the sudden weight of a man twice my size.
"Hey." My voice comes out sharper than I mean it to. "Hey, no. You don't get to do that."
"I'm fine." The words are barely words at all, more breath than sound.
"You are the furthest thing from fine that I have ever seen in my life, and I have watched Killian try to set his own dislocated shoulder with a doorframe."
He doesn't answer. That scares me more than anything he's said since he appeared in the doorway of my cell like something conjured out of a nightmare.
I stop thinking about the men behind us.
I stop thinking about the shouting, the lights flaring on in windows across the villa, the dogs finally waking up to bark at everything all at once.
There's no room left for any of that. There's only this.
His weight against my side. The blood I can feel soaking through his shirt and onto my hand where it's pressed to his ribs, hot and insistent.
I've spent what feels like forever in a cell learning how useless I am. Learning that my smile doesn't work here, that my charm is a foreign currency nobody wants to trade for, that everything I've ever been good at is worthless against a locked door and a language I can't speak.
I am done being useless.
"How far is it?" I ask, because he is getting heavier and heavier. "You said we need to get to a boat. How far is the boat?"
He grunts, which I choose to interpret as close, and then I drag him through a gap in the trees, my shoes sliding on gritty earth, my free hand fisting in his shirt because if I let go of him now I don't think I’ll get him back.
The shouting behind us picks up, a gun goes off, the sound flat and enormous in the dark.
I don't scream. I want to. I want to scream until my throat gives out, because a week ago the loudest thing in my life was Katya laughing at one of my terrible dating profiles, and now there are men with guns thirty seconds behind me and the person keeping me alive is bleeding out against my side.
"Talk to me," I say, because if he stops talking, I'm afraid of what that means. "Say something. Anything."
"Iris." My name, rough, like it costs him. "Quiet."
"That's not anything, that's my name, I already know my name, I've had it for twenty-seven years."
"Quiet." But there's something under it now, something that might almost be the ghost of amusement, if he has room left in him for amusement while he's leaking blood into both our hands.
We come out of the vineyard onto a dirt track that curves down toward a smudge of dark water, and for one terrible second his legs actually give, his whole weight dropping through my arms, and I go down with him because there's no version of this night where I let go of him.
"No." I get my knees under me, get my hands on his face, force his eyes to mine. They're dark and unfocused and trying so hard to stay on me that something in my chest cracks clean open. "You don't get to pass out on me. We are so close. I can see the water. Look, look at the water."
He looks. Or he tries to. His eyes drag toward the black glint beyond the dirt track and something in his jaw sets, some last reserve of will dragging itself up from wherever he keeps it.
I don't waste time being gentle. I strip my T-shirt off in one motion and wad it against the wound in his side, pressing hard, harder than feels kind, because Rafferty taught me that pressure stops bleeding.
"Hold this," I tell him, guiding his hand over the fabric, over mine, until I'm sure his fingers have enough strength to keep the pressure on their own. "Hold it there. Don't you dare let go."
I ignore the fact that I’m not just in my bra and jeans, and I get his arm around my shoulders again.
This time I don't wait for him to find his feet. I find them for him, hauling him upright with a strength I didn’t know I had.
It must be some deep animal reserve that's been sitting coiled in my body for a situation I’d never imagined myself experiencing.
I’m still here, I’m still alive, and I’m not going anywhere except home, and I’m taking him with me.
"Move," I tell him, echoing his own voice back at him, and something that might be a laugh, small and pained, huffs out of him against my matted hair.
We stumble down the track together, his weight dragging at my shoulder with every step, my whole body screaming with the effort of holding up a grown man while running on legs that haven't so much as walked anywhere in a week. Now’s the time I regret not eating more of the bread and cheese deposited into my cell every morning.
Mangia, Moustache’s voice echoes in my mind.
Part of me hopes the man I’m lugging downhill didn’t kill Moustache, but since he rescued me, I suppose I can’t be picky about these things.
I’ll have to ask him when he is in a better state.
His daughter should know her father was a good man underneath the fact that he worked for a kidnapping shit stain of a human.
Behind us the shouting fractures into different directions, men searching the vineyard rows we've already left behind, buying us seconds I refuse to waste.
The water gets closer. I can smell it now, salt and diesel and something green underneath, and there, pulled up onto a strip of black sand, a small boat that looks like it was built for exactly this, for one desperate crossing in the dark.
"That's it," I say. "That's the boat. You said there'd be a boat."
"A boat," he agrees, and his voice sounds further away than it should, like he's speaking from the bottom of a pit.
I get him to the water's edge and my legs are shaking so hard I don't know how either of us is still upright.
I don't stop to think about how insane this is, a Bratva princess in her bra and jeans, hauling a bleeding assassin toward a getaway boat in the middle of the night in a country she still hasn’t identified.
I just move, because moving is the only thing I know how to do that matters right now, and stopping to be afraid is a luxury that could get us both killed.
"Can you get in?" I ask, already guiding him toward the low side of the boat.
"I need you to push," he says, and it's the most words he's strung together in the last five minutes, which tells me exactly how much this is costing him.
I push. I put my shoulder into his hip and I heave with everything I have left, and somehow, between his last reserves and mine, he goes up and over the side and collapses into the bottom of the boat with a sound that scares me more than the gunshots did.
I climb in after him, soaked to the knees, my hands shaking so badly I fumble the rope twice before I get it loose from the post it's tied to.
"Do you know how to drive this?" I ask, worried that I’m going to have to figure out on the hoof.
"No," he says.
Crap.
"Fantastic," I say instead, as brightly as I can. I look at the console, at a dashboard of dials and switches that might as well be written in the same Italian I've spent what feels like a decade failing to learn. "Absolutely fantastic. Okay. Okay, It can’t be that different from driving a car."
I turn the key. The engine coughs, catches, roars to life loud enough that I flinch, certain the whole hillside just heard it. There's no time left to care. I push the throttle forward and the little craft lurches away from the shore.
Behind us, shapes appear on the beach, dark against the dark, and one of them raises something to his shoulder.
I duck low over the console on instinct, hauling Yakob's head down with my free hand, and covering his head with my body.
The shot that follows goes wide, cracking off into the water somewhere behind us.
I don't slow down. I don't look back again. I keep the throttle open and the bow pointed at the black horizon, at whatever's out there past the edge of what I can see, because it has to be safer than what's behind us.
"Hey." I say, glancing down at where he's slumped against the hull, one hand still pressed to his side, his eyes half open and fixed on me like I'm the only thing left in the world worth looking at.
"Stay with me. Do you hear me? You don't get to check out on me now. Not after all that. Not when I don’t even know your name. "
"Yakob," he says, and his voice is thinner than it was, but it's there.
"Yakob." I glance between him and the dark water ahead, my hands white-knuckled on the wheel, my whole body running on something that isn't quite fear anymore and isn't quite courage either. It’s some third thing I didn’t know I possessed and never needed until now.
"Because I did not survive being caged in that cell and hauling your very large, very heavy body out of a vineyard just to lose you to a boat I don't know how to drive. "
He makes a sound that might be a laugh, if a laugh could be made entirely of pain and blood loss.
“I don’t even know where we are, or where I’m headed.” Panic has my throat in its fist. Tightening by the millisecond and threatening to cut off my oxygen.
“Sicily,” he says. “Go north, past the first island…harbor…second island…”
“Right, okay, I can do that.” My teeth are chattering, either from the adrenaline wearing off or the mild chill in the night air which is getting chillier the further out to sea we get.
“Jacket,” he says, moving his right arm as if he is trying to shrug out of it.
“I’ll take it when we’re not getting shot at,” I say, thinking he probably needs it more at this rate. “Besides, it has a hole in it now.”
He smirks, if you can call it that, and nods his head.
“Med kit,” he says, gesturing towards the seat behind me.
I fumble around without looking, finding a latch that lifts the seat and dipping my hand into the compartment.
“Pass it,” he says, presumably about the black bag that’s been stowed in there. I quickly do as I’m told and get back to figuring out the boat.
I keep the boat pointed away from the shore, away from the shouting and the shots and the vineyard where I spent days becoming someone I didn't know I had in me. I feel different. There’s no urge to cry or collapse.
Instead, a cool kind of calm settles over me as I try to take control of the situation.
There will be time for falling apart later.
Right now there's only this. The wheel under my hands. The engine roaring beneath my feet. A bleeding stranger who came for me in the dark, watching me with an expression I can’t quite figure out, out here on the black water, going somewhere neither of us has mapped yet.