Iris
I wake up on the third morning wrapped around a professional killer, and my first coherent thought is that I have never slept better in my life.
His arm is still around me. That's the headline. I fell asleep on the very edge of his bedroll with my hand over his heart after everything we’d done, holding all his terrible history where he'd set it down.
He could have moved me. He's strong enough now.
He could have transferred me to the bedroll and taken the cot.
Instead his arm is around me and his chin is near the top of my head, and under my palm his heart is beating steadily.
I’m naked, and I’ve never felt more alive.
The already small house now feels impossibly tiny. Two rooms, a terrace, a view that goes all the way to Africa if you believe hard enough. It fit us fine when we were surviving an extraction.
He stirs, his arm tightening around me briefly as he remembers what happened.
If it weren’t for the way my body still felt so lax, I wouldn’t believe it myself.
That’s the thing about Yakob. He is solid and real, and yet everything feels like it was possibly just a dream, and then I question what actually happened until my brain starts telling me it must have been a dream.
Last night wasn’t a dream.
I heard his story. I heard the human in him and it snapped what was left of my resolve. I’m sure psychologists all over the world have a name for what we did and why I did it. Some kind of hero rescuer complex and gratitude and relief all mixed up.
They wouldn’t account for the vulnerability. The way he looks at me when he doesn’t think I can see. The way he makes my insides quiver with want.
I took what I wanted. But he wanted it too.
Now he's up, moving through the rooms doing quiet useful things, and the house has shrunk to the size of a shoebox and the size of him takes up most of it.
We pass in the kitchen between the sink and the table, and when my shoulder brushes his chest, I feel it in my teeth.
He reaches past me for the water jug and the inside of his arm crosses the outside of mine, and I stand there holding a spoon like I've forgotten what spoons are for.
Dmitri the stove hisses at me twice, angrily, before I can get him to light.
And Yakob's no better. That's the part that's ruining me. I catch him looking, expecting the observational glances I've gotten used to, door, window, track, me. The security rotation of a man who counts me among the things to always be aware of.
This is different. This time his gaze stays.
I'm plaiting my hair at the window with the sun coming in, working through it with my fingers because there's no brush in this entire building, and I feel his attention land on me like a hand between my shoulder blades.
I look over. He doesn't look away. Three days ago he'd have looked away.
"You're staring," I say.
"Yes," he says, and goes back to the map he's marking like he didn't just take my whole nervous system offline with one syllable.
At noon he tells me the plan, because apparently, we have one now.
His man with a boat, a real one, not the ferry, will be at the east cove in two days and he will take us to Italy.
From there, a car to an airstrip on the other side of the country, then a pilot with a plane that will take me home.
He lays out the coordinates and contingencies, and I listen and nod in the right places while a completely different sentence gets louder and louder inside my chest.
Two days. That's what's left of this. Two days, and then the world comes back, with my brothers in it, and his contracts, and whatever a bratva ghost does when the job is finished.
I've been kidnapped, caged, rescued, and shot at, and it's the words two days that put a stone in my stomach.
I spend the day telling him about Ken and Vinny, and Slinky.
Little snippets that will stay with me forever.
Vinny’s dispassion, how Ken and Slinky were sneaking around having sex at any given opportunity, and how I’m pretty sure she was the head guy’s wife, judging by the size of the ring on her finger.
How Ken attacked me and called me troia.
That makes Yakob’s jaw clench in a way that sends butterflies through my stomach.
How Mustache saved me and had a blistering argument with Ken.
I tell him about Moustache and how he took care of me as much as anyone could in those circumstances.
How I hope he is okay now his boss is dead because from what I could tell, all he wanted was to look after his family.
How it felt like he had got stuck working in a situation he never wanted to be part of, so made the best he could of it even though we couldn’t understand each other.
The way he knew he shouldn’t have, but showed me a picture of his daughter and granddaughter anyway, by way of explanation as to why he wanted to help me. Why he regretted what was happening.
The dressing change is at nine. It has become the fixed point to end the day, and I've kept it clinical through discipline and sheer force of will.
He sits on the edge of the cot and pulls his T-shirt over his head, I kneel between his knees with the med kit open beside me, and it is all extremely medical and fine.
The wound is good. That's the professional assessment.
The edges have closed, no heat, the new skin shiny and pink, his body doing in days what would take another man weeks.
Soon it will be just one more scar on the atlas, a place and a date.
Sicily. This year. There was a woman. He got shot while rescuing her.
Then he taught her what wanting someone actually feels like, and ruined her for the dating apps forever.
I smooth the last strip of tape down and my hands don't leave.
I watch them not leave. They're resting flat on his ribs, one on either side of the dressing, rising and falling with his breath. That’s when I notice his breath isn’t steady, and neither is mine. My eyes lift to his, the question must be obvious in them.
Do you feel this too?
"Iris." Low. A warning, or a request. Even he doesn't seem sure which.
"I know," I say. "I'm being an unprofessional rescu-ee. You’ll have to file a complaint."
His hand closes around my wrist and stays there, holding it against his ribs, his thumb finding the exact place where my pulse is making a fool of me. His eyes have gone dark, the flint swallowed up, and the wanting in them is so bare, so unguarded, that it's almost hard to look at.
"Two days," he says.
"I know." It comes out as a whisper, and I don’t mind. I’m surprised I’ve managed to get any words out at all with the sudden lack of air in the room.
"When we get back, I return you to your family. That’s the contract. That’s the job." His jaw is tight. "You'll be home. Safe. Surrounded by people who," a pause, the careful selection of the worst possible word, "suit you."
"Suit me?" I sit back on my heels, my wrist still in his hand, and I look up at this impossible man trying to hand me back like a borrowed coat two sizes too big for him. "You absolute idiot."
He blinks. I'd frame the moment if I could.
"I understand these are extenuating circumstances," I wave the finger of my free hand between us. “And that you’re a fast learner, but don’t you dare tell me who suits me.” My voice cracks and I let it. He should hear what he does.
The air between us crackles.
"I don't know how to do this," he says at last, and it costs him, I can see it. "What you deserve. The kitchen. The noise. The, " his hand tightens fractionally on my wrist, "the entire universe. I've never been inside anything. I don't know how to be."
"Nobody knows how," I say. "You start where you are."
"And where am I?"
"About eight inches too far away."
He moves first. His hand comes up and cradles the back of my head like I'm something that might spill, the same care I gave him in the fever, returned with interest, and he tips my face up and stops, one last breath apart, one last chance for the walls, and I watch him choose this moment. Me.
Then he kisses me, and the house, the island, and the entire kidnapping ordeal excuse themselves from the room.
It starts careful, but it doesn’t stay that way.
His mouth is soft in a way nothing else about him is, and then my fingers slide into his hair and something in him comes off its chain.
The kiss turns hungry, searching and desperate, a man drinking after twenty years of telling himself he wasn't thirsty.
He pulls me up off my knees and into him, my hands flat on his bare chest, his heart hammering under my palm, and he makes a sound low in his throat that I am going to be hearing for the rest of my natural life.
I kiss him back with everything I've got, which turns out to be considerably more than I knew I had. Fiercer than I've ever been about anything.
We break apart because breathing is unfortunately necessary. His forehead comes down to rest against mine. Both of us are wrecked. I can feel his hands at my waist, holding on hard, actually holding on, like I'm the fixed point now.
"Iris." My name comes out of him in ruins.
"Hmm."
"We need to stop." His thumb moves once against my waist, contradicting him.
"Is that a management decision?" It comes out breathless, which undermines me somewhat. "Because I'd like to appeal."
The corner of his mouth ticks up, and this close, I finally get to see the whole thing, the smile he's been rationing, small and crooked and devastating.
"You're shaking," he says quietly. His hand comes up, and he tucks a loose strand of hair behind my ear with the same two-finger care he gave the lamp glass.
"I won't be able to stop. So you need to take time. You need to be sure."
I have never been more sure of anything. My entire body seems to be vibrating on a different plane of existence to this one. Every cell is switched on and pointing directly to him.
“I’m sure,” I say.