6. Luka
LUKA
She bled on my passenger seat and apologized for it, and that, I think, was the moment I was finished.
"Sorry," she said again, pressing her sleeve to the cut on her arm, looking down at the dark smear on the leather like she'd tracked mud across someone's clean floor. "I'll pay for it. I don't know how, but I'll find a way. Add it to the list of impossible things I owe people."
I had a gun under my jacket still warm from the stairwell, three men down behind us, a city's worth of cameras to outrun before dawn, and what undid me was a girl saying sorry for the only thing in that car that wasn't her fault.
I kept my hands at ten and two. I kept my eyes on the road.
I did not look at her, because if I looked at her I was going to say something I had no right to say.
"Leave it," I said.
"That's not a no. See, a no would've been comforting. That was the voice of a man who's already pricing the upholstery."
"It's a car."
"A beautiful car, actually." Her teeth were chattering, just slightly, the adrenaline turning to cold in her now that the running was done.
"Which is its own separate problem I'd like to circle back to, because cars like this come from somewhere, and nothing about tonight says you got it doing taxes. "
I changed lanes without signaling, took the next right, watched the mirror.
Nothing followed. The streets thinned to warehouses and chain fence and the low orange wash of sodium lamps.
She kept talking, which I was learning was what she did instead of falling apart, words stacked up like sandbags against a thing she didn't want to look at.
"You're not going to tell me where we're going," she said.
"Somewhere they can't reach you."
"That covers a depressing range of options, most of which end with me in a chest freezer."
"If I wanted that, the freezer was twenty minutes ago."
She let out a sound that was almost a laugh, ragged at the edges. "You have got to work on your reassurances. We'll get you a pamphlet."
The safehouse sat at the dead end of a service road, one of four I kept that no one in my family had on a map, because I had built them for exactly the night I'd told myself would never come.
I pulled into the garage. The door rolled down behind us and sealed off the street, and its drop pulled the first full breath out of me since her hallway.
I cut the engine. In the sudden quiet I could hear her breathing, quick and shallow, and the small wet catch each time she pressed the cut.
"Stay close to me going in," I said. "Floor's cold. You're in socks."
She looked down at her own feet like she'd forgotten she had them. "I had shoes. Past tense. They're under a bullet hole now, probably. God, I really liked those shoes."
Inside it was small and spare and exactly enough.
One room that did the work of four. A couch the color of wet cardboard, a kitchenette, a steel door I'd hung myself, windows blacked out with film no one would notice from the street.
A single lamp in the corner threw a low circle of light and left the rest in shadow, which was how I wanted it, how I always wanted it, the dark under my hand instead of at my back.
She stood just inside the door and turned in a slow circle, taking it in, her arms wrapped around herself.
"It's very you," she said. "Assuming you're a man who's never once owned a throw pillow on purpose."
"Rules," I said, because rules were a rope I could hold.
"Your phone goes dark. Battery out. No calls, no logins, nothing that touches a tower.
The lights stay low. You don't go near the windows.
And you don't leave. Not for air, not for cigarettes, not because you've decided I'm the bad guy. Not until I tell you it's safe."
"That's a lot of don'ts for a guy who won't give me a single do."
"Do stay alive. Everything else serves that."
She didn't take the phone out. I watched her not do it, watched her hand drift toward her pocket and stop, and I filed that away without knowing yet what it meant, without knowing it was about to become the worst part of my night.
"I'm not taking my battery out," she said. "That phone is the only thing I own that's fully mine. You want it dark, fine, I'll turn it off myself, but I'm not handing you the pieces."
I should have pushed. The professional in me catalogued every reason the phone was a liability and every way it could light her up like a flare.
Instead I heard the thing underneath her voice, the white-knuckle grip on the one possession nobody could take or repossess or shut off for missed payment, and I let it go.
"Off," I said. "Not out. Fine."
She blinked, like she'd braced for a fight and the floor had moved. "That was easy. Why was that easy?"
"Sit down. You're bleeding on my floor now instead of my car. It's not an improvement."
I got the kit from under the sink. When I turned around she'd lowered herself onto the edge of the couch, knees together, sleeve peeled back, and the cut ran longer than I'd let myself see in the car, a clean shallow line from below her elbow toward her wrist, beaded dark, the skin around it grayed with cold.
The sight of it did something to me I had no defense for.
I had watched men bleed and felt nothing, scrubbed it out of my own arms over a sink and felt less.
This was a thumb-width of broken skin on a girl who weighed nothing and joked while she shook, and it settled in me like a stone going down a long way.
I knelt in front of her. That was the first mistake, putting my face level with hers in the lamplight, close enough to see the gold rings in the brown of her eyes behind the fog at the edge of her glasses.
"This is going to sting," I said.
"You've said three reassuring things tonight and they were all threats. I'm sensing a theme."
I tilted her arm toward the light. My hands.
That was the thing I could not control, the tell I didn't know I had until it was already showing.
An hour ago these hands had been steady on a trigger, cold and exact, doing the one kind of work I was good at without a tremor anywhere in me.
Now they hovered over a cotton pad and a bottle of antiseptic and they were not steady.
They were careful in a way that had nothing to do with skill.
I cleaned the edges of the cut and felt her flinch and eased off without deciding to, and my thumb found the inside of her wrist and stayed there, not because the wound needed it, but because I could not make it leave.
"You're being gentle," she said, quiet, almost accusing, like she'd caught me at something. "That's weird. The gun guy is being gentle."
"Hold still."
"You held a man's whole life in your hands tonight and pulled the trigger like you were turning off a light, and now you're dabbing my arm like it's made of antique glass." Her voice wobbled and she steadied it with effort. "Pick a guy. I can't keep up with you if you're two of them."
I didn't have an answer. There wasn't one I could give her that wasn't a door into everything I was keeping shut.
So I taped the gauze down too slowly, smoothing the edge twice when once would have done, and I felt every degree of warmth coming off her skin into mine, and I hated how badly I wanted to keep my hands where they were.
"There," I said, rougher than I meant. I let go of her wrist. It cost me more than firing the gun had.
She flexed her fingers, looking at the neat white square taped to her arm like it had been left by a stranger. "Thank you," she said, and then, because she couldn't leave a tender thing alone any more than I could, "You've got a real bedside manner once you stop kidnapping people."
"It wasn't a kidnapping. You walked."
"In socks. Under fire. Let's not pretend it was a spa day."
I sat back on my heels and put a foot of air between us, because I needed it more than she did. "You want to know what tonight was," I said. "Ask. I'll tell you what I can."
"Wow. An actual offer. Okay." She pulled her knees up onto the couch and wrapped her arms around them, small and fierce, the cold making her curl in on herself. "Start with why. Why does anyone care what I did on a keyboard?"
"Because of where you ended up, and what you saw on the way out.
" I kept it plain. She'd earned plain. "You walked into a place that belongs to people who do not get walked into.
You think you saw nothing. You saw enough.
Names that connect to other names. A door that was supposed to stay closed, open for eleven minutes with your fingerprints on it. "
"I didn't take anything. I didn't even want to be there, I just followed a thread because the thread was pretty, and I'm an idiot, and now apparently I'm a marked idiot."
"Wanting has nothing to do with it. You're a loose end.
Loose ends get pulled." I watched her process that, watched the fear move under the jokes like a fish under ice.
"There's more than one set of people in this.
They've spent a long time at a kind of war you'll never read about.
Lately one side started losing ground, and losing makes people reach for things they shouldn't.
A prize they can use. Something to trade. "
"And I'm the prize. The one with no shoes and a balance of negative forty dollars."
"To them you're a key, not a person. That's worse. A person they might let go." I leaned my forearms on my knees. "The men tonight weren't mine. Understand that. They came for you to own you. I came for you so no one could."
"That is a chilling sentence with the word own in it, and you said it like you were reading a weather report.
" She studied me, and for a moment the wit dropped clean away and left something raw.
"Who do you work for? You keep saying mine.
Mine, like you've got a side, like there's a whole org chart with you on it.
So which kingdom are you the scary knight for? "