CHAPTER 7
Grant
◆
I'd never learned to sleep inside.
I'd taken the cold room because it was the coldest part of the hangar, concrete floor and concrete walls, a cot nobody used and a single bulb on a chain. Cold kept the wolf low and kept the count clean, and I needed both that night.
I ran the building's three ways out the way other men ran prayers, walking them in my head from the roll door to the side hatch to the truss gap where a man could go up if he had to. The bulb hummed. Outside, the storm threw the whole sky at the building and the building took it.
I broke down my sidearm and laid the slide, the barrel, the spring, and the frame on the rag in a line as straight as a range card. Gun oil and cedar came up off the parts, the smell of my own hands, the only smell in the world I trusted because I knew exactly what it cost.
I was not thinking about the woman three rooms over, the way she'd walked into this place last night with rain in her dark hair and her chin up like she was reading the room for a clause to break it on.
I wasn't thinking about the surname she'd thrown at me like a shiv, Holloway, or about how she'd watched me thumb the brass round in my pocket and filed the gesture away the way she filed everything.
She read rooms in her own way, a different alphabet than mine but the same trade underneath it.
I managed to keep her out of my head right up until the side hatch scraped and there she was.
"You count exits in your sleep too, or just out loud?"
Sloane Mercer. Wrapped in somebody's flannel that wasn't hers, arms crossed, gray-green eyes gone flat with no sleep. She had her grandmother's steel pen shoved through the twist of her hair, and even half-dead on her feet she'd come in already armed for an argument.
"You should be in the loft," I said.
"I should be in my apartment filing a bar complaint. " She came two steps deeper, into the bulb's small circle. "Instead I'm in a freezing concrete box ninety minutes from anywhere, watching a man take a gun apart at four in the morning like it owes him money."
"Go to sleep, Mercer."
"Can't. " She nodded at the parts on the rag. "Clearly neither can you. So we can sit here and pretend, or you can tell me the part nobody will say out loud."
I seated the spring without looking up at her. "Which part."
"The part where you all keep looking at me like I'm already a name you're going to have to remember."
There it was, the thing under the armor. She was more afraid of being mourned by strangers than of the dying, and I knew the shape of that fear better than anyone, because I owned the original.
She didn't wait for an answer she could tell I wasn't going to give. She kept going, the way she'd kept going at the firm, I'd have bet, the way she kept going at everything, building her case while the floor fell out.
"Last night your president put me in a bunk and told me I was safe. Cady gave me a blanket and called me a friend like it was nothing. Hollis poured me bad whiskey. " She reached up and touched the steel pen anchored in her hair, the way some people reach for a rosary.
"Your sunshine one fed me a sandwich I didn't ask for and watched me eat all of it.
Forty hours ago I was a senior associate up for partner who didn't owe a soul in the world, and now I'm in a warm room full of people who'll bleed for me, and you want to know the truth, Holloway?
That's the part that scares me. Not the coven.
That. " Her chin came up. "And every one of you keeps managing me around it like I'm too fragile to be told. "
She'd rather be in danger than be cared for. I knew that math down to the decimal, having built a whole life on it.
"You're cargo," I said, keeping my voice flat. "I don't remember cargo. I deliver it."
It was the cruelest true thing I had, and I used it on purpose, because cruelty kept distance and distance was the only thing that had ever kept anyone alive in the running tally I carried, the one where I wrote down the dead.
She didn't flinch, which was the whole trouble with her. She stepped into it.
"No. " Her voice dropped, went precise, lawyer-cold.
"You don't get to do that. You don't get to make me an object so you can survive me.
I've been somebody's line item before, Holloway.
I know exactly what it feels like to be the asset somebody decided they could afford to lose.
" She held my eyes and did not blink. "Try again. "
The wolf came up under my skin so fast I had to set the slide down before my hand closed on it wrong. Heat in my chest, in my throat, the low thing she couldn't hear but I always could. Easy. Easy. I made myself breathe the cold.
"You want the truth," I said.
"I want the truth."
So I gave it to her, the truth I never hand to anyone. Maybe because she'd called me a coward in lawyer and she was right, or maybe because the storm made the whole world feel like the inside of a stalled engine.
"Seven years ago I had a hand in mine. " My voice came out wrong, scraped down to fragments, the only way it would come.
"Extraction. A translator and her kid. Vehicle stalled in the open.
I had ninety seconds. I crossed it in sixty.
Got the door. Got her hand. " I held mine up, open, the burn scar webbing the forearm catching the bulb.
"Had her hand in mine. Then the fuel went. And I had a glove and no hand."
The cold room got very quiet under the storm.
"I carried what was left of that round out in my own arm.
" I tipped my head at the scar, then at my pocket where the brass sat warm from my body.
"And the round the shooter sent for me, the one I should have caught, I keep in my pocket so I don't forget the math.
The math is this, Counselor. Everybody I'm sent to keep, I lose, or I almost lose, and the almost is just the long way around to the same room.
So no. I don't do probably safe. And I don't learn names. "
I expected the lawyer to come back at me with leverage, or a counter, or one of her cool reframes.
She crossed the rest of the floor instead of arguing.
"Sloane. " It came out as a warning. My pupils blew wide, the bulb went too bright, her heartbeat the loudest thing in the building. She runs three degrees colder than me, and I can smell the cold coming off her skin and read clean through it that there's no fear in her anywhere. "Don't."
"Stop telling me what I can't survive," she said. "It's a character flaw. I have it too."
And she put her hand flat on my chest, right over the place where the growl lived, and she kissed me.
She kissed me. She rose up on her toes and closed the last inch herself and pressed her cold mouth to mine like she was signing something, like she'd read every clause and decided, and the decision was me.
For one second I held still the way I hold still when a situation turns lethal, completely.
Then it detonated.
I had a hand in her hair, the pen knocked loose and ringing on concrete, her twist coming undone over my fingers.
I had my other arm hauling her up off her heels and into me, into the banked heat I run that no human ever gets close enough to feel, and she made a sound against my mouth that went straight down my spine and lit every fuse I'd spent seven years drowning.
She tasted like the cold and like exhaustion and like copper, she'd bitten her own lip somewhere in it, and that tiny wrongness, that small blood, hit the wolf like a match on fuel.
I kissed her like I'd never been gentle in my life.
Because I never had. I kissed her with the whole back-bay wall behind her and my body caging hers against the cold concrete, one hand splayed at the small of her back wide enough to span half of her, lifting, and she got her fingers in the front of my shirt and pulled, demanding, taking, saying yes with her whole body without spending a single word on it.
She kissed back hard, and that was the thing that wrecked me.
She kissed the way she argued, all forward pressure and no apology, her hands fisting my shirt to drag me down to her instead of waiting to be reached.
The pen was gone, her hair was down, and the only sounds left in the cold room were the storm hammering the steel and her breath and the low broken thing in my own chest I couldn't keep all the way quiet anymore.
When she shivered, it was the concrete that did it to her, so I turned us until the wall of my own heat stood between her and the cold steel, instinct, the wolf doing the one decent thing it knew how to do, which was burn for her.
And God help me, she fit, the cold of her laid against the burn of me.
Under the smell of my own hands there was something else now, her, something clean and decided.
The single bulb on its chain swung a little from the building's flex and the light moved over us both in slow passes of light and shadow, and I had her face tipped up to it in my hand and her pulse under my thumb going hard and fast and human against my too-hot skin.
This is what I run hot for. This woman, right here. I could keep this.
That was the thought that stopped me.
I could keep this. The exact thought I'd had with a hand in mine seven years ago, ninety seconds out, sure I had it, sure I'd made it. I had her hand. Then I had a glove.
I felt my own strength then, all of it, in the worst possible way.
I'd lifted her without trying, and the wolf wanted more than careful now, wanting claim, wanting to mark and hold and never give back, and I felt how little stood between that want and her thin human spine against the concrete.
It would take one bad second, one snap of the thing I keep on a chain in the cold.
I'm not built to a human scale; I'm a weapon that learned to wear a coat. And I had her in both hands like she was unbreakable, and she was not, she was the most breakable thing in the building, and I was the most likely thing in it to break her.
I tore myself back.
I put a full step of cold air between us, both of us breathing like we'd run the apron in the wind. Her mouth was kissed dark, her hair down around her shoulders, her pupils as wide as mine, and she stared at me with her hand still half-raised toward where I'd been.
"Grant. " She gave me the first name this time instead of the surname, rough in her throat.
"Don't. " My voice was barely a voice. The growl was all through it, pitched too low to hear, the thing she'd feel in her sternum before her ears caught it. I dialed it down. It took everything. "Don't move. Give me a second."
"Are you—" She caught herself. Squared her shoulders, the lawyer rebuilding the building. "Did I do something wrong."
No. You did the only honest thing in this room. That's the problem.
"You did nothing wrong," I said. "Look at me."
She did, steady, and furious underneath it, the blotchy color coming up her throat the way I'd learned it did when she was holding the line. She should have been afraid and she wasn't, and that undid me worse than the kiss had.
"I felt myself pick you up like you weigh nothing," I said, slow, laying each word down straight, a range card for the only target that mattered, which was the truth.
"Because to me you do. I had you against that wall and I wanted to keep you against it, and the part of me that wants that doesn't know your bones aren't mine to test. I run hot, hotter than you can feel under your hand.
I have exactly one rule that's kept anybody alive around me, which is that I never let go of the chain, and you just made me forget the chain existed.
" I picked the pen up off the floor and held it out to her, flat on my palm, an offering and a fence at once.
"So I'm going to walk out of here and put it back on.
None of that is your doing. It's mine, all the way down. I've always been my own worst clause."
I'd borrowed the shape of her own words on purpose, the way she'd told me last night that she read every clause and it had ruined her. She caught it, of course. She read everything.
She took the pen and held it without clicking it.
"You're afraid of yourself," she said, slow, like she was reading a clause she hadn't expected to find.
"It isn't losing me you're worried about.
It's being the thing that—" She stopped, recalibrated, then said it plainly the way she does when she decides something is true. "You're afraid you'll be the fire."
I had nothing. She'd read the room and the room was me and there was nothing in it I could redact.
"There's a word for that, you know," she said, quieter.
"In any contract worth signing. A way to stop the whole thing cold, no penalty, no argument, the second one party can't continue.
" She wasn't crying. She was close, and she was too proud, and she clicked the pen once, finally, hard.
"You don't need to fear yourself. You need a brake you trust. There's a difference.
I'd know. I write the difference for a living. "
A brake I trust. I'd carried a brass round for seven years to remember I didn't have one.
She'd just described the thing I'd never let myself want.
I tucked it away somewhere deep, the way you pocket a thing you can't use yet but can't throw out either.
I didn't know yet she'd hand the whole idea back to me on a worse night, with a single word, but the seed of it went in right there, in the cold room, in the dark, under the storm.
I picked up the slide and seated it, then worked the action once, clean, the sound of a thing put back together, and holstered the weapon. The wolf settled a notch under my skin, not all the way down but far enough to walk on.
"Go up to the loft," I said. "It's warmer."
"That an order, Holloway?"
"Take it however keeps you walking out."
She got to the hatch. Stopped, one hand on the cold steel frame, hair down, pen in her fist, the bulb throwing her shadow long and thin across the concrete. She didn't look back. She was learning, I think, that I do the same.
"For the record," she said, "I meant it."
And that was the thing, the round I should have caught, because I'd spent seven years sure the only safe way to keep someone was to hold them at arm's length where the fire couldn't reach, and she'd just stood in the fire and told me she wanted to stay in it.
I meant it. Two words she got nothing back for.
She said them and walked, and the saying was the whole of what she wanted out of it.
I should have let her go on it.
Instead I heard myself, low and final, not turning around, the cold of the room crowding my throat and the brass round suddenly heavy as the dead in my pocket.
"Next time you kiss me, sweetheart, you'd better mean it. Because I won't be able to stop."