Chapter 27 #2
Alek had a long coat open over a charcoal sweater.
He was not running. Alek does not run. He covered the distance between his car and mine in a smooth contained stride, his eyes doing the work as he came, taking in the bodies, the zip-tied two, my men, me, the open door of the SUV where Chloe was still inside with Rhea.
He nodded at me. Small. Brother to brother.
Then he looked down at the two on the asphalt with their wrists behind their backs.
"This is the remaining hand of their association," he said, calm, as if he were reading a weather report. "We will clean every one of them. They are weak. They will not last the week."
Mikhail had come up on his shoulder with a shotgun loose at his hip, the muzzle pointed politely at the ground. He looked down at the bodies in the road with his head tilted. "Cesare's bench warmers." He nudged one with the toe of his boot. "Lucia is scraping."
"Lucia is for tomorrow," Ivan said. He had not raised his voice. He never does. He was already crouched by one of the zip-tied men, a hand on the back of the man's neck the way you handle a dog that has not decided whether to bite. The body under his palm had gone very still.
I let myself look back at my SUV.
Chloe had not moved from the doorway. The pistol was still in her hands but pointed at the floor now. Rhea was tucked against her side, face still pressed into Beom-Beom. Chloe's eyes were on me.
I went to them.
The drive home was quiet. Anatoly took the wheel again, calm, as if the broken window over his shoulder was a small inconvenience.
Sergei had taped plastic over the worst of it.
The wind whistled through anyway. I sat in the back with Rhea on my lap, her head under my chin, her braids smelling of Halmoni's kitchen.
Chloe sat against the far door with her hand on Rhea's back.
She did not say a word for thirty miles.
I watched her in the rearview when Anatoly's eyes were on the road. I knew the look. I have worn it. The first time I had killed a man I had been a boy, and I had walked the rest of that night with my hands in my pockets so I would not have to look at them.
The gates of the compound came up out of the dusk.
Gravel under the tires. The big doors opened before we had stopped.
Mikhail had run ahead and was already on the front step.
He came down and took Rhea out of my arms without asking.
Rhea let him. He murmured something low and gentle, the side of him almost no one outside the family ever sees, and started up the stairs with her on his hip and Beom-Beom dangling from her fist.
From the upstairs landing came Lily's voice, soft and bright and already moving toward them. "Oh my sweet girl, come here, come here, we have warm bread and a fire, come to me, sweetheart, come here."
Chloe walked past all of it. She did not look at Lily. She did not look at the housekeeper already moving to take her coat. She walked straight through the foyer and up the stairs and down the corridor to my room.
I followed her. I did not push. I closed the door behind us with the back of my heel.
She stood in the middle of the room with her arms wrapped around her own ribs, the way a person stands when she is holding something inside her chest she does not have a name for. She was not crying. Her eyes were on the rug.
I went to her slow. I stopped a foot away. I did not touch her yet.
"Chloe. Come here."
She moved into me on autopilot. I folded her against my chest. Her arms stayed around her own ribs for a beat. Then they loosened. Then her hands came up and closed in two small fists at the back of my shirt.
I held her. I did not speak for a long time.
I let her body decide what it needed. Her cheek lay against my sternum.
Her breath ran shallow and high. I kept one hand flat between her shoulder blades and the other at the back of her head, fingers spread wide into her hair, the weight of my palm anchoring her.
I could feel the small tremor that had been living in her since the shot.
It was in her shoulders. It was in her ribs under my forearm.
I did not shush it. I let the heat of my body do the talking.
Eventually her breath went out of her in a long uneven line. Then it came back in. She turned her face and pressed her forehead into the muscle of my shoulder.
"Let me help you forget for a while," I said. Low. Into her hair.
She was still for a beat. Then she nodded against me. Small first. Then real.
I tipped her chin up with the side of my thumb.
Her eyes were glassy with everything the last four hours had put in them.
I kissed the side of her face first, near her temple, where my lips could feel her pulse stuttering against them.
Then her jaw, where the muscle was still locked tight.
Then the corner of her mouth, slow, until the lock began to give.
Then her mouth. She opened for me on a small soft breath and her hand curled into the front of my shirt.
I did not rush her. I have done a great deal of rushing in my life. Tonight was not for that.
I undressed her myself. I worked the buttons of her coat down one at a time, and as the wool fell open I bent and put my mouth to the hollow at the base of her throat where her pulse beat hard against it.
I slid the coat off her shoulders. My knuckles ghosted down the outside of her arms as it went, slow, and I felt the small involuntary shiver that ran through her with it.
Good. Her body was beginning to come back to her.
I lifted the hem of her sweater. I took it up over her head the way you strip armor off a soldier who has been wearing it too long.
As it cleared her hair I caught a handful of the strands and pressed my mouth to the side of her neck, behind her ear, where she was warm.
She made a small sound. The cardigan slid off her shoulders into a pool at her elbows, and I bent to the bare slope where her shoulder met her throat, then the freckle below it I have known by heart for months.
Her camisole came up over her ribs and over her head.
The breath caught in her on the third button of the jeans, a small sharp catch, and I lifted my head and kissed her mouth slow until the catch eased.
Then I unfastened the rest and crouched and drew the denim down her legs.
As I came back up I set my lips to her hip where the waistband had pressed a soft pink line into her skin.
I kissed the inside of her wrist. I kissed the bend of her elbow.
Each piece of cloth that left her, I matched with my mouth on a place where she could feel me through the fog.
Her skin was cool when I started. By the time the last of it lay on the floor at our feet, she was warm under my hands, and the fog behind her eyes had begun to thin.
I came up to her mouth again. I laid my palm flat between her breasts, over her sternum, and held it there.
Her heart was running fast under my hand.
I waited. I kissed her slow. I waited some more.
And then I felt it, the moment her pulse slowed under my palm and her hands, which had not stopped trembling since the shot in the SUV, went still against my back.
She breathed out long. I breathed it in.
I laid her down across the bed. The covers were cool against her bare back.
I stood at the edge a beat and let her look at me.
The shock was still in her, but her eyes were on me now, and that was what I wanted.
I unbuttoned my shirt slow under her gaze and pulled it off.
Her eyes followed my hands the whole way.
I worked my belt out of the loops and let it drop to the rug with a soft heavy sound.
I stripped the rest off. My control was already fraying at the edges and she had not done a thing but watch.
I came down over her slow. Hip to hip. Chest to chest. I gave her my weight the way you give a frightened animal something solid to lean against. She made a small sound into my mouth and her arms came up around my back and pulled, hard, like she needed to feel more of me than there already was.
I let her have it. I pressed her down into the mattress under me until there was no inch of her my body was not covering.
"I am here. I have you. Stay with me."
She made a small sound and her hands slid into the hair at the back of my neck.
"Yours," she breathed. "Only you."
My mouth moved against her temple. "Mine," I said. Low. Final. I said it the way you set a stone into mortar.
I worked my mouth down her throat slow. I returned to the hollow at the base of it, harder this time, until I knew she would wear a small mark in the morning.
I traced the rise of her collarbone. I closed my mouth over the soft peak of one breast and felt her arch up off the bed to find me.
I gave the other the same. Her breath broke into something thinner and higher.
I tasted the space between her ribs. I tracked down her stomach.
Her muscles fluttered where my breath ghosted across her skin, and her fingers slid into my hair and tightened.
I put my mouth on her.
I settled my shoulders between her thighs and let her feel the breadth of me there.
One hand hooked under her thigh and lifted, opening her to me.
The other lay open and flat across her stomach, fingers spread wide, holding her where I wanted her.
When her hips tried to rise against my mouth I pressed her back down into the mattress with my palm and held her there.
She whimpered. I worked her slow. The first soft "*oh*" was barely a sound.
The second was a breath against the back of her own hand.
By the third her hand had left her mouth and gone into my hair, and her thigh had started to tremble where it lay over my shoulder.