Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
Wren
I'm up through the hatch before it's fully open, scrambling, the pistol forgotten on the cellar floor, because that wasn't the voice of a man who won clean. That was the voice of a man holding himself together by my name.
And there he is, on his knees on the floor he made me promise to come up through, his hand pressed to his side and the red coming through his fingers and spreading dark down his shell, his eyes finding me and going soft with the only thing left in them, which is relief, which is you're alive, which is worth it.
"You're hit," I say, and my voice comes out hard and clear and steady because clear is what I am when it counts. "Don't you dare. Don't you dare. You came back through the door, you do not get to die on the wrong side of it."
"It's not—" He sways. "It's a graze, it's lower than it?—"
"Lie down. Now. On your back. I've got you.
" I'm already moving, already pulling at his shell, already cataloging: entry, no exit I can find, low on the left side, too much blood but not the dark arterial kind, not yet.
My hands are not shaking anymore because there is no room for shaking, there's only the work.
"You don't get to be the one who saves people and then bleeds out on his own floor while the woman he saved watches.
That's not how this goes. I read the structure once today and I'm reading you now, and the structure says you live.
Do you hear me, Eli? The numbers say you live.
Give me the real number and the real number is you live. "
His hand comes up, bloody, and cups my jaw, and he smiles, actually smiles, this impossible man, gray and bleeding on the floor at the top of the world.
"There she is," he says. "There's my brave girl. You made him earn it."
"I made him earn it." My eyes are streaming and my hands are steady and both things are true. "Now you're going to let me make you earn it too. You're going to stay. You hear me? You came back through the door. Now you stay through it."
And his eyes start to close, and I will not let them, I will not, and outside the sun is brilliant on the snow and the slope is quiet and the men are gone and the only fight left on this whole mountain is the one happening under my hands.