Chapter Fourteen Four Days
Chapter Fourteen: Four Days
Lysandra
Four days pass, and Cassian stops pretending. There's no pretense of interrogation. No questions, no documentation, no guards rotating through with clipboards.
What there is instead: meals that appear at regular intervals, and a warm bed with blankets heavy enough to matter.
He even brought me a phone. Tossed it onto the bed with his face arranged into something indifferent, said there was nowhere else to put it.
I thanked him. His ears went red at the tips.
The first thing I did was call Nessa. I told her I was fine, asked her to look after my mother. When she asked when I was coming home, I thought about Cassian's face for a moment, then told her: soon, probably.
The only problem is that he likes to feed me.
It started because the fever made my hands unreliable, made the spoon difficult. Somewhere along the way he seemed to decide this was a game worth continuing.
I let him.
By the fourth day, there's a moment between the medicine and the food where his thumb catches the corner of my mouth, slow and deliberate, and then his mouth replaces it.
He kisses the way he always did. Almost.
Except four years have made him hungrier. Less patient. Like he has already waited long enough and has no intention of waiting further.
He kisses me until there's no air left in the room, until there's no air left in me, and he doesn't stop until I can't anymore.
I don't stop him.
I know what he's doing. He's checking, every time, where my line is. Moving it a degree at a time, waiting to see if I'll flinch. I grew up watching my father run that same strategy across negotiating tables.
The difference is that I don't want to flinch.
At night, sometimes he leaves. When he does, the room feels larger than it should.
When he stays, he pulls me against him with the matter-of-fact certainty of someone reclaiming something that was already his, and I fall asleep listening to his heartbeat, which is steady in a way that mine has not been in a very long time.
I do not think about what happens when this ends.
Tonight he's gone when I fall asleep.
He's there when I wake up.
I know it's him before I open my eyes. It’s the heat of him, sitting on the edge of the bed, the rough, uneven sound of his breathing in the dark. Like he’s fighting a war with himself just by looking at me.
I reach out. My fingers find his wrist.
The war ends.
He drops over me, and the kiss is not gentle. It is a devouring thing, his breath ragged against my mouth, thick with something he has held back too long.
Four years of it, compressed into the bruising pressure of his lips. His hands move with territorial purpose, anchoring me to him as if he's afraid I'll disappear.
In the dark, the weight of him pins me down.
Through the thin fabric, the heat of him presses between my thighs, heavy and insistent, moving in a desperate rhythm. Something caged for too long, done being patient.
The part of me that pushed him away four years ago doesn't even stir.
I close my eyes. I tilt my head back, baring my throat. I wrap my arms around the hard tension of his back and drag him closer, my fingers burying into his hair.
And I give him what I didn't give him then.
He goes still.
Not the stillness of hesitation. The stillness of something being pulled tight and stopping just before it snaps. He lifts his head and the room is dark and his eyes, when they find mine, are red all the way through.
"My rank is high enough now." His voice is rough, pulled from somewhere he doesn't usually let anything come from. "High enough that you're willing to give me this."
It's not a question.
My chest does something sharp and small. Not anger. Closer to grief.
To him, I have always wanted the rank, not the man. That's fair. I never gave him reason to think differently.
I look at his eyes. Red, and underneath the red, something that has been waiting too long and is too proud to say so.
I have seen those eyes before.
They looked the same the night I stood with my hand still raised after the slap, watching him understand something terrible and refuse to look away from it.
He has been carrying this for four years and turned it into a career and an empire and a very specific set of plans, and underneath all of it he is still asking the same question he was asking in that night.
I laugh. Soft, tired, not unkind.
"Does it matter?" I ask. "Whether this is power or whether this is you. Does it actually matter to you?"
His jaw goes tight.
"Yes."
I look at him. At the red eyes and the tight jaw and the four years of it, all of it, the cliff road and the boots in the corridor and this room and all the rooms before it.
"I love you," I say.
The room doesn't move.
He doesn't move. He's braced above me, his weight on one arm, and the arm doesn't shift and neither does he, like the sentence landed somewhere in his chest and stopped every system simultaneously.
Then: "You're not about to tell me there was a reason." His voice has a crack in it I've never heard before. "That night. You're not going to tell me there was something you couldn't say."
I look at him for a long moment. "What if I did?"
His throat moves. Something vast and dangerous moves through his eyes and I watch it go.
"Tell me," he says. "Whatever you say. I'll believe you. I always will."
He means it. I can see that he means it, completely, without the slightest concession to self-preservation.
He would believe a lie. He doesn't care if it is one.
He is telling me this on purpose, as a declaration rather than a weakness — this is what you are to me, I have decided, I am past the point of caring what it costs.
My eyes go hot.
I don't cry. But it's a near thing.
***
The phone on the nightstand goes off.
He closes his eyes for one second. Then he reaches for it, reads whatever's on the screen, and puts it face-down. He stands up.
He picks up the clothes folded on the chair — clean, not mine, something arranged in advance — and comes back to the bed.
He dresses me with the focused efficiency of someone who has a plan and is now executing it, and I let him.
He pulls me to my feet.
There's a wig on the table, and a mask. He fits the wig with brisk hands and then the mask, and then he looks at me once, checking, and then he takes my hand.
We wait.
Then: an alarm, sharp and discordant, cutting through the corridor. Voices rising. Someone calling for medical. A prisoner down, sublevel two, get the medics.
The noise spreads outward like water finding cracks.
Cassian moves. He doesn't run. He walks, steady and deliberate, and I walk with him.
The stairwell is narrow and smells like concrete and cold air. We climb.
One flight.
Two flights.
"We're leaving this way?" I ask.
The front entrance of the facility is at the end of the hall. The main door. The desk with the guards and the sign-in registry and the security cameras that I have been watching from inside rooms for the past four days.
"We're leaving this way," he says.
He pushes the door open. Cold air comes in off the street. He moves me inside his coat in one motion, tucking me against his side, his arm across my shoulders, and we walk.
I thought I knew his plan. I thought I understood the general shape of how he was going to get me out of this building. What I did not anticipate was that the plan would be this.
This. Walking out the front door.
I look up at him. I don't know his full plan. It turns out I don't need to.
His arm tightens slightly around my shoulder.
We keep walking.