12 Tommy #3
“You still hold the tether.” Her shadow had crouched again, back to the line, back to the work, the only place she knew how to put a thing this big. “But I don’t have a playbook for this. I don’t know. I’ll have to do some research.”
“It’s not a switch.” I kept my hand moving on Kaia’s spine, slow, the only thing I could give her while I said it out loud.
“It’s not—I touch her and she’s fixed. It’s more like—” The joke reflex came up and I let it, because the truth underneath was too big to carry bare.
“It’s like I’m a dialysis machine and she’s got twenty-six years of poison to run through me, and if I unplug, it backs up and it kills her.
The fever, the half-shifts, the cooking—that’s her body trying to clear it and not having anywhere to put it.
My—” I made myself use the word, the one I’d spent a lifetime running from.
“My bloodline. The old part. It gives it somewhere to go. It grounds the surge so her body can let it out a little at a time instead of all at once. But it has to be a little at a time.”
“How long, Nadia,” Reed said again. “If you had to guess.”
Nadia sighed. “A week? Maybe more.” I felt the size of the words as she said them.
“This is a slow bleed. She’s going to be sick and in pain and out of her mind, and the only thing standing between her and a flash-over the whole time is Tommy.
Which means he can’t leave her for long.
Where she goes he goes and he’s attached to her like a—”
“Like a very handsome life-support unit,” I finished.
Nobody laughed. I hadn’t really wanted them to.
“Okay,” Reed said. And then, quieter, the grief back in it, the thing from the ravine: “Okay. You’ve got it.
Whatever she needs, however long. I’ll move the world around the two of you.
” His shadow stood. “And Tommy. When she’s clear of this—when she can stand on her own and we’re not all holding our breath—you and I are going to sit down about the Fourth Signatory, and you’re going to tell me the whole thing, every piece you’ve been sitting on.
But not today. Today you just keep her breathing. ” A beat. “That’s the whole job.”
“Will do, alpha. But I expect the same transparency from you. I want to know all of it. No more holding back. Why have you been collecting bloodlines?”
Reed grunted assent. He turned. His shadow slid off the canvas.
Nadia stayed a moment longer.
“I’ll bring a saline line and electrolytes to the flap,” she said.
“You drip them into her, slow, she’s losing too much fluid through the fever.
And Tommy—” The clinical voice cracked, just at the edge, just enough to remind me there was a woman in there who’d watched the Order’s labs up close.
“What they did to her? The religious brainwashing? There’s no word for it that’s clean.
So don’t go looking for one. Just be the floor she stands on.
That’s the medicine. There isn’t another kind. ”
Her shadow went.
And the tent was just us again, the leaking canvas and the tired generator and the dawn coming up the color of the inside of a shell, and the woman they’d built a cage out of breathing slow against my throat, and the two hearts going, hers and mine, still matched.
I bent my head down over hers. Pressed my mouth to her hair, where I could still find the green-and-warm thread under everything they’d poured into her.
“I’ve got you,” I said, to the top of her head, to the wolf curled up asleep around my heartbeat, to whatever was left in there that had ever been allowed to be a person. “All the way down. Take your time. There’s nowhere either of us has to be.”
She stirred.
I felt it start in her hand first—the fist in my hair loosening, the fingers spreading, a slow surfacing—and then her whole body shifted against mine, drawing a breath that went deeper than the shallow fevered ones she’d been taking all night, and her lashes came up off my skin.
The heat hadn’t spiked. That was the first thing I checked, the animal in me checking before the man could, and it held steady at a simmer.
The tether was holding. She was waking up clear. Or as clear as she was going to get.
Her eyes found the canvas above us. I watched her read it. Watched the haze burn off and something underneath come online, slow, methodical.
She took in the tent. The cot. The fact of being held, my bare arm a bar across her back, my body curled around hers in a lock there was no innocent word for.
She took in the perimeter—I felt her do it, felt her catalog the breathing in the trees, the wolves, the not-hers, all of it ringed around this small lit box she’d woken up inside of.
I saw her arrive at the only conclusion her whole life had ever given her tools to reach.
She went still in my arms. Hands-going-to-prayer-position still, and her face closed, the lid coming down over the fire one more time, and when she spoke her voice came out level and dead and entirely without hope, a recording played at the right speed by someone who had stopped expecting mercy a very long time ago.
“What is the extraction price,” she said, “for a prisoner of my rank?”