CHAPTER 10 #2
And she folds the muslin against the new split and presses, firm, the pressure exactly right, a woman who has bandaged her own bleeding fingers a hundred times over a hundred deadlines, and she looks up at me through the gray with rain on her lashes and says, perfectly calm, "Hold that.
You'll want it elevated. Are they all yours, or some of his? "
I open my mouth and nothing comes out of it, which has happened to me maybe twice in my whole talking life.
"His, mostly," I manage.
"Good. " She wraps, neat, a hem you'd never see from across a room. "In the car. You're soaked and you're coming down off whatever that was and you'll drop any minute now whether you like it or not. Bea's coming to the house. I'm not leaving her here."
And that's it. She holds her ground a full inch from me; whatever she's afraid of, it stands beside me instead of across from me, fear with me, which is its own country entirely, a place I've never once been let into.
I spent thirty years building a man nobody could get into, and she just walked through the wall like it was a door I'd forgotten I left open.
It undoes me worse than the fight. The fight is Tuesday. This, though, her thumb pressed to my broken knuckles, the rosewater coming up off the cloth through the iron smell of my own blood, clean cotton, chalk, the small bright sting of split skin, this I have no training for at all.
The drive back is bad.
The road itself is fine, the coupe holding the wet cliff turns like it loves them; it's my body that gives me trouble, catching up to itself on its old schedule, the shake settling into my hands and then my arms, the adrenaline going sour, and underneath it a thing I haven't felt since I was young and stupid and hadn't yet learned to lock it down.
I'm genuinely scared, the kind of scared that has nothing to do with my own skin.
Because here's the arithmetic I can't whistle my way out of.
They didn't come to take anything. They came to show her.
To put a man in her one free room and let her come home to a door left open and the cold knowledge that nowhere is hers anymore, that the only walls left are ours, which is exactly where Lev wants her: inside, dependent, the proof of the soft thing he's accusing Mateo of being.
She's not a person to Lev. She's a move on a board. And I've watched my whole life what Lev does to the pieces he's finished with, and I'll tear this city down to the foundations before I let her be one.
Bea's in the back going quiet now, the fast talk burned off into the after-shake, watching the gray go by, and Amara's in front with my wrapped hand resting on the gearbox under her hand — she put it there, she just took it and set it down where she could keep her fingers on the pulse at my wrist, and she's left it there the whole drive — and she says, low, so Bea won't hear, "That was the realest I've seen you. "
"The fight?"
"No. " Her thumb moves on the inside of my wrist, over the jump of the blood. "The minute after, when you thought I'd be afraid of you, and your whole face got ready to let me be."
I don't have anything for that. I drive.
"I'm not afraid of you, Gael," she says, to the windshield, to the rain. "I'm afraid for all of us. There's a difference. Learn it."
It's nearly word for word a thing she said to me about her own softness, the first week, and she's done it on purpose, handed me my own line back to show me she remembers everything, and the falcon over my heart gives one hard beat like a fist on a door.
I take her down to the cove before we go up to the house. Bea I send ahead with Pavel, who meets us at the forecourt with his earnest worried face and a coat for Amara she waves off. Then I take Amara's elbow and steer her past the great hall, around, along the cliff path, down.
"Where are we going?"
"Showing you something. While I've still got the nerve."
The rain's eased to mist by now but the wind's up off the Sound, and the sea-stair is the worst stretch of the whole grounds in this weather, a switchback of black stone cut into the cliff a hundred years ago by men who didn't much care if you fell, slick as oiled glass, the rain sheeting down the treads in thin moving skins. I go first.
I keep my body between her and the drop the whole way down, my bandaged hand fisted because the cold's woken it up, and the salt comes up at us thick and the foghorn's started its slow moan out past the point, the wet black stone shining, the rope of the boathouse groaning on its cleat below, salt and gun oil and the iron tang still on my knuckles.
The boathouse sits at the bottom on its own stone quay, half in the water, older than the manor, the skiff tied up inside riding the chop on a long painter, the rope creaking, that low working sound a tied boat makes, complaining, alive.
I get the door and pull her in out of the wind and we stand there breathing in the dark that smells of tar and salt and old wood, and the skiff knocks the dock, knock, knock, patient.
"This," I say. I'm not whistling. I'm careful not to. "You see this. The stair, the door, this boat. The painter's a slip-knot, one pull and she's free, oars are under the thwart, the outboard's fueled, I check it. " I make myself slow down, make my mouth give her the words clean instead of fast.