CHAPTER 29 #3
And I do. I hold his eyes and let it take me, the whole bright unspooling of it, the clench and throb and flood of it, his name leaving me as something half curse and half prayer and wholly his, and he watches every second of my face the way he promised, and only when I'm coming apart around him does he let himself go, deep and silent, his control finally breaking, the burn-scarred arm crushing me close as he spills into me with a sound torn out of somewhere he keeps locked.
After, neither of us moves for a long time.
The lamp ticks cooling, the radiator warming, the watch its careful seconds on the nightstand. Out past the cold glass the black Sound keeps its own counsel, patient, indifferent, a world that's about to come apart held off for one hour from a room where nothing is.
He shifts us so I'm against his side, my cheek on his chest, his burn-scarred arm warm and heavy around me, his heart going hard and then slower under my ear.
I trace the smooth pale length of the scar — the way I'll get to trace it now, for years, for whatever this empire and these men will let us have.
The fire took his mother. It gave me the arm she made him hold the others with, and he's holding me with it now, and I'll spend the rest of my life making sure it was worth keeping.
"Two days," I say into the dark, because somebody has to say it.
"Two days. " His chest rises under my cheek. "And the day after."
"Tell me how it goes. The vows. The real ones.
" I prop my chin on him. "I mean the warm rite, the one with a pulse in it.
Father Anton said the words over us in that chapel like he was reading a receipt, and I signed Costa under your seal to make sure everyone knew I hadn't been bought.
I want the other one now. The one I choose. "
So we plan it, there in the dark, the way other couples must plan ordinary lives.
The chapel again, but warm this time, candles lit and meaning it.
My gown, the one standing pale and almost-finished on the form in the cold conservatory beside a flower that doesn't know it should be dead; I'll kneel and finish the hem in the morning, six inches of basting pulled out and the real stitches set, my own two hands, my mother's worn steel guarding the finger that's been doing this work since girlhood.
Three rings, Mateo says, because there are three of them and one of me and that is the shape of the thing, and he'll be damned if he'll let me stand up in front of God and the old guard wearing only his, as if the others were less, as if the whole impossible constellation of us were anything to be ashamed of.
Gael will whistle, and for once the whistle will lead into joy instead of blood.
Emil will calculate the odds of the day going wrong and then close the ledger, because some things ask only to be attended, never solved.
Nadia will cry into her bread. And my mother — alive, recovering, pink-chested and proud — will be there in the front pew where the bride's mother belongs, the surgery that began as Lev's leverage turned into the thing that lets her watch her daughter marry the spine back into her own life.
"When I stand up in that chapel," I say, "it's a choice now. A vow I'm making with my own mouth, the bargain anyone once struck over me burned down to ash behind it."
"More than a choice," Mateo says. His thumb moves slow over the full slope of my hip, over the give of me, reverent in the dark.
"He thought he was selling me a weakness.
He handed it to me like a noose. And I'm going to stand up in two days and marry it on purpose, with the woman he called a thing wearing a dress she built herself, the old guard watching, and let him understand from across the water exactly what he made.
" His arm tightens. "I'm done apologizing for the pulse, Amara.
He can have his day. We'll have the rest."
The orchid is budding down in the cold conservatory beside my almost-finished gown. And the wall I spent the night learning to hold is holding me back, warm and scarred and finally not keeping it alone.
"Mine," he says into my hair, and then, because he's a man who learned tonight to finish the harder half of a sentence, the won word, the one no one warned him about: "and yours. The wall is yours too now, Amara. Stand on it with me."
I lift the thimble from my throat — the worn little guard that carried my mother through her own hard years, the thing my fingers have closed over every time I was afraid — and I press the cold dented steel of it to his lips like a seal on a vow that no contract drew up and no money paid for.
"Always," I say.
Tomorrow I'll kneel on a cold glass floor beside a flower that refuses to die and finish the hem of the dress I built myself.
The day after, I'll wear it down an aisle and choose, out loud, in front of God and the old guard, the men I was sold to and the life I made.
And the day after that, we'll go across the black water and end the man who called me a bargain.
Tonight, I just hold the wall that finally holds me back.