Chapter 25
SYLVIE
I CANNOT BELIEVE I’m back on this roof.
Same gravel. Same rust-colored puddle in the same dip by the vent housing that never dries, not once, not in nine weeks of August. The dead pigeon is worse for wear. Vultures came through and picked it apart—I empathize.
Yet, here I am, back to my familiar antics.
He still doesn’t close his blinds. After everything he’s gone through, Callen still keeps his life on display for the birds.
It’s the single stupidest thing about him. It might be the thing I love most.
I lower the binoculars and wheeze.
The pain in my side is a permanent passenger now. Nearly a week after it broke, it’s not pure agony anymore, it’s just there, a hot wire between two ribs on the left that lights up when I breathe wrong, which is all of the time.
There’s a veterinary clinic six blocks north with a man who does the night inventory alone. I gave him more cash than the prescription was worth, and he didn’t ask me a single question. Now I have a bottle of something a dog would take for a shattered femur. I take two when the pain gets loud.
There’s a mirror in the stairwell of the building I sleep in and I’ve stopped using it. I hate what I see. A thinning face that’s gone gray, a woman who moves like she’s ninety, and stops on landings to breathe. I have been humbled.
A few months ago, I walked into a bar and wanted every head to turn.
Now, I don’t want to be seen anymore. I don’t want to expect another living thing to love me again.
I should have already left. Everyone thinks I did. Cricket’s called forty times and I’ve promised her every single time that when I get to where I’m going, I’ll write her. I promised I wouldn’t disappear again—although that’s exactly what I intend to do.
But my gut and intuition teamed up and wouldn’t let me go just yet.
Salisbrie doesn’t leave loose ends. I don’t trust her silence. The burner phone melted in the lake. I’ve searched her online and nothing noteworthy has come back. She’s hiding now that PALADIN’s hunting her, but no doubt plotting.
Belai has PALADIN standing shoulder to shoulder around a hospital room protecting him. Nuria and Sameen have guards at every door of their house.
Callen has nobody. Except me.
So I came up here to watch, to be certain he was safe. I only need that gnawing feeling that something isn’t finished. Maybe that’s just my wishful thinking because Callen made it clear on that dock: we’re done.
He’s barely been home this week. I think he’s mostly been at the hospital with Belai.
He comes back to shower and change, then he leaves again.
When he’s in there, walking around with his shirt off, hair wet, I put the binoculars down.
I don’t watch him. I’ll never be able to tell him that I’m doing my best to stay on this side of the wall he built.
I have to honor his wishes, but I’ll be damned if I let him get hurt any further because of me.
Which is why I watch the street.
Every car. Every plate. The van that parks across from the deli on Tuesdays and Thursdays and hasn’t moved in weeks. The man who feeds the cats behind the laundromat. The two kids who fight on the corner at eight and are back holding hands at eight twenty.
I know this street now. I know it better than I have ever known anything.
Nobody is paying me and nobody will ever know and the man I’m doing it for would put a bullet in me himself if he found out I was up here, and I do it anyway, every night, for four hours, on a broken rib. It’s the only way I get to still love him.
He hates me with his whole heart, but I’m still going to love him with all of mine. That love doesn’t have to go anywhere, do anything, be something. But it’s there. It always will be.
I’ve watched all week, but this is the last night.
There’s a train at six forty tomorrow morning.
It goes south, and it gets me to the border by afternoon.
There’s a man I know at a marina who doesn’t ask names, but he’ll take you as far out into the water as you want to go.
I’m going to spend all of Salisbrie’s deposit to have him sail me to the other ends of the earth.
When I hit land on the other side of the ocean, that’s when I’ll figure out the rest.
Everything I plan to keep is shoved into a backpack. It’s not much. Three passports, none of them mine. Cash in four currencies. My mother’s earrings, in my ears.
And a scorpion, of course.
She’s in a padded case in the bottom of the bag with breathing holes drilled in the lid, and she is enormously pregnant and enormously annoyed about the travel. She’s been rattling that case since Tuesday.
But I can’t just tip her into a field. There are two hundred of her left in the world and about a dozen more of her arriving soon, and if I do this wrong I put something in an ecosystem that has no defense against it.
So, I’ll find somewhere remote. Somewhere hot and dry, with endless insects to munch on, and release mama and her babies. They’ll be my only companions on the most deserted island I can find.
I’ll write to Fiona.
Once I’m somewhere, I’ll tell her I’m alive but beg her not to come. A week ago, I wanted my sister to run away with me. But now, I don’t want to strip her of the thing she has that I no longer do.
Not just a job. A family.
She built a whole life. She has a husband, a loyal best friend, three men who’d die for her without thinking, and a woman—the closest thing she has to a mother—who gave her a home.
It’d be selfish to ask her to choose. So I don’t. She’s a pack animal. I’m the lone coyote.
I exhale into the warm night, pulling the binoculars from my eyes. The window’s dark. He’s not coming home tonight, it seems.
And I have a train in six hours.
I sit on the gravel with my back against the vent housing and I look up.
You can’t see stars in this city. Not really. There’s a smear of light where the sky should be, and if you stare at one place long enough you can trick your brain into thinking something magical is there. But it’s just a mirage.
It’s time to go.
I get up. I sling the bag over my shoulder and wince when it grazes the wound on my hip. Fuck, I‘m a mess.
I’m turning for the stairwell door when it hits me.
I don’t know what it is.
There’s no sound. There is no movement in the corner of my eye. There is nothing at all, and yet something in my brain, some engrained animal instinct that has kept me alive all these years, says: look again. One more time.
I turn around.
I lift the binoculars.
The lights are still off but the front door is open.
He’s home. I missed him coming in, I was looking at the sky, I was looking at the sky so I didn’t see two figures in the living room.
Shit. That’s Callen on the floor.
He’s on his side in the hallway with his legs still half in the doorway, and he isn’t moving. There’s a man standing over him.
His back is to the window. But that enormous silhouette is unmistakable. Six and a half feet of him, shoulders filling the frame, and his hair is down. It’s down and over his shoulders instead of that ridiculous, perfect little man-bun.
I drop my backpack so it doesn’t slow me down, and I’m already running.
The stairwell door goes into the wall so hard the glass in it cracks.
I feel my broken rib on every single step. My whole left side is screaming but I don’t listen to its protests. I take the stairs three at a time and I do not slow down. Not once. Eight flights down.
The lobby door. The street. There’s a car and it brakes and it screams at me as I cross four lanes without looking.
His building. The alley. The fire escape.
I’m moving so fast I must be flying.
I go up the emergency stairs in Callen’s building so dead set and focused, I’ll turn stair climbing into a fucking Olympic sport. This is the single most important athletic mission of my life.
Please hang in there, Callen, I’m almost there.
I don’t arrive at his door, I arrive through it without thinking. My gun is in my backpack, which I dropped on the roof across the street. Shit.
I stop in the entry for a millisecond realizing I was so focused on getting here, I didn’t think about what I was going to do when I arrived.
Ruslan has a gun drawn.
It’s all gone. Eleven years, every hour of training, every dirty trick, every inch of speed I ever had. None of it helps me now. He is fourteen feet away with a pistol in his hand and it is pointed down at the back of Jeffrey Callen’s head.
There is no closing fourteen feet on a drawn gun.
There is no throw. There is no shout, there is no distraction, there is no version of the next second where I put steel in that man before he moves one finger.
Callen lifts his head.
He pushes himself up onto one elbow in a puddle of his own blood and he lifts his chin.
He’s meeting it head-on. His own end.
There’s only one thing left in this entryway that can get between a bullet and that man.
I lunge.
I don’t decide. My body’s already going. My arms come out wide and I put every ounce of what’s left of me into the air.
I open my arms as far as they’ll go.
I make myself as big as I have ever been in my life.
Bang!
The world goes black.
CALLEN
MY HEAD IS a bell somebody’s rung.
That’s all there is. There’s a ringing that has no outside, and the floor is cold on my cheek, and my own blood is running into my mouth. It’s warm and it tastes like pennies at the tip of my tongue. I can barely see. There’s a shape above me, huge, and I can’t make it into a man.
I am going to die on my hallway floor.
I get my elbow under me, my chin up, because I am not going to take it in the back of the skull, I am going to look him in the eye and face my fate. At least I’ll see my brothers again. At least Belai will publish his book. PALADIN will be okay. Vesper will take care of them.
It’s just…the only loose end…
I never told her…
That’s it. That’s what’s in me at the end. Regret.
Then something comes through my apartment like a thrown door.