Chapter 23
RAVEN
"Ineed you to do something for me," I said.
"Anything."
"I need you to stop talking for a while. And I need to not be touched. Can you do that?"
"Yeah." The chair creaked. "Yeah, I can do that. But I'm calling the doctor."
He went quiet. And I lay in the dark and let the truth settle over me like sediment falling to the bottom of a glass, each piece drifting down through the murky water of what I thought I knew and landing somewhere new.
I was alive.
And I was dead.
I was in South Dakota in a safe house, and the man I loved—because I did still love him—had beaten me on camera and faked my death and driven me through the night and was now sitting in a chair beside my bed, coming apart at the seams, waiting for me to decide whether to hate him or hold him.
I wasn't ready to decide. Not yet.
So I lay there. And I breathed. And I let the silence do what silence always did for me—speak louder than words.
A doctor came and went. A nice woman with cool hands who assured both of us that nothing was broken and there were no internal injuries that she could tell.
She tried to talk Milo into taking me to a hospital, but he absolutely refused.
I don't know what he told her happened to me or how he kept her from calling the police, but eventually she told him what to watch for and to call her immediately if I needed anything.
I don't know when I fell back asleep. The drugs were still metabolizing, pulling me under in waves that came without warning. When I surfaced again, the warmth from the sun was cooler now. Evening, maybe. Or a cloudy afternoon.
Milo was still there. I could hear him moving around in what I assumed was the kitchen, maybe fifteen feet from the bed. There was the sound of a cabinet opening. Water running. Something being poured.
Carefully, I sat up.
The pain was still there, but it was duller now, more like a sustained chord than a series of staccato strikes.
My ribs protested. My face throbbed. But I could move.
I could sit. I could swing my legs over the edge of the bed and plant my bare feet on a wooden floor that was cold and slightly uneven.
My dress was gone, and I was wearing some kind of long T-shirt.
I reached for my cane automatically. My hand closed on nothing.
Right. My cane was at The Silver Table. On the stage beside the piano bench where he'd told me to leave it.
I stood anyway.
The room tilted, and I grabbed the edge of what felt like a nightstand and steadied myself. My body screamed at me to lie back down. But I ignored it.
I was done lying down.
My feet learned the floor as I moved toward the sounds of the kitchen, my hands out in front of me.
Twelve steps from the bed to the doorframe.
Then a small, narrow hallway. My fingertips brushed both walls simultaneously.
Four more steps and the space opened up.
I must be in the kitchen. I could feel the wood change to linoleum under my feet, and the smell of coffee was stronger.
His footsteps stopped. He'd been pacing. I hadn't realized it until he stopped.
"You should be in bed."
"I should be a lot of things." I kept moving. Slowly. Mapping. Counting. Rebuilding a world the way I always did—one surface, one step, one sound at a time. "How big is this place?"
He paused. "Three rooms. Kitchen and bedroom. There's a little sitting area in there on the far side of the bed. Just a couple of chairs and a T.V. Bathroom off the hall. Maybe eight hundred square feet."
"Windows?"
"Three. Two in here, one in the bedroom."
"Exits?"
"Back door off the kitchen. It's locked."
I filed it all away. Within an hour, I'd know this space the way I knew my apartment in Austin. Down to the millimeter. Down to the creak in the third floorboard and the draft under the kitchen window and the exact number of steps from the bed to the bathroom door.
I made my way to the kitchen counter and found it with my hands. Ran my fingers along the surface. It felt like formica, cool, slightly sticky near the edge where something had been spilled and wiped but not well enough. A mug sat near the sink. I picked it up. It was empty, but still warm.
"Can I have some coffee?"
"You should probably eat something first. You haven't—"
"Coffee."
A beat. Then the sound of him moving. Cabinet opening. A clean mug pulled down. Coffee poured. He set it on the counter near my left hand, close enough that my fingers found it without searching.
I took a sip. The coffee was bitter and lukewarm and it was the best thing I'd ever tasted because it meant I was alive to taste it.
"This is awful." I took another sip, then set my cup down on the counter, both hands wrapped around it to feel the warmth. "I need to ask you something," I said.
"Okay."
He'd moved away and I turned my head in that direction. "When you were—" I stopped. Tried again. "When you were asking me those questions. My fingers tightened around the mug. "Did you believe it? Did you think I was the leak?"
The silence that followed was different from the others. A man choosing his words carefully.
"I think," he said slowly, "that you're one of the smartest people I've ever met. And I think that smart people are capable of things that other people can't imagine."
That wasn't an answer. "That's not what I asked."
"I know what you asked."
"Then answer it."
Another pause. I listened to him breathe. Counted the beats between inhales as I raised my cup to my lips.
"It doesn't matter," he said finally. "Whether I believed it or not doesn't change what I did. Or the way I feel about you."
I set the mug down. My hand was shaking. Just a little.
The fact that this man would destroy his entire life to save mine regardless of whether I deserved saving sat in my stomach like a stone.
He'd saved me.
He'd saved me…
And I was the leak.
Every accusation, every suspicion, every piece of intelligence that had surfaced on the outside and sent the Bratva scrambling—that was me.
I'd collected information from a piano bench for over a year.
Carefully, methodically, with the operational discipline of a woman who'd been trained by grief and rage to dismantle the organization that stole everything her father built.
The guilt sat heavier than the bruises.
It lived in a different part of my body, somewhere deeper. Somewhere I couldn't reach. It just sat there. Throbbing. A sustained low note that colored everything else.
I should tell him.
The thought surfaced and I pushed it back down immediately.
Not now. Not yet. Not when I was broken and confused and the drugs were still leaving my system and I couldn't tell the difference between clarity and delirium.
Not when the man who'd saved me was sitting across the room, waiting for me to forgive him for something he'd done to protect me from a truth he didn't even fully know.
This was not the moment for confession.
But the weight of it. God, the weight.
"I want to clean up," I said instead. "Can you show me the bathroom?"
He stood and walked toward me. "This way." He still didn't touch me. Walking ahead of me, close enough that I could track his movement and follow, he led me down the short hallway to a door on the right I'd missed somehow when I came to the kitchen. He opened it.
"Walk in shower is straight ahead, about five or six steps. Toilet to the left. Sink to the right. Towels are on a shelf above the toilet. Soap and shampoo are in the shower, hanging from the shower head."
I stepped inside. Yes, the room was small. The acoustics told me everything. The sound bounced tight and fast, close walls, low ceiling. I found the shower and reached in, searching for the shower knob.
"To your left," he said from the doorway. "I put some things in here for you. A toothbrush and toothpaste on the sink to the right. A change of clothes on the shelf above the towels."
"Thank you." The words were inadequate. They were enormous. They were everything and nothing and I said them because they were the only words I could manage that weren't I was the leak or I love you or I'm sorry I made you do this.
"I'll be right outside."
He closed the door.
I stood in the bathroom and pressed my back against the wall and slid down until I was sitting on the cold tile floor, and I let myself fall apart.
Tears tracking down my swollen face, each one stinging as it crossed the split skin and the bruises, my body shaking with sobs that I muffled with my hand pressed over my mouth because he was right outside the door and I didn't want him to hear over the running water.
Not because I was angry. Not because I was afraid. Because the man on the other side of that door had destroyed himself to save me, and I was crying because I didn't deserve it, and if I told him why, I might lose him, and if I didn't tell him, the secret would eat me alive.
I sat on the floor and cried until the tears dried up and my ribs burned from the effort and the tile under my legs had warmed to my body temperature.
Then I wiped my face. Stood up. Took off my shirt and got in the shower.
The hot water hit the cuts and bruises and I hissed, but it seemed the doctor was right. I didn't feel like anything was broken, just swollen and tender, mostly cuts and bruises.
The sobs tried to come back while I shampooed my hair, but I swallowed them whole. I was done crying.
I dressed in the clothes he'd left. Soft cotton. A t-shirt that smelled like it had been washed in the same detergent as the sheets, something generic and bought in bulk. Sweatpants that were too long but had a drawstring. No bra. But with the state of my ribs, that was fine by me.
When I opened the door, he was right where he said he'd be. Leaning against the wall beside the bathroom, close enough to hear if I'd fallen, far enough to give me space.
"Come sit," he said. "I need to look at your injuries."
"You've already looked at them. And so has the doctor."