38. Chapter 38
Chapter thirty-eight
Micah
The rope has stopped hurting.
That’s the part that scares me more than anything else has tonight, more than the fever or the dark or the shape of the man moving somewhere behind me.
My wrists went past pain about an hour ago, out the other side into a kind of numbness that feels less like relief and more like a warning.
My body giving up on telling me something is wrong because it’s decided I already know.
I flex my fingers anyway. Slow, small movements, the kind I hope don’t show.
I’ve been doing it since he tied me here, working the give in the knot without looking like I’m working anything at all, because the one thing I learned a long time ago and never managed to forget is that the moment you let someone see you trying, they take the trying away from you.
I know this building. Even the bones of it, the particular cold that comes off old brick that’s been rained on for longer than it’s been dry.
I’ve climbed through a dozen places just like it with a camera in my hand and a grin on my face, and it is a special kind of cruel that the thing I turned into a career, the thing that felt like freedom, is the same thing that’s ending up killing me.
Footsteps. Unhurried. He’s never in a hurry, that’s the worst part, he moves through this the way a man moves through his own kitchen.
“You’re awake.”
I don’t answer. I’ve learned that too, a long time ago, in rooms much smaller than this one.
He crouches in front of me, and the little bit of light from his torch on the floor catches him from underneath in a way that makes him look almost gentle, and that’s the thing I can’t get past, even now, even here.
He is so ordinary. Thinning hair. A soft, forgettable face, the kind you’d walk past on any street in London and never once look back at.
A gray fleece, the unofficial uniform that used to mean a car waiting outside a building I didn’t want to be in, a hand on my shoulder steering me toward it.
Dave. Just Dave. Never anyone’s first thought when they pictured a monster, and that was always the point of him, that was always what made him useful to the people above him. Nobody watches the driver.
“I used to bring you your tea,” he says, like we’re catching up. “Remember that? Two sugars. You always said thank you so nicely.” His head tilts. “None of the other boys said thank you.”
My stomach turns over slow and complete, the particular nausea of a memory I’ve spent years building a wall around suddenly having a face put back on it.
“You were kind to all of us,” I say, because staying silent isn’t working and maybe words will buy me something, time or information or just the small mercy of him talking instead of doing something worse.
“You were different.” He says it simply, like it’s just a fact, like the sky being a particular color.
“I knew it the second I saw you. I used to imagine, you know. What would happen when you didn’t belong to them anymore.
” He reaches out and tucks a piece of hair off my face, and I flinch so hard the rope bites into skin I thought had gone past feeling. “I’ve been very patient.”
I think about being sick. I think about the ring, the terror of being fifteen and property, and somewhere underneath all of it, cold and steady, I think about Lennox, because thinking about Lennox is the only thing keeping the room from spinning.
“He’s coming,” I say, before I can stop myself.
Something moves through Dave’s face, quick and unimpressed.
“Is he? Your detective.” He says the word like it tastes bad.
“I’ve been very good to you both. I gave you flowers.
I let him think he was clever.” He stands, drifts back toward the window, the broken one, the one with the two snapped cords hanging like something’s spine. “He won’t be able to find you.”
I close my eyes and pray even though none of my prayers have ever been answered.
The sound that comes through the building isn’t subtle, glass giving way somewhere below us, then feet on stairs that don’t sound careful at all, and Dave’s whole body goes rigid in a way that tells me, even before I hear the voice, that he knows exactly who’s coming.
“Micah!”
It’s the only thing in the world I want to hear and it terrifies me anyway, because Lennox comes through the doorway with his coat torn at the shoulder and blood already on his knuckles from somewhere and his eyes go to me first, just for a fraction of a second, checking, cataloguing, the way he catalogues everything, and in that fraction of a second Dave moves.
I scream his name. It comes out wrong, cracked, useless.
They go into each other hard enough that the whole structure seems to shudder.
Dave gets a shoulder into him first, drives him back into the door frame with a crack that I feel in my own teeth, and for one horrible second I think that’s it, that’s the whole fight, over before it started, and then Lennox comes off the frame swinging and I understand for the first time in my life what it actually looks like when a person decides they are not losing something.
Lennox is not young. The lines around his eyes, the gray coming in at his temples that I’ve always thought was so distinguished.
None of that matters right now, because whatever’s left in him after a career like his, comes out all at once, brutal and precise, a man who has spent his whole career learning, from dealing with the aftermath, exactly where to hit another man to make him stop.
Dave fights ugly, fights like someone with nothing left to lose, a fist that catches Lennox across the jaw and snaps his head sideways, a knee that finds his ribs and doubles him half over, and I’m screaming something, I don’t even know what, useless noise from a useless corner of the room while the two of them turn the small space into wreckage.
I stop being useless.
I work the rope harder, ignoring the numb burn of it, ignoring everything except the small progress I’ve been building for an hour, and the knot finally gives all at once, so suddenly I nearly fall forward off the pipe I’ve been tied to.
My hands are clumsy and half dead, and I don’t care.
I get to my feet on legs that don’t want to hold me and I look for anything, anything at all, a length of pipe, a brick, something that isn’t nothing.
That’s when I see the knife.
It comes up from low, from Dave’s other hand, the one Lennox hasn’t been watching because he’s too busy absorbing everything the first hand is doing, and I open my mouth and the warning comes out half a second too late to matter.
Lennox twists at the last possible moment, enough that it doesn’t go where it was aimed, but not enough, and I watch his whole body change shape around it, a single sharp inhale through his teeth, his free hand going to his own side on instinct before the rest of him has caught up to what just happened to it.
He still wins.
I don’t know how. I don’t know what it costs him to keep his feet, to get his hand around Dave’s wrist and force it wide and down and put him on the ground hard enough that Dave’s head smacks against the concrete and he doesn’t get up again, but Lennox does it, breathing like something’s tearing inside his chest, and then it’s just the two of us and the dark and the sound of that ragged breathing, which is the worst sound I have ever heard in my life.
I get to him before he hits the floor.
I don’t remember crossing the room. I just know that suddenly I’m on my knees with his weight against me, heavier than I expect, all of him folding into me at once, his hand pressed hard to his side, blood already warm and slick between his fingers, more of it than I want to look at directly.
I get my own hand over his, pressing down, and I’m saying his name over and over like it’s the only word I have left, which it might be.
“I’m fine,” he says, which is a lie, the first outright lie I’ve ever heard him tell.
“You’re not fine, you’re bleeding, don’t you dare,” I say, and my voice is doing something I have no control over, cracking wide open on every other word, “don’t you dare do this to me, don’t you dare.”
He looks up at me. Even now, even like this, gray and unsteady and losing more blood by the second, there’s something almost amused in his face, exhausted and amused and entirely, achingly mine.
“I came to get you,” he says, like that explains everything, like it’s the only fact in the world that matters right now.
“I know.” My hand is shaking under his, and I hold it there anyway, both of us keeping each other whole with nothing but pressure and stubbornness. “I knew you would.”
He grins up at me. Weak and faltering, but it’s there.
Frantically I keep babbling, anything to keep him here. “You came into my life and never once left again, not really, not even when I gave you every reason to.”
I can hear the sirens starting somewhere far off, small and distant, not fast enough, never fast enough.
“I love you. I’ve loved you since the first night we spent together.
I loved you before I had the first idea what to call it.
I loved you when you turned your hand over on my sofa and didn’t say anything, because you didn’t have to, because I already knew. ”
I draw in a shaky breath. “I’m so sorry it started as a lie, but it hasn’t been a lie for a long time. I love you. I really love you. I love you, Lennox, please, please stay awake, please don’t you dare leave me now that I’ve finally said it.”
Something moves through his face that has nothing exhausted in it at all, something that pushes straight through the pain and the blood loss and lands somewhere I can actually see.
“I love you too,” he says, quiet, certain, the words coming out like they’ve been sitting in him for weeks, folded and ready, waiting for a moment honest enough to finally hold them.
“I’ve loved you for longer than I’ve been willing to admit, even to myself.
I loved you in an alley with my torch in your face and I loved you making eggs I didn’t deserve and I loved you every single morning I had to leave before I was ready to let you go.
” His hand tightens weakly under mine, and it’s the smallest gesture and it undoes me completely.
“I should have said it last night. I had the words. I just didn’t trust myself to say them out loud and mean them as much as I do. ”
“You’re saying it now.”
“I’m saying it now,” he agrees, and his eyes are struggling to stay open, fighting to hold mine, and I lean down and press my forehead to his, careless of the blood, careless of anything except the warmth still coming off him, still there, still his.
His mouth finds mine, clumsy and slow and utterly without hurry, like he has all the time left in the world instead of maybe none of it, and I kiss him back like I can hold him together with that too, like it’s one more thing my hands can do for him besides the wound.
“Stay,” I whisper against his mouth. “Stay with me.”
“Always meant to,” he murmurs, barely audible now, his voice fraying at the edges. “Just took me a while to say so.”
The sirens are close now, blue light starting to climb the far wall through the broken window, the same window, the same building, the whole ugly shape of everything folding back in on itself and closing into something that finally, finally looks like it might end differently.
I hold onto him with both hands and everything I have, and I don’t let go, not for one single second, not until strangers in uniforms are pulling me gently away and telling me he’s going to be alright, not until long after that.