8. Knox
EIGHT
KNOX
“Lean forward,” I say, filling a jug with warm bathwater and lifting it to Fury’s hair.
She leans. I lift the jug, cup my free hand at her hairline so it doesn’t sheet down her face, and pour. Her hair darkens and the water runs down her spine, pooling in the dip at the small of her back.
She’s thinner than she was. I can see it in the new sharpness of her shoulders, in the bones standing up at the base of her neck where there used to be a softer line.
She’s been eating but not enough. Soup, toast, the occasional spoonful of yogurt Micah coaxes into her.
Her body’s running on survival rations and stubbornness.
The bath in Holden’s en suite isn’t anything special, but it’s deep enough that the water comes up to her ribs when she sinks down into it. At least I know she’s warm and doesn’t need to waste energy standing while I wash her hair.
She hasn’t done it properly since before the hospital—the nurses did what they could, but her hair is thick and it tangles if you look at it wrong.
I work shampoo into my palm and start at the crown. Temples. Down to the nape. My fingers are too big for this. I’m built for heavier things—weapons, tools, the collar of a man who’s earned my fist. Not the skull of a woman I could lift out of this water with one arm.
But I’m careful. I’ve always been careful with her.
She makes a sound. Small, involuntary. Her shoulders drop a fraction and her head tips back into my hands.
“Good?”
“Mm.” Her eyes are closed. “So good.”
“Tell me if your neck hurts.”
“It’s good, Knoxie.”
I smile at the name and keep working. Loosen the tangles with my fingers instead of dragging through them. There’s nowhere I need to be. My schedule for the foreseeable future is one item long: wherever Fury is.
I rinse the shampoo, reach for the conditioner. A bottle I bought this morning from the pharmacy. The clerk had blinked up at me from behind a display of lip balm while I held up three bottles that all looked the same and said, “Which one’s best for tangles?”
She’d recovered fast. Recommended a leave-in too.
Now the conditioner slides through her hair in a silky white ribbon, and I work it in section by section, patient. Methodical. Fury’s hands drift under the bathwater and she adjusts herself.
“You comfortable?” I ask.
She opens her eyes enough to look up at me. They’re heavy-lidded from heat and exhaustion, silver gone soft. “Mhm.”
“Water too hot?”
“No.”
I nod once and keep going, dragging my fingers through the ends of her hair again.
“Tilt your head back.”
She does. With her head back, her throat is exposed, and I can see the shape of it. The dark line under the dressing. The map of where the rope went.
My hands still.
There’s a box I keep things in. It’s in the back of my skull, behind the locked door where I put the things I can’t look at during daylight hours.
The unit names are in there. The sound a body makes when it hits the ground from a height.
The specific shade of red that arterial blood turns when it oxidizes in desert air.
Sage’s throat is in that box now.
The image of her hanging. The strain in Eli’s voice while he kneeled on the ground beside her. The sight of her intubated in that hospital bed. So damn small.
I lock the box. Shut the door.
Work the conditioner through. Focus on the ends.
“Knox?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t have to do this.”
“I know.”
“I can wash my own hair.”
“I know that too.”
She opens one eye and looks up at me. Water beads on her lashes. “Then why are you?”
I separate a section and run the detangling comb through it. The house is quiet around us. Holden left for the station an hour ago. Micah’s in the kitchen. Milo’s somewhere with his laptop, probably muttering to himself like he always does.
“Because you’d do it yourself and you’d rush it and you’d wrench your neck reaching back,” I say. “Then you’d pretend it didn’t hurt. Micah would know it hurt. He’d worry. And then I’d have to deal with Micah worrying.”
She snorts. Barely a sound, but it’s hers.
“So this is about Micah’s feelings.”
“Exactly.”
Her mouth twitches. I rinse the conditioner.
I soap a cloth and start at her shoulders. Light pressure. Careful around the cuts and bruises. We’re a week past the attack now, but she’s still covered in them—from the struggle and the fight to get her breathing again.
Her hands are healing. The torn nails trimmed short, the worst cuts scabbed over. In a few weeks there’ll be nothing left but faint lines and pink skin. Right now they’re a record of how hard she fought.
“I can get the rest.” She takes the cloth from me and finishes where I left off, drawing a slow, deliberate line down her arm, across her stomach, up the other side.
She sits forward, brings the cloth to her face, and holds it there a moment.
I wait. She scrubs slow, careful circles on her cheeks, chin, the place under her eyes where the skin is thinnest. She stares at nothing, knees drawn up, and I know her mind is taking her somewhere neither of us wants her to go.
“Thank you,” she says, blinking herself back to the present and handing the cloth back.
“You good?”
“Yeah. All clean.” She sits up and pushes the wet hair off her face, and the rope of it swings and slaps across my forearm and chest, soaking the front of my shirt.
“Sorry.”
I look down at the spreading patch of wet. “It’s water.”
I reach back, fist the collar, and pull the shirt off over my head one-handed.
Fury stares. Her head tilts.
The tattoo.
It’s still healing, the skin starting to peel and flake along the top edge. Margery’s lines are clean, the detail precise, but new ink looks like what it is. A wound somebody chose.
Fury studies it.
I stay still as her eyes trace the design—the sage rooted near my sternum, the purple flowers, the five bees fanned across my pec. Two in flight. Three perched on the leaves and the blossoms, wings folded.
Her lips part. Nothing comes out.
Her hand lifts from the water. Stops an inch from my skin without touching it.
“Knox.”
I don’t move.
“When did you get this?”
“While you were in the coma.”
Her hand drops back to the water. Her jaw works the way it does when she’s fighting tears.
“Is that—”
“Sage.”
“The plant?”
“Yeah.”
“And the bees?”
I could explain it. I could tell her what I told Margery—five bees, coming to the plant, feeding it, fed by it. I could tell her the bees aren’t us. They’re her. Five pieces of who she is. The fighter. The lover. The survivor. The friend. The woman I love.
I could say all of that.
Instead I say, “You.”
She blinks. A tear drops, hits the water. She scrubs at her face with the back of a wet hand, fast, like it offended her.
“All of them?”
“All of them.”
She’s quiet. The tap drips. Her hand lifts again, and this time she touches me—not the ink, but the bare skin beside it, the unmarked patch between the plant and the old shrapnel scar along my ribs. Her fingertips are warm from the water.
“It’s over your heart,” she whispers.
“Yeah.”
Her face crumples. A fracture that runs through her expression and rearranges it into something I don’t have a word for.
She leans forward and presses her forehead to my chest. Her breath comes warm and uneven against my wet skin.
I put my hand on the back of her head and hold her there.
We stay like that. The water starts to cool. Through the door, Micah is in the kitchen—the clink of a mug, water running, the ordinary sounds of a house where people live. My back aches from hunching over the tub. I don’t care.
She pulls back. Wipes her face. Squares her shoulders.
“If you tell anyone I cried in the bath, I’ll stab you.”
“Noted.”
“I mean it.”
“I know.”
I stand, take the towel off the rack, and hold it open.
She grips the lip of the tub and ignores my help in favor of getting herself up out of the water.
I wrap the towel around her before she’s even fully upright.
For a second she looks small inside it. Smaller than my Fury is.
Smaller than the woman who grabbed my knife under the jetty and became the center of my world.
She’ll get back to herself. I know it the way I know the tide.
I’ll make sure of it.
“Come on, Fury. Micah made tea.”
She steps off the bathmat. Wobbles. I catch her arm.
Then she shakes me off and walks out of the bathroom on her own two feet.
That’s my girl.
My Fury.