Page 63 of Night of Shadows
"Eísai diki mou."
She doesn’t lift her head. She kisses the side of my throat. The kiss is the same kiss she gave me at the lake house when I said it the first time. The kiss of a woman who has heard a sentence in a language she doesn’t speak and decided, in the moment, to trust it.
This time, the second time, her mouth at my throat says something against my skin.
I cannot make out the word. I do not need to.
Whatever she said, it was the answer.
? ? ?
Later, when our breathing has evened, and the sweat has cooled on us, I find my phone in the coat on the chair and call mymother from the edge of the bed while Maeve pulls my shirt on over her head behind me.
Eleni answers on the first ring. She has been waiting up. I tell her we are coming back into the city tonight, but that I want Nora to stay with her until morning, under her roof, with two of Cormac’s men in the lobby. Just in case she accepts, I offer to bring both her and Nora to the Brownstone in the morning.
My mother refuses, saying Nora is asleep in the small bed Eleni keeps made for her. She also says Nora will not be moved tonight for anyone, including me, and that she will bring her home in the morning. Then she says, in Greek, that I sound like my father, and she hangs up before I can decide whether that is a kindness or a wound.
? ? ?
Petrov drives us back across the river a little after midnight.
Maeve is beside me in the back seat in the borrowed sweater, the sleeves too long over her hands, her hair still loose from the bed we just left. She does not speak.
Somewhere on the bridge, she reaches across the seat and takes my good hand and laces her fingers through mine, and she holds on for the rest of the drive. I let her. I have been holding the line of myself together since the rifle round cracked the glass over her head, and her hand around mine grounds me.
The brownstone is dark and warm. Petrov goes through every room before he leaves us at the door. I lock it behind him: the deadbolt, the second deadbolt, the chain I installed last week.
? ? ?
Downstairs in the master bedroom, she has picked out her side of the bed. She lies down facing me. My good arm is under her shoulders. Her cheek is against my chest. The bandaged arm rests across the bedspread on my other side, careful of nothing now, finally.
The brownstone is quiet.
Nora is at Eleni's. Cormac's two extra soldiers are in the lobby of the Beacon Street building. Petrov is downstairs in this building, monitoring the perimeter. The Sig Sauer P226 I am carrying tonight is on the nightstand in arm's reach. The phone is also on the nightstand and eerily silent.
Petrov has not pinged me. The mole is somewhere in this city tonight, and somewhere in this city tonight, a federal employee whose name I have not yet confirmed is finalizing the betrayal he’s not yet executed, and I am tracking exits even now, even with Maeve asleep on my chest in the dark.
She thinks I am relaxed.
She’s wrong. I have not been relaxed in fifteen years. The state I am in is a state I am calling ‘with her.’ A state she’s invented for me by being in a bed with me, the closest thing I am going to get to relaxation in the rest of this lifetime, and I will take it.
She moves slightly against my chest. "Lex."
She’s quiet for a long minute. Her finger traces a line on my chest. The line is the long scar from the knife at twenty-two. She’s traced it before. She traces it again. A deliberate gesture of a woman who has decided that this body is a thing she’s allowed to know.
Then she says, in a different voice: "Lex. I need to ask you something."
The voice has shifted. The voice is the voice she uses for courtrooms, only quieter.
"Yes."
"If I don't make it through grand jury…"
"You will."
"If I don't."
I go very still.
