Page 122 of Bought for Blood
“You’re not dead.”
“Keep it anyway.”
Crowe looks at the envelope. Then he puts it back inside his coat. He doesn’t ask me why.
We go at dusk.
It takes two of them to get me up the stairs. Odile walks backward in front of me the whole way with both hands out.
“Stop hovering,” I tell her.
“I’m not hovering. I’m waiting.”
“For what?”
“For you to go over, so I can enjoy it.”
“You could carry me.”
“I could.” She takes another step back. “You’d never speak of it again. Neither would I.”
The vehicles are on the quarry floor with their lights off. Serenity is already in the back of the second one. They put me in beside her, and she gets her head onto my thigh without opening her eyes.
We go south. She wakes an hour in and lies there looking up at me in the dark.
“How far?”
“All night. We’ll be home before it’s light.”
“Home.” She turns that over. “How far is Aurora from your house?”
“Six hours.”
“That’s not long. It felt like the other side of the world.”
“You were unconscious for most of it.”
“That would do it.” Her hand comes up and finds my wrist. “Bastien. On the stairs. Somebody shot me.”
“I know.”
“It went straight through. I felt it go through.” Her eyes are on the roof of the car. “Then I got up. I was on the next flight before I worked out I shouldn’t have been standing.”
“No.”
“Is that you?”
I don’t answer her.
“That’s what I thought,” she says.
She turns her face into my leg, and she’s gone again inside a minute. I sit in the back of a car in the dark with my hand on her head.
She should be dead. Faine knows exactly why she isn’t.
Yves has the doors open before the car has stopped.
His face stays blank while they lift me out. Then he sees the state of Serenity past Odile’s shoulder, and he has to turn his head away before he comes down the steps.
