Page 77 of Hold On to Me
The words don't make sense. None of it makes sense. I'm standing in the gallery with the jade figure glowing to my left and the Mayflower handkerchief behind glass to my right and my body is still humming from last night and I'm reading words liketherapist coverandAlmazov accessand the room is tilting.
"I don't—" The papers tremble in my grip. "I don't understand what this—"
"Communications. Encrypted, routed through three servers. Between a shell company in Saint Petersburg and a device that matches your phone's hardware signature."
"My—" The word stalls in my throat. "My phone?"
"Mila brought them to me at four this morning."
And my body, my stupid, terrified body that learned two weeks ago what it feels like to lose him, doesn't hear the evidence or the accusation or the Saint Petersburg connection. It hears:he's going to close the door again.It hears:the coffee was the last coffee.It hears:the note with the A on it is the last note.And my eyes fill and my throat closes and I'm holding fabricated evidence I don't understand in hands that are shaking for the first time since I boarded this ship and all I can get out is—
"I love you. Please—"
His whole body changes.
Not softens. Shifts. The rigid line of his shoulders drops a fraction and he crosses the space between us in two strides, and his hands, his scarred, enormous, warm hands, close around mine, papers and all, and his grip is firm and his eyes are burning but not at me, I can see it now, not AT me, and his voice when it comes is low and rough and absolutely certain.
"I know."
"B-but the evidence—"
"It doesn't matter." His thumbs move across my knuckles, the same way my thumbs move across his scars during sessions, reading me, steadying me, and his eyes don't leave mine. "Even if the whole world calls you a liar, I know you. I know how you hold a handkerchief. I know how you can't hide a single thing you feel. I know the sound you make when you're happy and how you stopped making it when I closed that door." His grip tightens on my hands. "You could never have done this."
"Then who—"
"There's only one way to find out." His jaw locks. The burning in his eyes shifts to something darker, grimmer, the expression of a man who has spent three years hunting and just discovered the trail was poisoned from the inside. "But for now I need you to do one thing for me."
"W-what?"
He drops my hands. Cups my face instead. Both palms against my jaw, the same spot, always the same spot, and he tilts my head back and his eyes hold mine and his lips move without sound.
One word.
Duck.
I DUCK.
I don't understand why and I don't ask because it's what he told me on the balcony: if his world is dangerous, he tells me, and if he tells me, I listen, and his face when he mouthed that word was the face of a man who has heard something behind me that my ears haven't caught yet, and I trust him, I trust him the way my hands trust his scars, completely and without hesitation, and so I duck.
Everything happens at once.
A sound: footsteps, fast, the click of heels on the gallery floor. A voice, Mila's voice, sharp, stripped of everydarlingshe ever gave me: "You shouldn't have—"
The crack of a gunshot splits the gallery open.
My hands fly to my ears. My eyes squeeze shut. I'm crouched on the floor between the display cases with my knees pressed to the cold teak and my palms clamped over my ears and the sound is still ringing through the glass and the stone and my bones and I'm shaking, I'm shaking so hard my teeth rattle, and the silence that follows is the loudest thing I've ever heard.
Silence.
And when I open my eyes and turn, it's to see Mila slowly falling to the ground.
Artem
I SAW HER IN THE DOORWAYtwo seconds before Star ducked.
The reflection in the glass of the jade figure's case, a shape moving in the gallery entrance, the silhouette I've known for eleven years, except the posture was wrong. The casual lean gone. The gallery-curator ease gone. A combat stance. Weight forward. Right hand already moving under the left side of her blouse.
Star's face was in my hands. I mouthed the word.
