Page 129 of Bought for Blood

“You.”

“Don’t.”

“I’m not being charming. That’s all there was in my head.” I get my hand onto her back. “I was fairly annoyed about it at the time.”

“Annoyed.”

“I had so many years of material available. None of it turned up.”

She’s quiet for a while.

“I knew where you were,” she says. “The whole time. Nobody believed me except Crowe, and I don’t think Crowe believed me either. He just went anyway.”

“He would.”

“Viktor said no. Grace said no.” Her thumb stops. “She’s going to be so angry with me.”

“Yes.”

“Worth it,” she says.

“Serenity.”

“Mm.”

“When she stops being angry.” I keep my hand where it is. “What will she want?”

“Me at that mountain, eating something, for about a year.” She yawns. “Why?”

“No reason.”

“Liar,” she says, and she’s asleep inside two minutes.

She sleeps like this every night now; twelve hours, fourteen, gone the moment she stops moving. Whatever she spent in that room to save me, she’s still recovering from.

I lie there with her weight on me. Then I look at her shoulder again.

A thumbnail of pink skin, front and back, on a woman who took a rifle round through the top of her lung three days ago. The doctor stood in this room and couldn’t believe she’d only had the wound a day. Faine put two fingers on it in a boiler room and then decided not to have a conversation with me about it.

She should be dead. She isn’t, because of what I did to keep her heart going. There is a Court law about that with both our names in it now.

I move her hair off her face.

They didn’t take her the first time because of me. They took her for what’s in her veins, and that hasn’t changed. Anyone hunting her would start by watching me.

Six hours north, there’s a mountain full of people who spent a year trying to find her. Her sister is inside it. There are walls, and guns, and good people behind both. Better people than I am. Everything she was taken from is up that road. The only thing this house has that the mountain doesn’t is me, and I’m the thing she needs the least.

She’d stay anyway. She’d stay here and never ask for the rest of her life back, and I would let her, and I would call it love, and it would be the last selfish act of a very long life.

She’d fight me on it. She’d win. She has never lost an argument with her hands on my face.

So she isn’t going to get the chance.

I put my hand over the back of hers. I don’t move again for a long time. Behind the shutters, the light comes up on another day. I already know how I’m going to spend it.

Chapter 37

Serenity