Page 131 of Bought for Blood

“So would you.”

“I knew what I was walking into.”

“That’s supposed to help?”

“No.” I put the paper down on the blanket. “You’d have gone. If you were in my shoes.”

Grace opens her mouth. Then she shuts it again, and her shoulders drop, and she looks at the floor.

“Yes,” she says. “That’s the part I can’t get around.”

“Come here.”

“No.”

“Grace.”

She comes. She sinks down beside me and puts her head on my shoulder, and she cries for a while with her fist screwed into the front of my shirt. I hold the back of her jacket, and I cry too.

“They said you’d been shot,” she says eventually.

“I was.”

“Show me.”

I pull the shirt open at the collar.

Grace looks at the mark for a long time. It’s small and pink and round. She puts one finger on it and takes it away.

“It went through you?”

“Out the back.”

“Sery.” She sits up. Her face is blotched and serious. “Through the top of a lung. That’s less than a week old, and it’s gone.”

“I know.”

“So what happened?”

I open my mouth to tell her. “I don’t know,” I say.

Grace looks at me for two seconds longer than that answer is worth. Then she wipes her face with the heel of her hand and lets it go. So do I.

“How long have I been here?”

“He brought you Tuesday night. Half past two in the morning.” She sniffs. “You’ve slept through two whole days. The doctor came down from the medical wing four times, and by the last one he’d stopped being worried and started being interested, which I liked less.”

“He carried me down.”

“All the way to that bed.” Grace pulls her sleeves over her hands. “There was a car outside the gate with a man in it who wouldn’t get out. Viktor was up because somebody had telephoned ahead.”

“What did he say?”

“Not much.” She thinks about it. “He put you down. Then he stood there and said, ‘Don’t let her wake up on her own.’”

I can’t get any air in for a moment.

“That’s it?”