Page 65 of The Last Dance

I went to Iren, sat on the edge of the bed. He didn’t flinch. His arms were wrapped around his knees, nails bitten bloody, but his hands were steady. “You came,” he said, voice gone dry as a winter branch.

“I told you I would.” I took a closer look at the ankle. The skin was raw, but not broken. I traced the cuff, then reached for his wrist. There was a shallow cut along the bone, maybe from fighting the restraint or maybe from the last attempt to get away.

I pressed my thumb to the pulse point, just to be sure, and he snorted, barely a sound. “I’m alive. You don’t have to check.”

“I have to,” I said. “That’s the job.”

Yuri got the last bolt off, dropped the chain to the floor, and stepped back. I looked up at him, and he gave a tiny nod. “Clean.”

Iren swung his legs off the bed, tested his weight. He winced, but stood anyway, blanket still around his shoulders. He glanced at Parsons, who had backed himself into the corner by the fridge.

“Do I get to hit him?” Iren asked, not a joke.

“No,” I said, “because you’d miss and break your hand, and I’d have to listen to you whine about it for the next month.”

He smiled, weak but sharp, and dropped the blanket. “Fine. Can we just go?”

“In a minute.”

I turned to Parsons. He’d found a scrap of composure, tried to fix his shirt, failed. He looked at me the way small men look at loaded guns: with fear and, beneath it, envy.

“You watched him for months,” I said. “You built this room. You put a chain on his ankle. And you called that salvation.”

Parsons didn’t answer. He just looked at the floor.

I gave it one last try: “Did you touch him? Before tonight.”

“No,” he said, fast. “Never. I—this wasn’t supposed to happen. I was—he—” The words broke apart, then recomposed as the usual liturgy. “He deserves better than what you’ve made him.”

I nodded, letting the words hit and pass through. “He was saving for college when I met him,” I said. “He had a jar under his mattress. He was doing that himself, before me, with no help from anyone. What did you give him? A chain and a houseplant.”

He didn’t speak.

That was fine.

I looked to Yuri. “Clean up.”

Yuri moved in, quiet and exact, hand closing on Parsons’s elbow. He didn’t even struggle. I turned to Iren, who had limped to the loveseat and was running a finger over the edge of a book. He didn’t say anything, but when I came to stand beside him, he leaned into my side without asking for permission.

I picked him up—he was light as a ghost, even now—and carried him up the stairs, through the empty shell of Parsons’s house, and into the cold night air. He didn’t protest. He just buried his face in my shoulder and stayed there until we hit the car.

The drive back was silent. Yuri rode up front, hands never leaving ten and two. I sat in the rear with Iren curled against me, head on my chest, breath slowing as the shock faded. He didn’t joke, didn’t deflect, didn’t try to make it easier. I think that was the first time I saw him completely empty, no lines left to throw between himself and the world.

I held him anyway, because if I let go I wasn’t sure I’d ever get him back.

Sasha was waiting in the entrance hall, dressed in black silk and war paint, as if the appropriate response to someone else’s kidnapping was to host a dinner party for ghosts.

Lin lingered a safe three steps behind her, face composed, eyes averted, hands folded so neatly it looked like he’d been born for this exact moment.

I carried Iren in. He was conscious, mostly, the adrenaline fading to a wired, almost drunken clarity that made his head loll on my shoulder. When we crossed the threshold, the heat of the house hit us—a wall of dry, lemon-scented air, thick as the tension waiting inside it.

Sasha’s eyes found Iren, then found me, then went flat and shiny like river ice in late winter. “He’s alive,” she said. No relief, just a dissection.

“Yes,” I said.

She looked at Iren again, as if checking for defects.

Lin moved forward, silent as a sin. I turned, handed Iren off to him. “Bedroom. Medical kit.”