Page 67 of The Last Dance

Yuri waited until the door closed, then turned to me. “You want confirmation?”

“Of course,” I said.

He nodded and left.

I stood in the entrance hall, letting the silence settle back into the bones of the house. For the first time in years, it felt empty in a way that didn’t frighten me. I breathed in, slow, and held it.

The debt was paid. I had made my choice.

It was the only thing that mattered.

I headed upstairs to check on Iren. The shower was running when I got there. Lin had prepared the suite as if for a minor surgery: clothes laid out, medical kit open to the proper page, even the bottle of iodine uncapped.

He did not linger. He ghosted out the moment I entered, leaving only the trailing suggestion that anything less than recovery would be a professional embarrassment.

I sat on the rim of the tub. My shirt stuck to my back in three places, each a small, private burn. I peeled it off and folded it, placed it on the towel rack the way I’d seen Lin do a hundred times. The tiles underfoot were warm, a pointless luxury, but I let myself take it.

From the shower, the water hissed in staccato bursts as Iren scrubbed the worst of Parsons off his skin. I heard the plastic crinkle of the first aid kit, then the snap and hiss of antiseptic hitting open flesh. He didn’t make a sound, but I knew he felt it.

When the shower cut off, there was a lag—three minutes, maybe four—before he emerged. He wore one of my shirts, pale blue, unbuttoned and enormous, sleeves rolled twice but still covering his hands. The hem hit mid-thigh, making him look smaller than I remembered. He stood in the doorway, letting the steam backlight him, and didn’t say anything.

For a second I thought he was angry.

He sat down, cross-legged, on the tile beside the tub. He didn’t look at me. His hair was wet, sticking to his forehead, and his eyes were both red from soap or from what came after.

I kept my hands on my knees, not reaching for him. I could count the seconds by the pulse in my neck.

He was the one to break the silence. “I was losing,” he said, voice even. “If the door hadn’t opened when it did, I would have lost.”

There was nothing to say to that but the truth.

“Yes,” I said. “I know.”

He nodded, and for a while neither of us moved. When he spoke again, it was softer, almost a whisper, “But you did open the door.”

I let the words hang, then: “I got there in time. That’s the only variable that matters.”

He looked up at me, finally, and there was something in the tilt of his jaw—pride, maybe, or relief—but it was thin, stretched tight over bone and memory. “You say that like it’s easy to believe.”

“It isn’t,” I said.

He uncurled himself, drew his knees up, and rested his chin on them. He looked ten years younger, and it hit me: there would always be men like Parsons. Always. My job wasn’t to erase them. It was to get there first.

He was staring at the cut on my wrist, the one I didn’t even know I’d gotten. “You’re bleeding,” he said.

I checked. A shallow slice, already crusted over. “It’s nothing.”

“Should disinfect it.”

I shrugged. “I have a man for that.”

He almost smiled.

He looked at his own wrists. The marks from Parsons’ hands were ugly, deep red on pale skin, but he didn’t rub them. He just flexed his hands, slow, as if reacquainting them with the idea of motion.

“What happened to Parsons?”

I considered how to answer. “He’s handled.”