Page 68 of The Last Dance

He nodded, and didn’t ask for details.

“And Sasha?” he asked.

“Gone,” I said. “London. She won’t come back.”

He let that settle, and then said, “I told you about her. The first week, at breakfast. You didn’t believe me.”

“I did,” I said. “I just didn’t want it to be true.”

He accepted that, and didn’t press. There was no accusation in his face, only exhaustion.

We sat there, two feet apart, listening to the slow cooling of the bath and the click of the heater cycling off. After a while, I stood and offered him a hand. He hesitated, then took it, letting me help him up.

The master bedroom was quiet, blackout curtains drawn, the kind of darkness that absorbs sound and memory both. Iren sat on the edge of the bed, hands folded, head down. I turned down the sheets, then lay back, letting the mattress catch me.

After a moment, he lay down next to me, face to the ceiling, breathing in even, measured beats. He asked, “You’re not going to ask me if I’m okay?”

“No,” I said, wondering how many times I was going to repeat those words. The odds were not in my favor. “Because you’re not.”

He closed his eyes, then opened them again. “Do you think it gets easier?”

“Never,” I said. “But you learn the timing.”

He rolled to his side, rested his head against my shoulder. “What if I don’t want to learn?”

I put my hand on the back of his neck, thumb tracing the line of tendon. “Then I’ll learn for both of us.”

He was asleep before I finished the sentence. I stayed awake, counting his breaths, listening to the wind rattle the gutters outside and the faint, stubborn noise of life going on in the pipes and vents of the old house.

Sometime after midnight, Lin checked the room. He didn’t say anything, didn’t even pause, just confirmed we were both alive and left again. The air was still, the weight of the day finally settling into the mattress and the bones of the house.

I didn’t sleep. I kept my hand on Iren’s shoulder, felt the warmth of him under the borrowed shirt, and let the silence close over us.

The truth was, I had gotten there in time.

It was the only truth I could hold onto.

And for tonight, it was enough.

Chapter Seventeen

~ Iren ~

Two weeks out from rescue, the human body is supposed to heal in increments you can track by calendar. The mind does not get the memo.

I sat cross-legged in the deep leather chair of Vadim’s study, a hardback open and not being read in my lap, the afternoon light striping the dark wood of his desk and the spines of a hundred volumes lined up with military precision behind it.

The yellow bruises on my jaw and arm, in theory, were the last traces of what happened.

They were not.

I turned the same page three times, pretending to take notes in the margin, my brain blanking the text into a gray fog. If I wasn’t actively reading, my mind filled the air with all the things I didn’t want to think about: the clang of a chain, the sound of my own breathing, the slow creak of footsteps in the corridor above.

Vadim sat at the desk, pretending not to watch me. He did not fidget, not with his hands or his pen or his coffee. He just inhabited the air, spine perfectly straight, head angled like he was listening to the room itself.

I wondered if he was bored. I wondered what it would feel like to be a person whose nervous system had only two speeds: absolute violence and complete, predatory stillness.

The bruises on my jaw had faded to a jaundiced haze, more embarrassing than painful now. The memory of how I got them was neither.