Page 17 of Roulette

I tightened my hold on him without thinking, and something deep inside my chest shifted. The walls I’d spent years building didn’t crumble all at once, but the first crack spread through them, wide enough to let hope slip inside. For the first time in longer than I could remember, I wasn’t waiting for the moment everything fell apart. I simply held him, and somehow, that felt like the safest place I’d ever been.

After, the room went still. The lamp still on. Roulette settled beside me, one arm draped across my waist, his breath evening out against my shoulder. I turned into him. My hand found his chest again, palm over his heartbeat, and I listened to the steady rhythm of it slowing, slowing, until it matched my own.

* * *

Roulette

The lamp was still on. I’d forgotten about it, or maybe I’d left it on deliberately -- hard to say, at three in the morning, when your brain had stopped keeping track of things like light switches and time. The compound outside the window was dark, the kind of dark that only happens when every engine had been cut and every voice had died away and even the dogs had given up and gone to sleep. I lay on my back with one arm behind my head and listened to her breathe.

Lark slept with the same fierce concentration she brought to everything, like even unconscious she was holding onto something. Her face was turned toward me, one arm tucked under the pillow, the other curled against her chest. Her hair had come loose from whatever she’d done with it earlier and now it spilled across my pillow in waves the color of wheat in late summer, catching the lamp’s light along the edges where it curled against her neck. The comforter was pulled up to her waist now, tugged loose from where it had been tucked taut at the headboard, bunched where her hand had gathered a fistful of it in her sleep. I hadn’t moved it. She must have reached for it and dragged it up without waking.

The room smelled like her. Not perfume -- she didn’t wear any that I’d noticed -- but the particular scent of her skin and her hair and the faint lavender of the soap she’d used in my shower. My mouth tasted like sleep and the memory of her, and my chest felt lighter than it had in years.

I didn’t reach for my phone. The ceiling above the bed was smooth and white and entirely uninteresting, but I looked at it anyway because looking at Lark felt like staring into something too bright, and my eyes needed a place to rest that wouldn’t burn.

She wasn’t going back to the guest room. Her toothbrush was still on that sink, her paperback on that nightstand, her clothes in that dresser, but the room felt empty now in a permanent, unmistakable sense.

She wasn’t leaving the compound.

The gate, the fence, the cameras -- they were supposed to keep danger out. The tulips proved they weren’t enough. From now on, she wouldn’t cross the gravel alone. She wouldn’t stand on that porch with only a locked door between her and whoever had found her. I’d already made that decision in her driveway, with a lug wrench in my hand and her fear trying not to show.

The certainty settled cold and clean. Fear was hotter and less useful. This was focus -- the problem, the solution, and the narrow distance between them.

But this was different. This was my bed, my house, and Lark asleep beside me with one hand close enough to touch. The man who’d left those flowers was already dead. He just didn’t know it yet.

Lark shifted in her sleep. Her breath caught, held for a beat, then released in a soft sigh that moved the hair across her forehead. Her hand uncurled from her chest and reached sideways, fingers searching the sheets until they found my arm. Her palm settled against my forearm, fingers resting lightly on my skin, and she went still again. Her touch was warm and dry and entirely unconscious, like a child reaching for a parent in the dark without waking up.

I kept still. Her pulse moved against my forearm, slow and steady, and I let that rhythm pull my own down until the tension of the night finally started to loosen its grip.

Her hand was still on my arm. I could feel each individual finger, the slight roughness along her knuckles from a lifetime of work, the cool metal of the thin silver ring she wore on her right hand that she never took off.

I turned her hand over slightly, careful not to wake her, and caught what was left of the lamp’s glow on the band. Thin. Tarnished at the edges. A stone too small to make out in the dim light.

“This means something,” I said. Not really a question. More checking, the way I checked anything I planned on keeping around.

She stirred without fully waking, her voice thick and slow. “My mom’s. Only thing she left behind when she took off. Grandma kept it in a drawer for years. Gave it to me the day I turned eighteen.” Her fingers tightened faintly around mine. “I don’t wear it because I miss her. I wear it because it’s proof I came from somewhere. Even if where I came from didn’t want to keep me.”

I turned that over the same way I turned over anything that mattered -- slow, careful, checking the weight of it before I set it down.

“Keeping it anyway,” I said. “After everything.”

“Yeah.” Barely a whisper. “Guess I still like proof I exist. Even from people who didn’t want the job.”

I didn’t say anything else. There wasn’t a version of comfort that wouldn’t have come out smaller than what she’d just handed me. So I reached over with my free hand and turned off the lamp.

The darkness was immediate and total. Compound dark -- no streetlights, no ambient glow from neighboring houses, just the deep black of a property set back from the road with trees on three sides and a fence that kept the world where it belonged. My eyes adjusted slowly. The shape of her beside me became a darker shadow against the dark, and then details emerged -- the pale line of her arm against the sheets, the faint outline of her profile against the pillow, the blanket a rumpled mass at her waist.

I laced my fingers through hers instead, ring and all, and held on until her breathing evened out and the room went quiet around us.

Outside, something moved in the trees -- a branch shifting, or an animal, or nothing at all. The sound was distant and meaningless. Her breathing was soft and even beneath the slower cadence of my own heart, which had been running too fast for too long and was finally, grudgingly, beginning to slow.

I closed my eyes. Her fingers stayed where they were. The sheets smelled like both of us, and the room around us was still and dark and entirely ours, at least until morning. I let my hand find hers in the dark and rested my palm over her fingers where they lay on my arm, holding it there while the night settled around us and the compound slept on, oblivious to the line I’d crossed.

Her fingers curled into mine, just slightly, but she didn’t stir. I held them there and didn’t let go. I lay awake longer than I meant to, just listening to her breathe, memorizing the weight of her hand in mine like it was something I’d need to recall later, in the dark, on a night she wasn’t there to remind me it was real.

Chapter Nine

Lark