The number rings twice.
"Yeah." Knox's voice. I woke him.
"Woman." The word scrapes through my throat. "Car wreck. Forest road. Bring a tow in the morning."
Silence while Knox processes. I hear Sarah murmur something in the background, and Knox's voice softens when he answers her before coming back to me. "You okay?"
"Fine."
"She hurt?"
"She's a nurse. Treated herself."
The long pause that follows has weight. Knox doesn't rush silences. He understands silence the way most people understand conversation.
"You want me to come get her tonight?"
I turn my head. Nina has left the table. She stands at my bookshelf, her bandaged wrist careful against the spine of a book she's pulling free. Poetry. Rumi. The Masnavi, a translation I found in a secondhand shop in Vegas eight years ago, the one luxury I allowed myself on the single trip I've made outside Nightfall Cove since Knox gave me the cabin.
She opens the book, and her expression goes soft and still, the way people look when they find a friend in an unfamiliar room.
"No."
The receiver clicks back into the cradle.
The guest room occupies the north corner of the cabin, separated from mine by the bathroom and a stretch of hallway narrow enough that I have to angle my shoulders to pass through it. I made the bed this morning. I've made it every week for seven years, clean sheets pulled tight, hospital corners, the wool blanket folded at the foot. I don't know why. Some habit that predates the cabin, from the years before Knox, when the handlers inspected our quarters and docked rations for wrinkled sheets or a pillow out of place.
The memory flickers and I press it flat, the way I press every memory from that time—not examined, not revisited, folded into the dark compartment where I keep the things that happened to a creature called Number Seven and not to a man named Garrett.
I set a towel on the bed. Point to the bathroom. Her jeans are dark with rain from the knees down and her sneakers squelch against the floorboards. I open the dresser, pull out a flannel and wool socks. The flannel could wrap around her twice. I leave them on the bed and don't look at her.
"Thank you." Nina hovers in the doorway."Garrett." She says my name like it's a normal thing to say. "Thank you. For coming to get me. For the coffee. For—" She lifts her wrapped wrist. "All of it."
I nod. Retreat down the hall, angling my shoulders through the narrow space, and close my bedroom door behind me.
I sit on the edge of my bed and look at my hands.
The same hands that closed around hers in that ditch and pulled her out one-armed, her feet leaving the mud before she could brace. My hands have carried bodies. In the pit they carried opponents to the edge of the ring after the fight ended, because the handlers required it, because the crowd liked the spectacle of the winner dragging the loser. My hands broke a handler's jaw the night I escaped, felt the bone give under my knuckles like wet wood.
They look the same in every context. Massive, scarred across the knuckles, thick calluses on the palms. The hands of a creature built for damage. The difference has never been my hands. It's the mind behind them. The choice.
Her weight in my arms tonight held nothing of the pit. It held trust, given without conditions, from a woman who should have been afraid and wasn't.
My palms flatten against my thighs. I breathe.
Through the wall, I hear her settle into the guest room. The creak of the mattress under her. The soft, muffled sounds of someone arranging themselves in a bed that isn't theirs, the rustling of unfamiliar sheets. Then, so quiet I wouldn't catch it without minotaur hearing—humming.
She's humming.
The largo. The second movement. The Dvorák piece that filled the cabin when she walked through my door, and she's humming it now from memory, the melody wandering off-pitch in the places where she doesn't remember the notes.
The purr starts again.
I press my fist against my chest. The vibration builds behind the bone, deep and involuntary, too low for human ears to catch through walls and a hallway and the bathroom between us. She can't hear it. She'll never know. And it doesn't matter, because the purr isn't for her. The purr is my body's betrayal, the one response I thought I'd buried for good, surfacing now like it never left.
My knuckles dig in harder. The purr doesn't stop.
I lie back on the bed. The ceiling holds the shadows of branches, cast by the porch light through the window. My legs hang off the end of the mattress, the way they hang off every mattress, because no one builds beds for bodies like mine, I stopped minding years ago.
