I straightened up.
The jacket was next, which required him to be marginally more conscious, and that was where things got complicated.
“Hey,” I said, at a volume calibrated to reach him without startling. “Russo. Sit up for me.”
He made a sound that was not a word.
“I know. Sit up.”
He sat up, or something close to it—listing slightly to the left, eyes at half-mast, his coordination operating on whatever reserve was available after a mild concussion and a full day of playoff hockey and a bathroom fight. He was present enough to register that someone was there, not present enough to care who.
I got the jacket off his shoulders. He helped with approximately fifteen percent of the effort, which was more than I’d expected.
“Shirt,” I said.
“’M fine,” he said.
“You’re asleep sitting up,” I said. “Lie down.”
“Said ’m fine,” he muttered, but he was already listing again, and I caught his shoulder before he went sideways and guided him back against the pillow with the sort of care of a man who had decided not to think too hard about what he was doing and why.
His weight settled back into the pillow. He exhaled—slow, involuntary, as if he’d been holding himself together through effort and had finally run out of reasons to keep doing it.
I stood up.
The lamp was warm and the room was quiet, and Dante Russo was lying in the bed in front of me with his eyes closed and his face bruised and his chest rising and falling with the careful rhythm of someone who had crossed from the edge of consciousness into something deeper, and I became aware, in the way I’d been becoming aware of things all night that I had no business being aware of, that my hand was still on his shoulder.
I removed it.
Stepped back. Two steps, then a third, until the backs of my knees found the chair in the corner that nobody ever used, and I sat down in it.
The copper in my eyes, I knew without looking, would be visible now. That was what proximity did—what that kind of proximity did, the kind that my dragon had been cataloging all evening with an interest I’d spent years learning to override. My beast had been making its case for weeks, in the persistent way it made cases when it had decided something, and I had been making counter-arguments with the discipline of two centuries of practice, and tonight the arguments were less clean than they usually were.
I knew what it was doing. I knew what the warmth in my chest meant, what the heightened awareness meant, what the four-block walk through Chicago at midnight had meant. I was notnaive about my own nature. I had simply made a decision, a long time ago, about which parts of my nature I was going to act on and which ones I was going to manage, and that decision had held for longer than most human lifetimes, and it was going to hold now.
I checked my watch. Two hours.
I set the alarm on my phone, silenced it to vibrate, and settled into the chair. The lamp was on the far side of the bed from where I was sitting. I could read the rise and fall of his chest from here, the slight parting of his lips on an exhale, the way one hand had curled loosely near his jaw. The bruise on his cheekbone had deepened in the last hour; it would be full purple by morning, the kind that looked worse than it was and felt exactly as bad as it looked.
He made a small sound. Not distress—something softer than that. The sound of someone settling deeper.
I looked at the window. The curtains were drawn. Somewhere beyond them, Chicago was still doing what Chicago did, indifferent and enormous and lit orange at the edges from its own ambient glow.
The chair wasn’t comfortable, but I’d sat in worse.
He woke up the first time I checked him with that specific disorientation of someone pulled from deep sleep who hadn’t agreed to be pulled.
“Hey,” I said, the same low calibration as before. “Look at me.”
He looked. Eyes finding mine after a moment, the pupils contracting normally in the lamp light. Present. A little confused, which was acceptable.
“What’s your name,” I said.
“Russo,” he said, reflexively, and then: “Dante. Dante Russo.” A pause. “Why are you in my room?”
“Concussion protocol,” I said.
He stared at me for a moment with the expression of someone assembling context from available parts. Then something in his face shifted—not quite recognition, but the arrival of a memory he hadn’t been sure he’d kept.
