Miss Keller is ill. I end the call. I inhale slowly and set the phone on the desk, I roll my collar and I walk to her room.
She is buried under the sheets with only the top of her head visible, dark hair spread across the pillow, completely still. I go to her and press my hand to her forehead.
She is burning.
"Cold compress," I tell the maid hovering in the doorway.
"And the first aid box. Now."
The maid goes. I sit on the edge of the bed and look at her pale face and the two moles beneath her eye standing out against skin that has lost all its usual color. She stirs slightly at my hand on her forehead but doesn't wake.
The maid returns and I take the box and check her temperature and the number makes me set the thermometer down. Renzo's phone rings in the corridor. I hear him answer it, hear his voice drop into the clipped register he uses for these calls, and then his footsteps approach the doorway.
"I need to handle this," he says quietly.
I don't turn around. "Go."
A pause. "She'll be alright, Luca."
"I know. Go."
His footsteps recede.
I get her medications from the box and I coax her half awake with a hand at her jaw and she opens her eyes to barely slits and looks at me without full recognition.
I tell her to swallow and she does, obedient in unconsciousness. She will never be this obedient when she is fully herself. I give her water. She drinks and her eyes close again.
I sit back in the chair beside the bed and I watch her.
The afternoon moves through the room in long stripes of light across the floor and she breathes, occasionally shifts and I watch.
I tell myself I am here because she is valuable until she isn't and then I stop telling myself things because the chair is close enough to the bed that I can hear her breathe and I find I don't want to move it.
Evening comes and she hasn't woken up properly and I am still in the chair when Renzo appears in the doorway again. He looks at me sitting in the half dark beside her bed and he has the sense not to comment on it.
"Keller conceded," he says quietly. "He's granted access to the database. Full authorization, no time limit." He inhales to deliver it. "He wants his daughter back."
I look at her face, her pale skin, and the dark lashes against her cheek. The slight furrow between her brows even in sleep.
"I'll handle it tomorrow," I tell him.
Renzo nods and goes.
I look at her.
"Time to go home, princess," I say, very quietly, to the room.
She doesn't stir.
* * *
I wake in the darkness and it takes me a moment to understand that I am in her bed, on top of the sheets, still dressed, with a crick in my neck that suggests I have been here for several hours.
I sit up and in the faint night light, I see that she is sitting against the headboard with a glass of water, watching me with careful eyes. She has been awake for a while. The color has come back into her face and she looks tired but present. The vacancy in her eyes from the fever is gone.
"It's night," she says. "You fell asleep in the chair. I didn't want you getting cold." She sips her water. "I was too tired to get Renzo so I just moved you."
I look at her.
