"You don’t have to stop it." His hand moves once over my hair. "You held it together in front of men you couldn't read, in a language you couldn't speak, and you gave them nothing. You held it together while you all but carried me off a compound with a bullet hole in me. You held it together last night when they were feet away and closing in." His voice is rough and absolutelycertain, the voice he uses for facts. "You don't have to hold it anymore."
So I let it come.
I cry until my ribs ache. I cry for the girl on the mattress and the girl in the pantry. I scream once more when an image of Ken and his hands groping towards me flashes through my mind, muffled against him. I feel the sound go into his chest and stop there, absorbed, like he's built for it, like twenty years of silence made a space in him exactly the size of everything I've been holding. I cry until crying stops being an event and becomes exhaustion, and through all of it he holds on with that constant, unhurried strength, and somewhere in the quiet stretches I become aware of a sound I can't place.
He's humming.
Barely. Under his breath, hardly louder than the breeze. It takes me a moment to be sure, and another moment to realize there's no tune in it. It's tuneless and low and slightly terrible, and he's doing it anyway to offer me an anchor point in all this mess.
The most dangerous man in the world is sitting on a farmhouse floor, humming to me, and the part of me that broke an hour ago knits itself back together around the sound, different than before. Stronger along the seam.
The shaking winds down slowly. My breathing comes back to me one piece at a time.
"I ruined your shirt," I say eventually. My voice hoarse.
His chest moves under my ear, once, that low almost-laugh I'm collecting, and his arms stay exactly where they are. I should move. Any minute now I'll be embarrassed, I can feel the embarrassment queuing up, ready to tell me all about the screaming and the snot the way my skin goes all blotchy when Icry. But it can't get to me. Nothing can get to me. I'm inside the one perimeter on this island that nothing can get through.
"Nobody's ever done this," I tell him. I'm too wrung out to dress it up. "Held me. While it happened. I always did it where no one could see, and then I'd wash my face and go back in and be whatever they needed." I close my eyes. "You're the first."
He's quiet for a long moment. His hand settles at the back of my head like it's found its permanent posting.
"Then they missed the best of you," he says.
The best. This man watched me come apart on a stone floor, screaming, wrecked, ugly, empty, and that's the word he chose. That’s when I understand two things at once, lying there against his heart in the late morning sun.
The first is that I'm going to sleep for a hundred years.
The second is that I am never, ever going to recover from him, and I've stopped wanting to.
Yakob
She fell asleep on the stone floor, in my arms, mid-sentence.
I carried her to the cot and she didn't stir. At dusk she surfaced long enough for half a bowl of broth. It's deep in the night now. Her breathing is long and even, six in, seven out.
I sit in the chair by the window and run the inventory. Door, barred. Shutters, latched. Knife where my hand will find it, pistol on my knee, the angled slat and the empty track beyond it. The search moved on this morning. The boat comes tomorrow. Every item checks out. The perimeter is sound.
I’m not.
I first noticed it at the sink, hours ago, washing the mug she dropped. My hands. I held them under the water and watched them, and they weren't steady. Not shaking the way hers shook. A fine tremor, low amplitude, the kind you'd only catch if you'd spent twenty years knowing exactly what your hands are doing at all times. I have. I know my hands the way other men know their signatures. They never tremble. They have worked in the dark on four continents without a flicker, and tonight they couldn't hold a tin mug still under the water.
I told myself it was blood loss and knew I was lying.
Then there's the other item. The one I've been walking around all day the way you walk around ordnance that didn't go off.
I hummed to her.
On the floor, with her screaming into my chest, something in me started making a sound. I didn't decide to. I don't hum. I have no tune to hum, I proved that thoroughly this morning, and yet there it was, tuneless, under my breath, for the better part of an hour. I only became aware of it when her shaking began to ease, when she pressed in closer to the sound like it was warm.
I know where it comes from. That's the problem. A woman at a stove with her sleeves pushed up, singing badly on purpose, telling the neighbors through the wall that a person who is singing can't be poor, only interrupted. I buried the memory of that woman twenty years ago, along with the boy who loved her. This morning the boy's habit came up through me without permission, and it worked. It calmed her. Some dead thing in me knew what to do for a crying woman, because it learned it in a two-room house that doesn't exist anymore.
The chair creaks when I stand. She doesn't wake.
There's a task I've been deferring. She named it this morning, in the middle of coming apart, in the flood of everything she'd been holding.You have a finger in your jacket pocket. A finger.
Now it’s wrapped in a rag, taken from the hand of the man who put her in a cell, along with his signet. The ring is the message. Her brothers will know the gold, the Ramunnos will hear it was taken, and everyone in two organizations will understand what happens to men who touch Iris Orlova.
I take my jacket off the peg and step out onto the terrace, leaving the door open at my back so nothing is between me and the sound of her breathing.
