Page 10 of Sting of Sin

My heart came up into my throat. Cold all over. The first place my mind went, God help me, was him—the shadow—and the dark behind the wall heaved so hard I almost screamed before the door was even open.

Then it opened, and a shape filled it, and it was the wrong size to be afraid of.

Too big. Far too big. A wall of a man easing sideways through a doorway he barely fit, moving quiet as a held breath, and out in the hall behind him a second shape stood with its back to us, watching the corridor. The security light over the far exit threw just enough gray into the room for me to see him.

I knew him before I saw him clearly. I knew him the second the static fell out of my head.

Strawberry blond gone to shadow in the half dark, brown eyes already swinging to the bed, to me, finding me awake and sitting up, and something in his whole body changed when he saw it. Careful to certain. Quiet to here. All that size he spent his life folding down small. Not folded now. Not careful now. Pointed, every inch of it, at me.

"Bee." Just my name. The way he always gave it to me, like it was the only word he trusted himself with. He crossed the room and went down on one knee in front of me, close, closer than he'd let himself come since that awful night, near enough I could smell road dust and leather and the warm underneath that was just him, and the static fell out of the whole world.

He held out his hand. Open. Palm up. Not grabbing. Asking.

"You ready to go home?"

The gray water broke. It just broke, like a window, like a held breath, and behind it was a person, was me, was the bright loud trouble-girl I thought the woods had killed, and she looked at his open hand and at his steady eyes and she did the thing I'd dreamed about in a place so deep I'd stopped admitting I dreamed at all.

I put my hand in his.

***

THE SKY WAS the first thing that nearly undid me.

Not because I'd never seen it. They let us out, a courtyard with a fence you couldn't see past, an hour at a time, an aide always twenty feet off, and I'd spent four years beside a window of wired glass watching a square of it go gray and gold and gray again. I knew the sky. What I'd forgotten was the sky with nothing over it. No fence. No wall. No glass, no aide, no edge anywhere that somebody had put there to keep me in or keep it out. Just all of it at once, black and enormous and stabbed full of more stars than I had any way to hold, coming down over me so fast and so wide that my knees went soft.

The ride had been its own kind of undoing, wind I hadn't felt in years, the road pouring away under us, Eli's back the one fixed thing in a world gone to speed and dark, and somewhere in the long cold rush of it I'd stopped being able to tell where the fear ended and the alive began. Then the bikes came off the road and the engines died, and it was quiet, and it was open, and that was worse.

There was nothing between me and all that dark. After four years of being kept inside walls and fences and somebody's eyeline, the open air didn't feel like freedom. It felt like being uncovered. Like being set out where anything could see me.

And the place around me made it worse before it made it better. Gravel underfoot and the smell of dust and oil, a row of motorcycles black against blacker dark, a yard, and big rough men moving in it, more men than I'd been near in years, and it was outside, and it was night, and some part of me that never sleeps put all those pieces together too fast.

Open ground. Dark. Men. The smell of the earth.

The wall in me slammed up, white and high, and behind it something heaved, and I shoved it down. Shoved the whole picture down with both hands, hard, the way I always do, before it could crack the rest of the way open, because if it opens it doesn't close, and I'd learned a long time ago to keep myself on this side of it where I could still breathe.

I must have stopped breathing anyway, because Eli's hand tightened around mine.

"Bee." Low, right beside my ear. "Look at me. Not out there. Here."

I looked at him. Brown eyes in the dark, steady, holding still the way water goes still when a hand lies flat on it. He didn't tell me I was safe; he never told me things he couldn't promise. He just gave me his face to hold onto instead of the dark, and I held it, and the picture let go of my throat and sank back down to where I keep it.

"There you go," he murmured. "I got you. Nobody here but us."

Caleb came around fast on my other side and folded himself down into my eyeline. His face was concerned and he wasn't hiding it. "Hey. Hey, Little Bee. You're home. You hear me? You're with us. That's the whole of what's happening tonight, nothing else, nobody else. Just us."

Two women stood on the porch. One was heavily pregnant and the other waited with a blanket, both had warm eyes filled with concern, and when I came up the steps the blanket settled around my shoulders without crowding me, without a single word that needed answering. I couldn't have answered them if my life hung on it. My words were rationed things now, counted out, spent only on the two faces I trusted to hold them. They seemed to know that.

Inside was warm, and full, and it should have been loud, a room built for loud, but the men in it had gone quiet and careful the second I came through the door, dropping their voices, finding somewhere else to put their eyes, giving me a wide path to walk down with Eli's body between me and all of them like a wall set on wheels. Somebody had said something to them. I knew it the way you know weather. The whole rough place was bending itself gentle around me.

He took me down a hall to a room and stood back to let me see it.

Plain. Real. A bed with sheets washed soft and thin, a window with the blind half down, a stack of beat-up paperbacks on the sill, a flannel shirt slung over a chair. It smelled like road dust and leather and the warm underneath that I'd have known anywhere. It took me a moment to understand what I was looking at.

"This is yours," I said.

Three words, cracked and small, and Eli went still the way he always did when I spoke now, careful, like a man who's seen a wild thing come to his hand once and won't make a single move that might send it bolting.

"It's yours now," he said. "Long as you want it. I'm just down the hall."