Page 4 of Sting of Sin

And now the dark was handing it back to me with a name stuck on it, and the name belonged to the thing that was about to put me in a van.

Then the rest of it reached me through the water. Out past Flagstaff. Three hours on.

Three hours.

Away from the window I knew, the chair I knew, the two sets of boots that came every week. Somewhere new and locked and far, where there'd be no window I trusted and no boots in any hallway, where I'd be alone with the dark behind the wall and nothing and no one left to stand between me and it when it finally came through. And some part of me understood, with a certainty I couldn't explain and couldn't doubt, that the move wasn't carrying me away from the danger. It was carrying me toward it. Get out, the bells said, the way they'd said it once before, a whole day of saying it, the day I didn't listen.

Get out before they move you. Get out now.

My hands had gone to fists in my lap. I made them open. I made one of them move, slow, under the lip of the table where nobody could see, and I caught the edge of Eli's sleeve between two fingers.

That's all I could manage. Two fingers and the worn edge of his cuff. He didn't move. He didn't look down. He just went, if it was possible, even more still, and let me hold on.

Help me, I thought, with everything I had. Hear me. You always hear me.

Caleb's phone buzzed against his thigh. He pulled it out, glanced at it, and something in his face softened—Julia, I thought, or his son—and he murmured that he had to step out a second, just a second, and he squeezed my knee and he was gone down the hall with the phone to his ear and the door easing shut behind him.

And then it was just us. Eli and me and the gray water and the wall with the dark behind it getting closer every day.

He turned his head to look at me. Brown eyes. Steady. Waiting, the way he always waited, never pushing, like he had all the time in the world and would spend every minute of it sitting right here if that's what I needed.

The words had been dead in me for four years. I'd felt them rot. I'd felt the place where they used to live go quiet and cold, and I'd stopped trying, because trying was hoping and hoping is the thing that cuts you.

But Eli was a wall, and behind him I was almost safe, and the transfer was four days out, and I was out of edges left to not reach for.

I curled my fingers all the way around his sleeve. I leaned in until I could smell road dust and leather and the warm underneath that was only him. And I went down into the cold dead place where my voice had been rotting four years, and I got both hands around the first words I would choose to say in all that time, and I started hauling them up toward the light.

They weighed more than anything I'd ever lifted.

I lifted them anyway.

CHAPTER THREE

THREE WORDS. FIRST ones she'd said in four years, and she'd given them to me.

I didn't move. Didn't say shit. Just sat there with her fingers locked in my sleeve and those three words going off in my chest like a round in a closed room, and I kept my face flat because the worst thing I could've done right then was let her see what it did to me.

She was watching me. Waiting. Scared I wasn't gonna answer, I think, or scared I would. Her eyes were wide and wet and so goddamn blue, and there was a person in there. Not the ghost everybody else saw. Her. Bee. Looking out at me from behind all of it and asking me for the one thing I knew how to give.

"Okay," I said. Low. Just for her. "Okay. I got you."

Her grip didn't let up, but something in her face cracked open a half inch, and she nodded, barely, and turned back to the window like she'd spent everything she had and didn't have a drop left over.

She probably hadn't. Four years of nothing and she'd burned it all down on three words for me.

Throttle came back in stuffing his phone in his cut, easy, not knowing. "Julia says hi. Garrick's into the damn cabinets now, she—" He stopped. Read the room the way he always could. His eyes went from me to Bee and back, and his voice dropped. "What."

I shook my head once. Not here. Not in front of the soft-shoe crowd and the cameras in the corners and whatever the hell else was watching in that place.

"We're done for today," I said, and stood up slow so I didn't spook her, and it about killed me to peel her fingers off my sleeve one at a time and set her hand back in her lap. "We'll see you soon, Bee. You hear me? Soon."

She didn't look at me again. But her hand stayed curled where I'd left it, holding the shape of my cuff like it was still there.

I held it together through the hall and the front desk and Reed trying to catch us on the way out, let's find a time to talk through the transition, I really do think it's best, and Throttle saying yeah, sure, we'll call, in a voice that didn't mean a word of it, and we kept walking, out the doors and into the white light and across that too-clean lot to the bikes, where nobody was close enough to hear.

"Talk," Throttle said.

"She spoke."