Page 69 of Flames and Blood

He doesn’t move to go yet.

“Your hands,” he says.

“What’s wrong with them?”

“Nothing. Just make sure they don’t shake when she’s around.”

“Noted.”

“Good.”

He goes. The truck starts outside, and then it’s driving away, and the house is silent. Two fewer people in it. Somehow, that makes it feel smaller.

I sit out the daylight in the kitchen with the shutters shut, and it’s late in the afternoon before I go back in to her.

She’s awake when I open the door, sitting up against the headboard with the blanket around her shoulders, watching me steadily.

“They gone?”

“Yes.”

She pulls the blanket tighter. “What now?”

“Aurora.”

“Who’s Aurora?”

“It’s an organization. People who’ll know how to help you better than I can. There are dragons there. And security. And a name that means something to the people who did this to you.” I sit down in the same chair I never left last night. “It’s the only place I know that can actually help properly.”

She’s quiet for a moment. Not thinking it over; I’ve watched her think things over, and this isn’t that. This is a woman checking whether she has any objection and finding none.

“All right,” she says. “Aurora.”

“That’s it? No argument?”

“You want one?”

“No.”

“Then don’t sound disappointed that you’re not getting one.” She swings her legs off the bed, and then she stops and looks down at herself, at the shirt hanging to her knees and the cuffs over her hands. “Is there anything else to wear in this house?”

“No.”

“So I arrive at Aurora in your clothes?”

“You do.”

She takes that in. Then she rolls one cuff back twice, and then the other.

“Ten minutes,” she says.

We’re on the road minutes before full dark, in a different truck, heading south on a highway with no name I care about. She sits with her knees up and her arms around them, watching the dark go by, and neither of us says one word about last night.

She’s careful not to. I can feel her being careful.

“You’re very quiet,” she says, an hour in.

“I’m always quiet.”