Page 67 of Property of Prophet

The brothers take the chairs back to where they found them.

There are things to discuss—positions, timing, how to bring Calix to open ground without showing our hand—but Blade runs that part with Vex, and the others drift back to their stations.

This is what a chapter does—it allocates. It moves its pieces into place with the efficiency of men who have done this work before, who trust each other to occupy the assigned space and hold it.

They file out in ones and twos.

The door closes behind Rooster, the last, with a quiet precision that doesn’t fit his size.

Lily gets up and puts the cup on the counter. She stands there for a moment with her back to the room, both hands flat on the timber surface. “You knew all of that...” she says, “... and you didn’t break.”

“No.”

“How?

“Had a reason to hold on.”

She looks at me from across the room. I don’t look away. Something shifts in her expression. Small enough I might have missed it weeks ago. I don’t miss it now.

Lily understands. She is too precise not to understand. Her eyes hold mine for a moment, then she turns back to the counter, and her hands find something to do, rinsing the cup, setting it aside, each motion deliberate.

Lily pulled me off a frozen ridge and refused to let me die. She has been saving me every day since, in increments too small for her to notice and too large for me to forget.

So, I wait, not for forgiveness or for the fire to burn out.

I wait to see what the woman who saved me, the woman I love, will do.

Chapter Eighteen

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Lily

The cabin has never held a quiet of this particular kind.

Outside, seven impossible men keep my perimeter. The night is clear for the first time in weeks. There’s a deep-winter cold, forty below and dropping, the stars overhead as hard and bright as instrument light.

Inside, the stove ticks its slow, contented rhythm. Bear lies stretched in front of it, paws twitching through some dream of open country, while the lamp burns low. My rifle is cleaned and racked. The rounds are counted twice because a woman who counts things twice sleeps better than a woman who trusts her first pass.

Tomorrow, we will speak of binding rituals and of what my blood will be asked to hold. Prophet called me an anchor. The word has been sitting in me since the meeting broke, a diagnosis I gave myself by volunteering. Whatever grace remains in Prophet has apparently been seeping into me for months, through the sutures and the shared air of this small room. My hands run warm now where they didn’t use to, and until he said his grace was seeping into me, I hadn’t noticed.

Tomorrow has been circling this ridge all evening, patient as the weather.

Dinner was ten bodies in a space built for one. Flint read while he ate. Scout asked Bear’s opinion on everything and received it. Somewhere in the middle of the venison, Blade looked from Prophet to me and back again, a slow assessment with a conclusion attached. He didn’t share the conclusion. Apparently, presidents rarely do.

Then, one by one, they were gone. Blade muttered something about watch rotations. Hollywood winked at nobody in particular on his way out the door. Then the latch dropped, the quiet arrived, and it is not an empty quiet. It’s a full one.

Prophet stands at the window for a while with his back to me. His reflection hangs in the black glass, silver-haired and still, watching the dark the way he does when he listens to something below the range of my hearing or decides something. His shoulders tell me which, a heartbeat before he moves.

He stokes the stove for the night, then checks the window latch he has checked every evening for weeks, his habit now, in my house. Then he turns, lamplight finding the silver in his hair.

He crosses the room to me.

With no hesitation, he stops an arm’s length away, close enough for his warmth to reach me.

“You count your rounds twice,” he says. “You give the dog the first piece of every rabbit. When a stranger fell out of the sky, you kept him alive without once asking what it would cost you. You gave me a name when I couldn’t hold my own...” He pauses. “You are the reason there was anything left of me for my brothers to find.”

My throat works, but nothing comes out of it.