Page 26 of What We Burn

Work the conditioner through. Focus on the ends.

“Knox?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t have to do this.”

“I know.”

“I can wash my own hair.”

“I know that too.”

She opens one eye and looks up at me. Water beads on her lashes. “Then why are you?”

I separate a section and run the detangling comb through it. The house is quiet around us. Holden left for the station an hour ago. Micah’s in the kitchen. Milo’s somewhere with his laptop, probably muttering to himself like he always does.

“Because you’d do it yourself and you’d rush it and you’d wrench your neck reaching back,” I say. “Then you’d pretend it didn’t hurt. Micah would know it hurt. He’d worry. And then I’d have to deal with Micah worrying.”

She snorts. Barely a sound, but it’s hers.

“So this is about Micah’s feelings.”

“Exactly.”

Her mouth twitches. I rinse the conditioner.

I soap a cloth and start at her shoulders. Light pressure. Careful around the cuts and bruises. We’re a week past the attack now, but she’s still covered in them—from the struggle and the fight to get her breathing again.

Her hands are healing. The torn nails trimmed short, the worst cuts scabbed over. In a few weeks there’ll be nothing left but faint lines and pink skin. Right now they’re a record of how hard she fought.

“I can get the rest.” She takes the cloth from me and finishes where I left off, drawing a slow, deliberate line down her arm, across her stomach, up the other side.

She sits forward, brings the cloth to her face, and holds it there a moment. I wait. She scrubs slow, careful circles on her cheeks, chin, the place under her eyes where the skin is thinnest. She stares at nothing, knees drawn up, and I know her mind is taking her somewhere neither of us wants her to go.

“Thank you,” she says, blinking herself back to the present and handing the cloth back.

“You good?”

“Yeah. All clean.” She sits up and pushes the wet hair off her face, and the rope of it swings and slaps across my forearm and chest, soaking the front of my shirt.

“Sorry.”

I look down at the spreading patch of wet. “It’s water.”

I reach back, fist the collar, and pull the shirt off over my head one-handed.

Fury stares. Her head tilts.

The tattoo.

It’s still healing, the skin starting to peel and flake along the top edge. Margery’s lines are clean, the detail precise, but new ink looks like what it is. A wound somebody chose.

Fury studies it.

I stay still as her eyes trace the design—the sage rooted near my sternum, the purple flowers, the five bees fanned across my pec. Two in flight. Three perched on the leaves and the blossoms, wings folded.

Her lips part. Nothing comes out.