Page 27 of What We Burn

Her hand lifts from the water. Stops an inch from my skin without touching it.

“Knox.”

I don’t move.

“When did you get this?”

“While you were in the coma.”

Her hand drops back to the water. Her jaw works the way it does when she’s fighting tears.

“Is that⁠—”

“Sage.”

“The plant?”

“Yeah.”

“And the bees?”

I could explain it. I could tell her what I told Margery—five bees, coming to the plant, feeding it, fed by it. I could tell her the bees aren’t us. They’re her. Five pieces of who she is. The fighter. The lover. The survivor. The friend. The woman I love.

I could say all of that.

Instead I say, “You.”

She blinks. A tear drops, hits the water. She scrubs at her face with the back of a wet hand, fast, like it offended her.

“All of them?”

“All of them.”

She’s quiet. The tap drips. Her hand lifts again, and this time she touches me—not the ink, but the bare skin beside it, the unmarked patch between the plant and the old shrapnel scar along my ribs. Her fingertips are warm from the water.

“It’s over your heart,” she whispers.

“Yeah.”

Her face crumples. A fracture that runs through her expression and rearranges it into something I don’t have a word for.

She leans forward and presses her forehead to my chest. Her breath comes warm and uneven against my wet skin.

I put my hand on the back of her head and hold her there.

We stay like that. The water starts to cool. Through the door, Micah is in the kitchen—the clink of a mug, water running, the ordinary sounds of a house where people live. My back aches from hunching over the tub. I don’t care.

She pulls back. Wipes her face. Squares her shoulders.

“If you tell anyone I cried in the bath, I’ll stab you.”

“Noted.”

“I mean it.”

“I know.”

I stand, take the towel off the rack, and hold it open. She grips the lip of the tub and ignores my help in favor of getting herself up out of the water. I wrap the towel around her before she’s even fully upright. For a second she looks small inside it. Smaller than my Fury is. Smaller than the woman who grabbed my knife under the jetty and became the center of my world.