Page 37 of Crow’s Shadow

For four days I told myself nobody was coming. I told myself the stray ran off and the club shrugged and went back to its beer. I was wrong about every part of it, and the proof is standing in the doorway with his hand still resting on his gun, watching me the way you watch a thing the room might take if you blink.

“Come here,” I say.

He does not move. Of course he doesn’t.

“Crow. Come here.”

“If I come over there,” he says, low and wrecked, “I’m not going to do the right thing.”

“I’m done with the right thing. The right thing kept you across a room my whole life.” I get up off the cot. My legs hold. I cross the floor to him, because he cannot make himself cross it to me. “Twenty years you wouldn’t look at me. Look now.”

He looks. And for once there is nothing held back. Everything I’ve wanted from him is right there on his face. It should frighten me. It does. I do not care.

His hands come up to my face, both of them, and they are shaking. Crow’s hands do not shake. When he kisses me there is nothing gentle in it. He kisses me like he’s been starving and I fist my hands in his cut and drag him into me. He comes willingly, no distance left between us.

The bond reacts the second we touch. Heat moves under my skin and something in Crow answers it. Whatever Renner woke in me knows him.

Wants him.

And this time I let it.

“Shadow.” My name broken against my throat. “Tell me to stop.”

“Don’t you dare.”

The room comes back to me slow. The lamp has steadied. I am against his chest with his heart under my ear, hammered too hard all night for a calm man, gone quiet at last. His arm lies across me, a bar holding me down, as though I might vanish out a blind spot the way I did four days ago.

The pull is quiet. First time in my life, there is no ache at the end of the it. Only him. Warm, here and mine.

I should let it be enough. The girl in me who wanted this before she had a word for it would lie here till morning and ask nothing. But the bookkeeper in me never sleeps. And now, with my cheek on his chest and the whole shape of what we are settling into my bones, she opens her book and starts to count.

“Crow.” I keep my face on his chest so I do not have to watch his. “The fire. In the car you said you’d tell me when I was ready. I’m ready.”

He goes still under me. Not the calm still. The braced still, the one a man wears before a blow.

“You were five,” he says.

“I know how old I was. I want your side. You were fifteen. Tell me what a fifteen-year-old boy was doing at a burning house forty minutes out of Grimstone in the middle of the night.”

The quiet stretches a beat too long. The quiet stretches a beat too long. Five. Fifteen. The numbers don’t fit.

“You didn’t find it by accident,” I say. “A boy does not stumble onto a house fire that far out in the dark. Somebody sent you.”

“Shadow.”

“Were you sent. Yes or no.”

He sits up with me, slow. The lamp catches the side of his face and gives me nothing, the cleaner’s face, the shut door I spent my whole life reading and never once cracked.

“I was sent,” he says.

The words land soft and take the floor out from under me anyway.

“Loco sent me. Word came down there was a body out past the county line needed handling. That is the job. It was the job even then, before the patch.” His voice does not rise. It never rises. “I drove out to clean a scene.”

“A body.” My voice comes apart on the word. “Whose body, Crow?”

He does not answer. He does not have to. The room tilts, and the story I have believed my whole life comes apart.