Page 103 of Graceless

"The heartbeat gets louder every day," he said. "That is not a figure of speech. It is a sound, and it carries, and sooner or later something up there will hear it. My brother heard it first. He is one of theirs, Caterina — he has served them since before the water — and instead of reporting it, he came and told me. Do you understand what that cost him? He is betraying them every hour he stays silent. That is who came to warn us. That is 'after.' All of it."

"That's 'after,'" he said. "All of it. Three weeks late." He looked up from the table, and for the first time since I've known him there was nothing guarded in his face at all. "Now pack a bag. Please. I have never said please the way I am saying it now."

"No."

"Caterina—"

"I said no."

And he made the mistake.

He came around my grandmother's table in one motion — no sound, no warning, the speed he never uses in this house — and picked me up. Both arms, one under my knees, like a man walking into surf, and he was already turned toward the door, and the terrible thing, the thing I'll never tell him, is that my body — my dumb, loyal, joyful body — wanted to let him.

I went still instead. Cold still. The stillness Nonna used on grown men.

"Put me down."

He kept moving. The door came open under one of his hands without him appearing to touch it, and the March night came in, and the stoop light, and my street.

"Raq. Put. Me. Down."

"No."

My word. The little word I own, the one I'd slammed a door on an hour ago — he took it right out of my mouth and used it on me, level, final, not even winded, and over his shoulder the kitchen was getting farther away, the saints, the lamp, the pad on the fridge with every law we ever made.

"They don't decide for me," I said, and my voice came out shaking with rage and I let it shake. "You don't decide for me. Raq — listen to me — I decide, I have always decided, you put me down right now or you are no different from the ones who⁠—"

"You will be alive to hate me," he said. "I can carry that."

And the stoop dropped away.

The world let go. The streetlight fell down the sky. My stomach stayed somewhere over the Madonnas and the rest of me went up into the cold with my face pressed into the collar I used to fix, and Bay 50th Street turned into a string of lights, and then a grid of lights, and then one gold thread in a whole borough of them, all of it falling away below me at once — my house, my block, my six blocks to Nina's, everything I own and everyone I've buried, shrinking to the size of a spark.

He'd wrapped his coat around me. He was warm as August and steady as iron and I hated him with my whole chest, and I hooked one fist into his shirt because terror doesn't care who it holds on to.

He actually did it.

The son of a bitch actually did it.

CHAPTER 30

RAQ

The cottage stood on a bluff at the end of the island, past where the road gives up — a light-keeper's house from the whaling years, stone below and shingle above, one of the quiet places on my brother's map where nothing above the clouds has had a reason to listen since the light was decommissioned. Ocean on three sides. No neighbors. No saints.

I set her down on the stone floor of the main room and she hit me.

Not a slap. She turned inside my arms the moment her feet touched, and she hit me with both fists closed, in the chest, again, again, full force, hands that have hauled panels and stretched canvas and scrubbed floors, and I stood and took it, because it could not hurt me, and because it should have.

"You—" A blow. "Don't—" A blow. "You do not get to—" Her voice tore. She hit me until her hands hurt — I felt the moment they began to, felt her feel it — and she did not stop then either, she hit me twice more past the pain on purpose, and then she stepped back, shaking, dry-eyed, and gave me a look I had never once had from her.

The look you give something that got into the house.

"Where," she said.

"The end of Long Island. Past Montauk. It belonged to a keeper once; now it belongs to no one, which is the point⁠—"

"Take me home."