Page 117 of Graceless

She heated the soup anyway. She put it in front of me with a spoon and a glass of water and the paperwork squared on the table where I'd have to look at it, and she kissed the top of my head, and at the door she pointed at Raq and then at Cam, in order.

"Feet up. Two weeks. If she lifts anything heavier than a fork I'm hearing about it from Mrs. Esposito before you two have your coats off." She got her keys out. "Cate. I'm calling you at seven."

"Nina—"

"Seven," she said, and went up my steps, and the door shut behind her.

And the whole warmth of that woman went out of the room with her.

Cam sat back down. Raq had not moved from the doorway since he set me on my feet, and he did not move now, and neither of them said anything at all for a moment, and my kitchen — the saints, the soup, the pad on the refrigerator — filled up with something cold that had been waiting politely for the civilian to leave.

"Okay," I said. "You. In my house, in my kitchen, at my table, with your hands folded like you paid for the chair. I've been carried across a state, I've been in a hospital, I've got a bracelet on my wrist and a note from a doctor telling me not to stand up. So let's skip the part where you're charming."

Cam turned his head and looked at me, and everything pleasant went off his face at once.

I have spent my whole life in rooms with men who think they're frightening. This was not that. This was the light over the sink going thin, and the hair standing up on my arms, and something enormous and patient turning all of itself onto me at once, like a searchlight finding one window in a building —

And then Raq was between us.

I didn't see him move. He had been in the doorway behind me and then he was standing in front of my chair with his back to me, filling the whole space between me and that table, and the kitchen went so quiet I could hear the refrigerator kick.

He didn't say anything. Not one word. He just stood there in front of me, and whatever was on his face was aimed at his brother, and I watched Cam — who had let himself into a locked house, who had sat at my table for hours, who had not been afraid of one single thing all night — sit back an inch in his chair.

"Baraqiel." Cam's voice had changed too. Carefully. "I have not moved."

"No," Raq said. "You have not."

Two words. That was all of it, and they were the flattest, coldest, most frightening two words I have ever heard in that kitchen, and something went between those two men over a bowl of soup that I will be a long time forgetting.

I put my hand on Raq's back and pushed, and he let me move him, which is not the same as moving him.

I looked around his arm at the man at my table.

"What the hell do you want?"

CHAPTER 33

CATE

"What I want," Cam said, "is ten minutes, and then I will be out of your house."

My hands were shaking. Not from him — from the day, from the blood and the parking lot and the paper gown — and I put them around the soup bowl so nobody could take a reading off them.

"Sit down, Raq."

He didn't move.

"Raq. Sit. He's not going to do anything, I'm not standing up, and I'm tired of talking to your back."

A long second. Then he pulled out the chair at my right — beside me, not in front of me, which I noticed and so did his brother — and sat.

"Espresso?"

Cam looked at me like I'd offered him a sandwich at a hanging. "No."

"Wasn't a question. Raq, the pot's on the back left." I pulled the soup over because a doctor said eat and because my hands wanted a job. "Somebody comes into this kitchen, they get a coffee. Talk while it's making."

"I told you to take her." Cam said it to his brother. "I stood on a roof in Queens and told you to take her where no one keeps a watch. For four days I could not find either of you, and I was content — do you know how rarely that word is available to me? And then tonight I feel you cross the Belt Parkway. Coming back. To this address."