Page 120 of Graceless

The espresso came off the stove. Raq set a cup in front of him and one in front of me, decaf, because he knows, and sat back down at my right hand.

I put my spoon down.

"The answer's no."

"I was not asking you yet."

"You were asking him." I looked at Raq, and Raq looked back at me, and the blue was banked again and his hands were on the table and he had not said one word since he sat down. "Go ahead, Cam. Ask him. Let's all find out together."

Cam turned to his brother.

"Well," he said. "You have not once told me I am wrong."

"You are not wrong."

"Then tell her."

And there it was. Everything hung on it — Cam waiting, my heart going in my throat, and beside me the man who had already done this once, who had picked me up off my kitchen floor four days ago and had all the proof in the world that he could do it again any time he decided the reason was good enough.

Raq set his cup down.

"It is not mine to decide," he said. "Ask her."

Cam went completely still.

"I beg your pardon."

"You heard me. It is her body, her house, her life, and her child." He did not raise his voice. "I did what you told me on that roof. I took her. I put her where nothing could hear her, exactly as you said, and I was proud of myself — and she bled on a stone floor forty miles from a hospital because of it. That is what your plan costs when a man who loves her carries it out. Not a proceeding. Not a docket. Her blood, on a floor, forty miles from help." A pause. "So no. I will not tell her anything. Ask her."

"Baraqiel, she is a mortal woman⁠—"

"She is the one who is pregnant," Raq said. "Ask her."

Cam turned in his chair, slowly, and for the first time all night looked at me like somebody he had to talk to.

"Very well. Caterina Fontana. Will you come."

"No."

It came up out of me the way your hand comes off a hot pan.

"You have not heard the details."

"I don't need them. A quiet room somewhere far away with a doctor who doesn't ask questions. I've had the four-day version." I put the cup down. "My grandmother bought this house with money she made sewing. She held it through her husband dying, my parents dying, four recessions, and a stroke that took her whole right side — and every single person in her life told her exactly what you're telling me. Somewhere safe. Somewhere easier. She learned the stairs again instead. It took her a year." My eyes were doing something and I let them. "She died in that room over your head, in her own bed, with her people around her. That's what I've got instead of a religion.

"So no. I'm not having my child in a room somebody picked for me because I'm the least powerful thing at this table. I'm having it here, on this street, with Nina six blocks away and a doctor on 86th who's known me since I was nine. And you can tell whoever writes the list of what's permitted that they can go to hell. All of them." My hand was steady, which surprised me more than anything else that night. "If they come, they come. They can come up those stairs like everybody else."

Cam stood up.

"You have no idea what you are refusing," he said. "You have been sleeping beside a ruin and you think you have taken the measure of us."

And then he opened his wings.

They came out of nothing and they filled my kitchen — not folded, not tucked; filled it, ceiling to floor, the far one going through the doorway into the studio and the near one crossing the whole width of the room a foot from my face. Not white. Not feathers, or not only feathers: the light came off them the way light comes off water at the end of the day, and the color kept deciding — bronze, then a gold with no warmth in it, then something at the edge that my eye could not hold and kept sliding off, the way you can't look directly at the filament in a bulb. They moved slightly, the way a sail does when nothing is happening. The air in the room went thin and cold and smelled like the inside of a church in January, and my ears popped.

And him in front of them.

You do not get to see something like that in a lifetime and I saw it over a bowl of soup. He stood in my kitchen with the light off those wings on him and he was — beautiful is not the word; beautiful is for things that are trying. He wasn't trying. He was made, and everything human I have ever found handsome turned out to be a rumor about him: the line of the jaw, the height, the shoulders under that coat, the terrible symmetry of a face nobody carved and nobody bred, that has never once been tired or sick or afraid of a bill. Every saint on my wall is a bad photograph of this. Sixty years of Nonna's holy cards, the panel downstairs, all those years of nuns — all of it, every image anybody has ever made of them, was somebody remembering this badly.