Page 127 of Graceless

"You've counted."

"I have counted everything," he said, "since the parking lot," and kissed me one more time — soft, careful, a promissory note — and stepped back, and picked up the towel, and finished drying the pan like a man performing normalcy at gunpoint.

I stayed against my counter with my heart slamming and every nerve still lit.

"The couch," I said, when I could talk, "is still a punishment. You get that, right? You're supposed to be suffering."

"I am suffering."

"Good," I said, and took myself to bed — alone, wanting, aching, and, God help me, happy.

I woke at twenty past nine because the light through the curtain went wrong.

Not off. Wrong — the streetlight's amber dimming to brown, an August brownout color, the whole block's air conditioners pulling at once. Except it was March.

Then it died.

And through the wall, from the living room, in a voice I had never heard him use — flat, wide awake, already moving:

"Caterina. Get up."

CHAPTER 36

CATE

Iwas up before the word finished.

He was already in the bedroom doorway — filling it, backlit by nothing, because there was no light left anywhere to backlight a man — and the whole street outside had gone the kind of quiet that has weight.

"The back room," he said. "Now."

"The votive⁠—"

"Leave it."

"It's the only⁠—"

"Leave it burning. Nothing that's coming needs light to see." He crossed the room, and stopped, hands almost on me, that catch he does now. "May I."

"Go."

He carried me down my dark hallway past my dark kitchen — the little flame on the sill, the pad on the refrigerator, my whole life going by at four watts — into the back bedroom, no windows, no street. He set me on the bed. He wrapped the quilt around me. He crouched and took my face in both hands, and his palms were burning hot, and his eyes had light in them that came from nowhere in the room.

"Whatever happens. Whatever you hear. You stay off the window side of this house."

"I know. Back room, lights out, don't look. I was in the kitchen for the briefing." I got a fistful of his shirt. "Say it back to me."

"Say what back."

"That you're staying in this room."

He didn't say it.

"Raq. Say it back."

"You are going to be all right," he said, which was not what I asked for, and he pressed his mouth to my forehead and held it there one second longer than he ever does.

I should have known right then.