Chapter 191: Number Two Is—

Daemus was losing at Breakaway on Blair’s bed and taking it personally.

"That’s a penalty," he told the phone. "Ref. Are you blind?"

Blair sat at her desk with the Treaty commentary open in front of her. She had read the same paragraph three times. Her phone lay face up beside the book. 10:21.

He had come straight from the evening skate with his hair still damp, eaten both egg buns she’d saved him, and stretched out on her bed with his feet hanging off the end. He hadn’t moved since.

The game played a sad little trumpet. He dropped the phone on his chest.

"Bunny."

"Mm."

"Come here."

"I’m reading."

"You’ve been on that page since nine."

She turned the page. He laughed, low in his chest, and held out his hand without lifting his head.

She went.

He pulled her down on top of him, and she settled with her knees on either side of his hips and her right sleeve tugged down over her knuckles. He slid his hand up under her sweater and spread it flat on her back. His palm was hot. He looked at her mouth for a while before he did anything about it.

Then he kissed her the way he did when he had nowhere to be. Slow. Lazy. His tongue slid against hers and pulled back and came again, until she stopped thinking about the clock. She caught his lower lip between her teeth, gently, and his ears came up. His hand moved lower on her back, under the waistband of her skirt, and stayed there.

"Number two," he murmured against her mouth.

"Is?"

"Number two is..." He yawned in the middle of it, a huge, jaw-cracking wolf yawn. "Sorry. Number two is—"

She waited.

His hand went heavy on her back. His breathing slowed.

"Daemus?"

Nothing. He was asleep, his mouth an inch from hers, in the middle of a sentence.

Blair lay on his chest and listened to his heart slow down. He had been up since five. He had skated twice today and been in a shower stall until one in the morning, and none of that had been her fault, exactly.

She looked at the phone on the desk. 10:34.

She lifted his hand off her back an inch at a time and laid it on the blanket. She slid sideways off the bed. One of his ears turned toward her, and she froze on her knees on the floor.

The ear turned back.

She took her coat from the hook because it was dark, and carried her shoes. At the door she turned the handle all the way before she pulled, so the latch wouldn’t click.

Behind her, Daemus mumbled something that might have been "penalty."

She thought about leaving a note. She didn’t know what it would say.

* * *

The lamps in the East Wing stairwell were turned down low. Blair went down past the last landing, behind the mop sink, and folded herself into the gap between the sink and the wall. It smelled of bleach and wet rope.

She crouched there and waited.

At two minutes to eleven, the cart came around the corner. A gray bucket, a mop wringer, a black bag hooked over the side. One wheel squeaked.

The woman pushing it wore a gray coverall and rubber gloves. Her hair was up in a tidy bun. She leaned on the push bar with her hip, the cart rolled out into the dark, and the door sighed shut behind her.

Blair let out her breath.

Then someone came down the stairs.

She hadn’t heard him start. Jack reached the bottom step in his long coat, without a lamp, and stopped there, a yard from the sink.

Blair didn’t breathe.

He stood with his head tilted slightly toward the service door, the way a bird listens. Then he opened it and went through. He didn’t let it close on its own. He caught it and eased it shut.

She counted to thirty. Then she counted to sixty, because thirty felt like the number he’d expect.

Outside, the two wheel tracks ran into the trees, fresh, their edges still wet. There was no sign of Jack. She looked up once. Black branches, a half moon, nothing moving.

The cold didn’t touch her. The quiet did. Things lived in these woods, and she had seen some of them.

She followed the tracks.

They wound between the trunks for ten minutes, then bent around a fallen oak. Light showed through the branches ahead, small and yellow. Blair dropped to her knees behind the oak and looked over it.

A clearing. The cart stood at the edge with a lantern hooked on the handle. The janitor knelt in the middle of the frozen grass with the black bag open in front of her, tipping scraps onto the ground. Bread crusts. Ends of meat. Something that had once been cabbage.

"Come on, then," she said. "Come on, dears. I know you’re there."

The brush rustled.

A puppy tumbled out of it, then three more. They were thin, brown and white, all ears and paws. They threw themselves at the scraps. One of them climbed right into the bag.

The janitor laughed and scratched it behind the ears. She sat back on her heels to watch them eat.

Blair stared.

She had followed the woman who came for Ivy with a syringe ready. Into the forest. In the middle of the night. To watch her feed dogs.

One of the puppies lifted its head from the bread and looked straight at the fallen oak.

Blair’s breath hitched.

A hand closed over her mouth.

An arm came around her waist and pulled her back against a hard chest, and something black and silent folded around them both. The lantern light went out. Feathers brushed her cheek.

"Sixty," Jack breathed against her ear. "You should have counted to a hundred."

His hand stayed where it was. She could feel his mouth at her ear, his chest against her back, his thumb pressed under her jaw. He was perfectly calm. His heart beat slow and even against her shoulder blade, and hers hammered loud enough for both of them.

He had seen her under the stairs. He had walked right past her.

He had let her come.

Through a gap in his wing she watched the puppy lose interest and put its nose back in the bread.

"Greedy," the janitor said fondly.

Jack’s hand tightened over Blair’s mouth.

He wasn’t watching the janitor. His head had turned past her to the far side of the clearing, where a pair of eyes caught the light between two trunks and didn’t blink.

"Don’t move," he breathed.