32. Leave, to me

Chapter 32: Leave. To me.

The room was dark except for the single candle Mikaela had lit on the table, and even that felt too bright for what she was doing, hands steady where her voice wasn't as she worked a wet cloth along the gash above Eto's eye.

"Hold still," she said. "I know it hurts. I know. Just, hold still a second longer."

He sat on the edge of the bed, shirt gone, chest a mess of bruising already gone deep purple across one side where the sound had hit him, and he didn't so much as flinch when she pressed the cloth into the cut, just watched her face while she worked.

"This is bad," she said, half to herself, dabbing at a second gash along his jaw. "This is really bad, you went through two walls tonight, do you understand that, two, and Kael's just, he's just gone, there wasn't even a body, there wasn't even blood, how does a person just."

She stopped herself. Set the cloth down. Picked it back up.

"Sorry. I'm talking too much. You probably don't want me talking right now."

He caught her wrist, gentle, and shook his head once.

"Okay." She let out a breath and went back to it, wringing the cloth out in the basin, water gone pink from it now. "Okay. I'll talk. I need to talk or I'm going to think about the shed and I really don't want to think about the shed right now."

She worked in silence for a minute after that, hands moving careful over the worst of the bruising, and when she spoke again her voice had gone smaller, quieter, like she was working up to something she'd been circling for a while.

"I need to tell you something. And I need you to just, let me get through it, okay, because if you stop me halfway I don't think I'll finish it."

He watched her, waited.

"The past five years, since I was banished from the capital, I haven't exactly been." She paused, cloth stilling against his shoulder. "I haven't been careful about who I worked with. Or worked for. There's people out there, people I owe things to, people who don't forget when you owe them things, and I've been telling myself the whole time I've got it handled, I've got it under control, and maybe I do, mostly, but." Her hands had started shaking again. "But it's not just my problem anymore, is it. Not since you. If any of that catches up to me, it catches you too. And I should've told you that before now. I should've told you a long time ago instead of just, letting you walk around thinking I'm just some girl."

She finished the last of it, set the cloth aside, and sat back on her heels in front of him, waiting for whatever he'd say, bracing for it even.

He didn't say anything.

He reached out instead and pulled her up onto the bed beside him, arm going around her, and she went stiff for half a second before the exhaustion in her just gave out entirely and she folded into him, face against his chest, careful of the bruising, breathing him in like she'd forgotten how up until that exact moment.

He closed his eyes. Let a long breath out through his nose, slow, the kind of breath a man takes when he's setting something heavy down.

Then he looked at her. Straight on, eyes finding hers in the candlelight, and his jaw worked twice before the words came, each one dragged out separate from the last like they cost him something to produce.

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"You," he said, "are. Mine. Now."

Her breath caught.

"I. Know." He swallowed, kept going, fighting for every word. "Past. Come."

She was already crying by the second sentence, silent, tears just running without any sound behind them, and he reached up with one hand and wiped at her cheek with his thumb, clumsy, before he finished it.

"Leave. To me."

She kissed him before he'd even fully closed his mouth around the last word, hands coming up to either side of his face, and it wasn't gentle, not at first, five years of running and hiding and always being the one who had to be careful pouring itself into it all at once, and he kissed her back just as hard, one hand splayed wide against her back, holding her like something he didn't intend to put down again.

When she finally pulled back she was still crying, though it had gone quiet now, softer, and she pressed her forehead to his and just stayed there a moment, breathing.

"Okay," she whispered. "Okay."

She curled into him after that, careful of his ribs, and within minutes her breathing had gone slow and even against his chest, sleep taking her fast the way it only ever did after something had wrung her all the way out.

He didn't sleep.

Five nights now. He lay there with her weight settled warm against him, her hair spilled dark across his arm, and stared up at the ceiling where a crack ran jagged from one corner to the other, and let his mind work the way it always worked when his body had gone still and his voice had nowhere left to go.

Lyra was the obvious one. Followed Kael in the dark. Showed up crying, desperate, right before the attack. Too convenient, maybe. Too neat.

But that was the trick of it, wasn't it. If it read too neat, it probably wasn't her. He'd seen enough stories back on Earth to know how it usually went. The obvious suspect was rarely the real one. It was always the sweet old woman nobody looked twice at, the one who'd earned everyone's trust so thoroughly nobody thought to ask what she'd spent that trust on.

Elara.

But even that didn't sit right the longer he turned it over. Elara barely left her chair most days. Legs that didn't work right anymore. Hard to picture her hauling herself up onto rooftops in the dead of night, throwing walls of sound hard enough to put a man through brick.

And now Kael. Gone. No body, no blood, nothing but a hole in a shed and a name that didn't belong on any suspect list he'd been building. Kael had grown up in that home. Kael was the one who'd gone to Kaplan in the first place, pushed for someone to look into it, practically dragged this whole thing into motion himself. Men didn't usually build the trap and then walk into the middle of it.

Unless he hadn't been building anything. Unless he'd just been another piece someone else was moving.

A banshee. Weren't those supposed to be women, back where these stories came from. Screaming harbingers, not something that threw walls apart with a wave of a hand. Whatever this thing was, it wasn't behaving like anything he had a name for, and that unsettled him more than the wounds did.

Maybe it wasn't even one of the adults. Maybe it was one of the kids. He turned that thought over slow, distasteful as it felt, because kids made for good villains in half the stories he remembered too, the ones nobody suspected because nobody wanted to.

He wished he still had his phone. Could've looked half of this up in a minute, cross referenced every banshee myth he half remembered from some article he'd skimmed once and forgotten. But that phone was scrap somewhere in a forest a world away, crushed under his own hand months back, and there was no calling any of it up now except what was left rattling around in his head, incomplete and unreliable.

He was still turning it all over, no closer to an answer than when he'd started, when the light through the shutters had gone from black to grey to the pale gold of full morning without him noticing the hours pass.

A knock came at the door. Loud. Insistent.

He blinked, surprised at the daylight, and eased himself out from under Mikaela slow and careful, easing her head down onto the pillow without waking her, and crossed the room bare chested, bruises gone dark and mottled across half his ribs.

He caught the smell before he opened the door. Leather. Metal. Sweat. More than one man, more than several, a whole crowd of it pressed close on the other side of that wood.

He opened it.

A dozen city guards stood crowded in the hallway, armor catching the morning light through the window at the end of the corridor, and the one at the front stepped forward with a set of chains already unspooling from his hand.

"Eto Shapan," the lead guard said. "You are under arrest for the murder of Kael Corver and Lyra Manreal."