Page 23 of Icon and Inferno

The clock on the nightstand, which read 10:30 P.M., was an old-fashioned one, which meant the ticking now sounded overwhelming in the silence of the room. Sydney spent the first hour pacing back and forth, peering through the window at the back alley of the hotel every few cycles.

“The gate’s locked in the back,” Winter said to her on one of the cycles.

“I know,” she muttered.

But she kept checking anyway. She looked at her phone, waiting for a message from Tems, some warning for them to leave, some signal from Sauda. But there was nothing. Claire had gotten Winter’s message, had kept it secret. Now all they could do was hope that the plane would be there for them tomorrow. All they could do was wait. As the night deepened, Sydney ran out of things to check, and her mind settled at last on what she was dreading.

She sat down on the edge of the bed. All she could hear in the silence was the crunch of metal as Niall’s car flipped over, the scream that ripped from her throat as Niall looked at her with a dazed, bloody face, the explosion that threw her off her feet. Her ears still felt like they were ringing from the force of the blast. In the darkness, she felt like the world around her was still spinning, careening out of her control.

“Sydney.”

She realized her eyes were closed, and opened them to see Winter sitting beside her, the weak light from the window painting stripes across him, his face pointed at her in concern.

“Hey,” she said, rubbing her eyes.

“Hey,” he replied.

He didn’t ask if she was okay, and she leaned in his direction, grateful he understood.

He did the same lean, although she wasn’t sure if he was aware of it. Still, neither of them touched shoulders. They were careful to stay apart, their bodies so used to keeping distance between them.

“After I lost my brother,” he said slowly, “I realized that maybe I’d been anticipating losing him my entire life. That was why I felt so afraid every time he left on a trip.”

Sydney studied his face. “Like he might never come back.”

Winter looked at her. “Have you ever missed a person even while they’re still next to you? Like you’re waiting for their absence someday, so you try desperately to hang on to the moment, so much so that you can barely exist in the present with them?”

She knew exactly what he meant. “Yes,” she answered.

He nodded absently, as if his mind were somewhere else. “That was how I felt whenever I was with my brother. Like he was gone already. Like I already knew what would happen to him.”

His words hit true. It was how she’d felt when her mother was still alive, when they’d sit together by the river to watch the freight trains, or take walks together to the grocery store. This will pass, she remembered thinking at the time. She will be gone someday. And the thought would send a pang of missing through her. She’d felt that same fear whenever Niall trained her for a new mission, like that would be the last time they ever spoke. She’d felt it when Niall had announced his retirement, the inevitable realization that, someday, Niall wouldn’t be there for her anymore. And she’d felt it when she and Winter had strolled through Kew Gardens at the end of their last mission together, knowing that their lives were going to take them in opposite directions.

She had spent her entire life missing people who were still beside her.

“I know we’re not alone,” she said softly. “But I feel like it.”

“I know,” Winter replied. Here, in the shadows and highlights of midnight, he looked like someone not entirely real, the glow from the neon signs outside the window painting his skin in a pattern of colors.

“There was nothing we could have done,” he whispered in the silence.

She nodded wordlessly, even though she didn’t quite believe him.

There was nothing she could do to let the world know of Niall’s sacrifice, either. She thought of his biological daughter, who would now never know her father had loved her, whom he had wanted to see the instant he left the agency. Sauda could never tell anyone outside of Panacea that she had loved him, never share her grief over his death. And as for herself—she would have to move on and pretend outwardly that nothing had happened, that she had never known this man. As if he had never existed.

It’s the loneliest job.Sauda’s old words to her echoed in her mind.

It took her another moment to realize that she was finally crying. Tears were dripping down her chin, and her lungs hurt from the squeeze of each silent sob. She reached up to hurriedly wipe the tears away, but they kept coming, and she turned her face away from Winter, embarrassed to let him see her like this. She couldn’t stop. All she could see was Niall’s face during their last meeting, that small, grumpy smile. His freshly shaven face.

Make me proud, kid.

Winter said nothing. Sydney was glad that he knew instinctively to stay back and let her cry. He waited patiently, his face turned down to the carpet. Sydney concentrated on the pain in her lungs, let herself feel the ache of them and the wound in her heart and the weight on her chest. She wiped at her tears again and again. She could barely keep up with them.

“Here,” Winter said gently.

She realized he’d gone to the bathroom and brought back a washcloth for her, still warm from being soaked in hot water. She put it on her face, let it calm her.

She didn’t know how long it took before the tears finally slowed, before she could open her eyes and see clearly again. The stripes of light against Winter had changed. Idly, she realized that they should switch on a lamp.

Sydney turned her eyes back up to him. His hair was rumpled, as if he’d been raking his hands through it, and his gaze seemed tired and yearning. Yearning, always, for something out of reach.

Her heart tugged painfully. She knew that feeling all too well.

She took a deep breath and stared off into the darkness.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He frowned. “For what?”

She didn’t answer right away, because she wasn’t sure. Instead, she turned from him and toward the window, trying to understand why she’d said it.

When she’d been on a job with Tems, when they’d had their brief fling, had she felt this way?

No,she thought automatically. No, that had been different in every sense. They’d had a fling because they were snowed in to their hotel room, she was bored, and he was being charming. It had been fast and careless, something to pass the time. And that was before he’d stranded her overseas.

This… She wasn’t sure what this was. But when she studied Winter’s face, there was a warmth in her chest, an ache in her stomach. There was a lump in her throat when she remembered the words he had blurted out last night.

I have thought about you every single day since London.

“It’s not just a song,” she finally said.

He blinked, then laughed softly. “It’s okay.”

She shook her head. “I think what I mean is—when you agreed to join Panacea, I promised you that I was going to be your partner. Where you go, I go. But you were trying to tell me something, and I refused to listen to you.”

Winter shifted, and for a moment, his expression seemed lost and young. “Look,” he said, “forget everything I said. I shouldn’t have put that on you.”

Sydney hesitated. “There is something about you that scares me, Winter.”

He looked back at her. “Why?” he asked.

She opened her mouth, then closed it again, searching for the right explanation. “My father and I always had a violent relationship,” she began. “He’s not a good man. He hit my mother, hit me and my brother. But one time, someone broke into our home and stole a box of cash that he’d been saving up. It had over twelve hundred dollars in it. I never knew what he was saving it up for, but I saw him stash a few dollars every time he staggered home from a late-night shift. He’d take it out sometimes and count it, and I swear it was the only time I ever saw him genuinely happy. Like that box held something that could change his life.” She paused again. “When it was stolen, my dad went sprinting down the street, as if he might be able to catch the thief, who’d long gone. Then he went missing for several days and came home dead drunk.”

The image reappeared in her mind of her father staggering away from the house, his figure illuminated by a streetlight against cracked pavement before he was swallowed by the darkness beyond.

Winter searched her gaze. “I’m sorry,” he said.

She looked out the window. “Never in my life had I ever sympathized with my father. But I felt sorry for him that night. I’d saved up some money from my part-time jobs that summer, so I got it from my room and went to him and tried to give it to him. I told him he could have it, if it’d cheer him up.”

Winter stayed quiet as she took a deep breath.

“He started yelling at me. Took the money from my hands and threw it back in my face. Accused me of trying to humiliate him, like he couldn’t make his own money, asking me why I spied on him, why I knew the money was missing. Said someone stole it because I must have mentioned it in public somewhere. Said I was good for nothing.” She paused, then lifted her shirt sleeve all the way up to her shoulder. There, where her joints met, was a round scar in the shape of a cigarette burn. “My eye was swollen shut for a week after that, and I told myself it was my fault. My fault, for opening my heart like that. And so after my mother died, after I left for Panacea, I closed it tight. It made me stronger, you know?”

“I know,” he said softly.

Her eyes stayed on the cement wall outside their window, the faint sounds from the night market still echoing out in the dark. “Close your heart,” she murmured, “and no one can tell you you’re worthless.”

He looked away, his gaze distant, lost in his own thoughts.

“You’re not,” he said to the window. “You must know that.”

“I do,” she answered. “But… sometimes, late at night, the voice in my head tells me otherwise.” She swallowed again, focusing on the words struggling to come out. “Winter, I’m here because I’m trying to prove something to myself. What it is, I don’t know. Maybe that I deserve to be here, that I can survive without being tethered to anyone else, no matter where I am or what trouble I’m in. That I don’t need anyone. And then I met you.”

She chanced a look at him and found him watching her patiently.

“I don’t know why listening to you sing that song scared me so much,” she said. “Like there’s a rope attached to you that’s tightening around my wrist. I’m afraid you’re going to tug me into the water, and I’m not going to be able to come back.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Because I can’t swim,” she answered quietly. “That’s what I’m afraid of, Winter. I don’t know how to follow you.”

“Then don’t,” he replied.

She searched his gaze. “What?”

He moved closer to her, until she could feel the warmth radiating from him. His body brushed against hers. “I’ll come to you.”

She looked up into his face and saw the answer there, the realization that she was bound to him whether she wanted to be or not.

“Winter,” she murmured hoarsely, swallowing, terrified. “Winter, I don’t understand how you can live with an open heart. Everyone hurts you. Why don’t you protect yourself better? Put up walls?”

“What if protecting yourself kills you in the end?” he said. “What if the thing your heart needs most is right on the other side of that wall? I know it’s dangerous to expose yourself to everything the world wants to throw at it, to everyone who wants to take something for themselves. But I still leave it open, just in case something beautiful comes in.”

She didn’t believe his words, not entirely, but a lump rose in her throat nevertheless, lodging there, threatening to choke off her words.

“There are those who see your worth, Winter,” she whispered back. “Not for gain. Not for money. Just for you.”

He searched her gaze, and for a moment, she thought about looking away again, turning her back, and asking him to leave.

“Not everyone you love will leave you behind,” he whispered.

She felt herself leaning toward him, felt him leaning down to her, felt her hand touch his sleeve as he wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her closer. The tether between them pulled taut, and she felt the pain of it in her chest as surely as if her lungs had squeezed. But she couldn’t break away now. She didn’t want to.

And then he was kissing her.

He pressed his hands against the sides of her face and kissed her deeply. She didn’t know what was happening, didn’t understand it, was too afraid to disturb it. Her mind buzzed with something akin to panic.

She pulled at his shirt’s buttons, impatiently undoing each one. He was doing the same, tugging off her suit jacket and loosening the collar of her shirt, pulling its tails out from her trousers. She let him slide the shirt off her shoulders and shrugged it away. His shirt was open now, too—she had pulled it down his arms to reveal his bare chest.

His kisses moved from her mouth to her jaw to her neck. One of his hands unhooked her bra and ran along the smooth skin of her back. She felt feverishly hot against his lips.

“What are we doing?” he murmured in her ear. “Syd—what are we doing?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered, her head tilted back, eyes closed, a small noise escaping her as his lips worked along her neck. “I don’t care.”

There was a warning buzzing somewhere far in her mind, telling her that this would be a mistake, that they would both regret it, that it could end their friendship, this fragile partnership. It felt like stolen time. Wrong, illicit, unbearable. But she didn’t want to care about that right now. The door was closed; their room was silent; no one else was here. And right now, all she wanted was to forget about everything gone wrong in the world. All she wanted was to indulge this fear in her chest, give in to the thoughts that had been tugging at her heart for a year.

All she wanted was him.

So they tore frantically at each other, leaving a heap of clothes on the floor before he pushed her against the fabric of the bedframe, her arms wrapped around his neck, his hands gripping her bare hips. Her breaths came shallow and rapid against his ear. He smelled like hints of cologne and sweat and champagne.

She met his gaze. His eyes were hooded with desire, so searing that it sent a thrill of fear through her.

“What are we doing?” she whispered again, echoing his words from earlier.

“What do you want me to do?” he rasped back.

A wild recklessness surged in her chest. “Surprise me.”

His eyes looked dark with want. He pressed his lips against her ear.

“Stay still.”

She did.

He kissed her jawline gently, then her collarbone, her shoulder, then trailed down her body, making her skin tingle with each contact. His lips studied her every softness, slowed down and lingered wherever she shivered with pleasure, worked reverently on her until she arched, shuddering, a small cry emerging from her throat. She could tell that he had been with plenty of others before, that he knew exactly what to do and how to do it, and it left her in a heady fog of both envy and ecstasy.

“Winter,” she murmured, meeting his gaze with her hazy one.

“Tell me,” he whispered. “Do you like that?”

She closed her eyes. “Yes.”

“Do you like this?”

A shiver rippled through her body. “Yes,” she gasped.

“This?”

She sucked in her breath sharply. “Winter,” she whispered, her voice breaking. “Winter, I can’t—”

“Then don’t,” he whispered back.

Now she was seeing stars, could barely tell the difference between the fuzzy contour of his body and the darkness of the night. What he was doing to her made it too difficult for her to gather her thoughts, so she gave up and gave in, let her body go.

Pull me into the water with you,she thought. Just this once.

She had no concept of how much time had passed, whether they had been like this for seconds or hours. Eventually, she realized she had wrapped her arms around his upper back and pulled him down to her, that she was kissing his lips hungrily, their bare skin sticking. She raked her hands through his damp hair, memorized the sound of their bodies together and his gasps and the whisper of her name on his lips. He was trembling just as much as she was, and in the dimness, she could make out the ache in his gaze, could see herself in his dark irises.

“Sydney,” he whispered feverishly against her neck as he moved. “Sydney. Let me stay.”

She couldn’t tell exactly what he meant by that, and perhaps he didn’t know, either. Perhaps he was too caught up in the moment, feeling as intoxicated as she had, saying things he didn’t quite mean, feeling things he couldn’t quite articulate. Maybe he wouldn’t even remember by morning. But he whispered it again, nevertheless.

Let me stay.

She pressed her lips against his cheek and murmured something in response. She knew he’d heard her, knew that it must have pierced his heart as surely as it had pierced her own, but he didn’t say anything. Maybe that was for the best.

Keep me in your songs.

Afterward, Sydney lay awake, studying the patterns of faint light against the walls. Her gaze went to the boy beside her, his mess of black hair fanning across the pillow. His eyes were closed, his breathing slow and even, but he wasn’t asleep, because his hand was still running idly along the curve of her side, sending pleasant tingles through her body. He looked serene and delicate, vulnerable in a way that she found heartbreaking. She let herself take him in without thinking, savoring these few, precious minutes, admiring his every exquisite detail.

It was strange, how she could both remember everything that they had just done—and yet recall it only through a frame of fog, as if she’d had the most vivid dream of her life.

She watched him for a while, then reached over and brushed his hair gently back with a finger.

He stirred at her motion, a quiet murmur in his throat, and his eyelids fluttered. A second later, she found herself looking into a pair of dark eyes.

They said nothing to each other. Perhaps they were both too afraid.

Instead, Winter put his hand next to where hers rested against the sheets. His fingers brushed hers, just slightly. She echoed his movement, putting her own hand so that their fingers just barely overlapped, and gave in to this warmth, the pull of him that she couldn’t resist, the promise of something that could be magical, if only.

If only, if only.She felt his fingers move against hers, the gentlest of caresses, the kind of touch that passed between those who trusted each other the most—and wished with all her heart that she could just stay in this pocket of time.

Safe.Her mind buzzed, always alert for the danger in letting her guard down. She pulled her hand away, her breath shallow. It took everything in her to turn her face away from him.

He leaned away, too. The moment ended—his hand pulled away, and he straightened without a word in the bed, sitting on the edge with his arms propped up on either side. She stared at his smooth back, studied the contours of his muscles.

Then she rose, too, and began grabbing her clothes off the floor.

Neither uttered a word. There was simply nothing else to add.

We can’t.

The decision hung in the air, keeping them from leaning in again, from reaching for each other’s hands, from looking at each other.

They dressed in silence.

As Sydney passed him to head to the bathroom, she paused to look at him.

“Winter,” she began, then faltered.

He took a step toward her, wrapped an arm around the small of her back, and rested his forehead gently against hers. His eyes were closed, his brow furrowed. He was so warm.

“I know,” he murmured to her.

Then he stepped away without kissing her, and she continued on to the bathroom, and neither looked back at each other.

An hour before dawn, an alert came from Tems.

Minutes later, he was knocking on their door. When Sydney opened it, she saw him standing there, breathless, eyes narrowed. He rushed in past her.

“Three twenty,” he muttered.

Winter gave Sydney a questioning look.

“Someone’s on our tail,” she whispered to him. She turned to Tems. “Who is it?”

“Come with me,” he said. “Leave the keys. We’re not coming back.”

Sydney knew better than to question it. She and Winter followed Tems out into the hall, closing the door behind them with a soft click. Then they made their way down the corridor to a window that overlooked the front of the hotel.

They stayed in the hall’s shadows. Tems nodded down at the street.

At first glance, it was just another passerby, hurrying off to some early morning work at the markets—an older lady dressed in a linen shirt and traditional pants.

“Her?” she whispered.

“I saw her pass by fifteen minutes earlier,” he said grimly. “Could be state eyes, could be CIA. Could be a spy for Rosen’s killers.”

Sydney’s blood ran cold. It was something she always checked for when she was out in the field—if a passerby was really just a common pedestrian, she would never see them again. If there was a reappearance of a pedestrian, though—well. She was being followed.

Sydney looked away from the window and headed toward the stairwell.

“We need to go. Now.”