Page 47 of The Silent War

I thought about the yacht. About the reunion. The shape of a room we hadn’t walked into yet and the number of people who would think they had a right to speak our names there. I thought about how many exits it had. Fear doesn’t make me smaller. It makes lists.

A nurse opened the door two inches and saw my face and decided her question could wait. Good. I didn’t want to speak to anyone who wasn’t her.

Bastion’s jaw flexed once. “He’ll try again at dawn.”

“He can try.” I checked the time. “He’ll find the pedestrian bridge closed. Maintenance.”

“What about the helicopter?”

“Fog advisories.” I looked at the window. The fog advisories were mine. “No pilot lands in it unless he wants his license stripped.”

“Kind,” he said.

“I’m merciful,” I said.

We stood there like that—one hand each on her.

Fear had less room with the lights coming back. Anger didn’t leave. It never does.

I checked her IV again. Checked her oxygen. Checked that the line in my phone marked ALEXANDER stayed gray.

“Luca,” Bastion said, not looking at me. “If they try to move her, you’ll have to stop me from killing someone.”

“I already have,” I said.

He nodded once. Understood.

Her hand warmed more under mine. I felt my heartbeat show up in my fingertips. Stupid, but it felt like proof.

“Angel,” Bastion said, “We’re here.”

I didn’t say the word. It isn’t mine. Mine are numbers and doors and cities turning their lights back on because I told them to.

Still, I leaned closer. “You scared me,” I said in a voice no one else gets. “Don’t make a habit of it.”

Her mouth twitched like a dream had a sense of humor. It was nothing. It was everything.

She was okay.

We weren’t, not really, not if anyone told us to walk out that door and leave her in a room without our hands on her. But tonight no one was walking in with the power to ask.

Alexander would arrive in the morning to a city that had chosen a side while he slept.

Bastion kept stroking her leg. I kept her hand in mine. The lights kept returning like a promise I had written and enforced. And for the first time since the buzz in my pocket, I let myself breathe, all the way in and I didn’t feel like I was stealing air from a future that didn’t exist yet.

Chapter Seventeen

EMILIA

I woke to find Bastion in the chair beside my bed, as if he’d been sitting there all night and never thought to move.

The shadow on his jaw made him look harsher, older. The tattoos, the darkness in his eyes. His knuckles broken bloody. By the looks of it, he hadn’t changed. I wondered if he had left the hospital at all.

For a second, I thought I was still there—in the car, the rain, his voice cutting through the panic. Look at me. Don’t close your eyes.

Then the IV tugged against my wrist when I shifted, and I remembered where I was.

Alive at the hospital, recovering because of him.