Page 26 of To Clutch a Razor (Curse Bearer #2)
AN AIRPLANE MOVIE
Niko pays for their tickets home. They sit together on the plane, all three of them in a row, with Dymitr in the middle seat.
Ala waits until after the meal has come and gone and Niko has fallen asleep against the window to take the book of curses out of her bag.
She sets it on Dymitr’s tray table like it’s an old magazine.
He stares down at it, gray eyes wide.
He’s bruised. On his jaw, around his eye, on his cheek.
His lip is split, too. She hates to look at those wounds, knowing he endured all of that because he refused to give her up to his grandmother and his mother.
When she thinks about that, she gets an uncomfortable feeling in her throat like she swallowed a grapefruit whole.
“How did you…” He looks up at her. “ Where —”
“You were very insistent that only you and Elza knew about the bathroom hiding place, so when the book wasn’t there, I figured she had found it and moved it,” Ala says.
“And last night, when we were dragging our broken selves through the woods, I saw the fort and I felt…” She taps her temple. “That Knight magic thing.”
“Brilliant,” he says breathlessly.
“Your sister found me there.”
That startles him. His head jerks up.
“She knew it was really you, last night,” Ala says. “I asked her to let me keep the book so it couldn’t be used to hurt you.”
“And?” he asks, his voice soft.
“And she let me go. I think… there’s hope for her. Just a little sliver of it, but… some.”
Dymitr’s eyes are bright. He takes the book and slides it into his backpack.
He’s zipping it back up and pushing it under the seat in front of him when Ala finally works up the courage to say, “There’s some things I need to say to you before I lose my voice to that wi ? a for a few days.
The first is that I misled you. I told you I came here to help you, and that was mostly a lie—I came here to kill her. Joanna.”
Dymitr doesn’t react. Doesn’t move at all, in fact—just stares at her, waiting.
“I’ve been having nightmares that replay everything the curse showed me. Especially about her. I thought if she was dead, I would get some peace. And I thought, because I’d seen so many memories of Knights, I knew how to fight them.” She closes her eyes. Swallows hard. “But none of that was true.”
She dreamed about Joanna last night, in fact.
The same memory, playing again. She woke with the same trembling in her hands, and realized she’d been thinking of the aftermath of the curse as a puzzle to be solved.
If she could just get the letters in the right place, she would be free from it.
But there’s no puzzle. Only a tangle. A knot that will take a lifetime to untie.
“The second thing I want to say is,” she says, “I—I’m sorry. I know how much you loved your grandmother, and that you only had to do that to her because I couldn’t manage to do it myself. And now I’ll always be the one you did that for, and… I’m sorry.”
Dymitr seizes her hand. His grip is warm and strong.
“Never… never say that to me again,” he says, quiet but insistent.
Ala wipes her tears away with her fingers.
“What you will always be to me now,” he says, “is my sister, who I love and want to be safe. Understand?”
Their hands are clasped over the narrow metal armrest.
Ala nods. A garbled voice speaks over the intercom, warning them about upcoming turbulence. A man in a hooded sweatshirt squeezes past Ala’s seat in the aisle. The intensity between them passes, though Ala still feels unsteady, like she’s about to scream or sob or laugh out loud.
“Want a chip?” Dymitr says, and it should be strange that he’s still holding her hand, but it isn’t. It feels nice, instead.
“Are you referring to the hardened, salted paste of your preferred airport snack?” she says. “Because I don’t really think they qualify as ‘chips.’”
He grins at her—as much as he can, anyway, without reopening the split in his lip.
She leans her head on his shoulder, and he turns on a movie, and she thinks that if she’s going to spend her life untangling all this pain, at least she has someone she cares about to do it with.
At least she has him.