by Skye Warren
He nods. “Did you love him?”
I feared Leader Allen. I despised him. In a sick way maybe there was love too, in the form of necessity. The way you love air, unthinking, because you need it to live. I didn’t fight him when he taught me the divine worship he wanted. Because I had no choice? Or because I was brainwashed? It doesn’t matter. “I don’t regret what happened. It gave me her.”
He leaves the room, and I follow, shutting the door carefully so we don’t disturb her. I’m already schooling my mind to accept whatever happens next. Whatever form of payment Luca desires. It’s not so very different from Leader Allen. I need Luca to survive just as much.
In the luggage I find the white plastic box with FIRST AID written on it. “Let me take care of those cuts for you.”
He gives me a strange look. “They don’t hurt.”
That seems impossible, but then maybe a man as tough as him doesn’t feel pain like regular people. “It’ll get infected.”
After a hesitation he nods. I find a swab of alcohol and tear it from the packet. He stiffens when I approach, and I freeze. It’s like walking up to a dog who’s already bitten, who’ll do it again. But he doesn’t resist when I step close.
My hand reaches up to his neck.
He lowers his head.
The alcohol must sting against the open wounds, but I’m the one who sucks in a breath. Remembered pain. His blood drenches the little square cloth quickly. I work through two more packets before I’m done. He must bleed every time he fights.
“Who does this for you at home? When you fight in the ring?”
His voice has gone low and rough. “No one.”
This close I can feel his breaths against my temple, his heat warming my front. The apartment isn’t that much warmer than out there, especially outside the bedroom, but he feels like a furnace. When I turn away, my breast brushes against his arm. Embarrassment heats my cheeks as I find some antibacterial cream.
He stood still for the sting of the alcohol, but he pulls back from the soothing cream. It surprises me more than him when I give him a stern look. “Hold still.”
His lip curls up in amusement. “Yes, ma’am.”
I use a cotton swab to dab the cream on his cuts. “Thank you.”
He looks at me through slitted eyes, almost slumberous. “Why are you thanking me?”
“You saved me.”
He makes a coarse sound. “You really have no idea, do you?”
I turn away, fussing with the little tube of cream. “What?”
“How many men I’d kill for you.”
My eyes go wide. It’s a horrible measurement, the number of deaths that would be on his hands, the amount of violence he’d commit. And yet it’s a strange comfort too, knowing he would do that for me.
I throw away the bloody pieces and pack up the first-aid kit, using the excuse not to meet his eyes. “When will we go?”
“Tomorrow. Well, today. When you’ve had a chance to rest. I’ll come to the door at noon.”
Then I have to look at him. “Where will you go until then?”
“I’ll sleep in my car.”
“It’s freezing out there!”
“That’s where I slept last night.”
I try not to think about him outside my apartment while I didn’t know. How long has he been in Alaska, waiting for me, watching? And why does the thought make me feel safe instead of scared? “You can stay here.”
His eyes narrow. “With you?”
“I mean it’s nothing comfortable. Just the floor. But there’s a blanket. And basic heating.”
I’m not offering a blanket or heating. His car would probably be more comfortable on both counts. I’m offering my body. Maybe I should fight him, but I’m about to put the life of myself and my daughter into his hands. I want him to be as sympathetic to us as possible.
He studies me. Does he see my fear? My desire to please him? My mind is a mass of scripture notes. Already I’m trying to think of what he’d want. It was one thing when I planned to run away. Now that I’m hitching our fates to his, it’s in my best interest to make him happy.
I dig out the blanket I sleep on, which was rolled up for travel, from my suitcase. Only when I throw it out over the carpet do I realize how pathetic it looks. Sleeping on the floor seems strange to most people, but it’s all I’ve ever done. The few times we stopped at a motel, I could never get comfortable on a bed. I ended up on the floor by the end of the night.
“I hope this is okay,” I whisper, flushed.
His gaze roams past the sad makeshift bed to the corner, where the carpet curls up. To the ceiling, where leaks have turned the white plaster black. “It’s not okay,” he says gruffly.
My hands clench together. “I know Delilah deserves better.”
His eyes narrow. “And you.”
I’m not sure what I deserve, but it can’t be good. By the rules of Harmony Hills I’d go to hell for leaving, for working in a bar. And of course for helping them fight Leader Allen. And by the rules of this society, what little I’ve been able to quilt together from scraps of conversations, what Leader Allen did to me makes me a freak. I don’t belong anywhere.
All I can manage is a shrug.
He gestures to the bed. “What do you think is going to happen tonight?”
That’s a loaded question. I don’t want to whisper my fears aloud. I’m afraid I might be right. “Whatever you want?”
My voice curls up at the end, turning it into a question.
He grunts. “Get underneath the blanket.”
This part I’m used to. It wasn’t so cold in Harmony Hills, but I know how to lie on my back, how to squeeze my eyes shut. I know how to stay completely silent no matter what he does.
There’s a soft rush of air as he lowers himself next to me. I feel his size like a looming shadow in the room, as large as a mountain. I’m a trickling valley stream, about to be crushed. Except he doesn’t lay his body over mine. He lies next to me. He pulls me close, until I’m half on top of his body, my head pillowed by his chest.
“Sleep,” he says.
My ear rests right by his heart. I can hear the steady thump thump. In contrast my heart beat’s a mile a minute. My eyes are wide open, looking at the plain white apartment wall. A wall I’ve seen a thousand times but never like this. Never cradled in the arms of a man who could crush me.
I’ve slept with a man before. The proof of that is in the bedroom.
But I’ve never slept with a man before.
I bite my lip. “How—”
“Go to sleep, little bird.”
It’s impossible. He smells like the outside, like ice and pine—with a metallic undercurrent that I think might be blood. His chest moves steadily with his breath. It’s like resting my head on the ocean.
And I never sleep well. It’s not the carpet that bothers me. It’s softer than the whitewashed wood slats in Harmony Hills. The memories haunt me most at night, when my hands aren’t busy, when my mind is still. That’s when I remember what Leader Allen did to me when everyone thought we were praying.
Luca’s hand moves over my hair, brushing softly, petting. The rhythm combines with the motion of his body, lulling me into a kind of trance. His muscles are brick hard. They shouldn’t be comfortable at all, but he’s hot. Burning. A rare comfort in a cold frontier.
I press my face into him, my very own pink and purple pillow. My stuffed unicorn in the form of a hard-muscled man. My hand clenches a fistful of T-shirt, holding him there.
“Shh,” he murmurs. “I’m watching over you. I’ll keep you safe.”
That’s the last thing I hear before the night falls away, replaced only with deep, dark waters. They swirl around me in an endless tide, back and forth, dreamless and warm.
Chapter Nine
Most mornings when I wake up, Delilah is still asleep. Even with the sunlight coming in through the blinds, that girl can sleep. I can’t complain because she’s all smiles when she’s awake.
If I’ve had a particularly rough night at the Last Stop, I might sleep in, which means I wake up to a snuggly body on top of me, chubby fingers grasping my hair.
This morning I wake up to the distant sounds of cheerful babbling.
A low voice responds, maybe asking a question.
More babbling, this time with a happy squeal as punctuation.
Rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I follow the sounds into the kitchen. What I find makes me blink, more confused than ever. There’s a picnic happening on the cracked caramel linoleum, a thin blanket spread out. Luca sits across from Delilah, him cross-legged, her little legs in front of her. Between them is a sleeve of crackers, an open jar of peanut butter, and a sippy cup.
“Do you want another one?” Luca asks.
Delilah responds with a string of syllables that probably mean yes, along with several other thoughts. She claps to illustrate her point. Or maybe to get him to hurry.
He doesn’t hurry. He takes his time with a butter knife in the jar, spreading thick, creamy peanut butter onto the cracker, making it completely even. “Take a drink,” he says, holding it out.
Her black curls shimmer under the kitchen light as she shakes her head. “No.”
That’s one of the few words she knows. And though I’ve never seen a more cheerful child, she also has a stubborn streak. She will say no plenty of times throughout the day, albeit cheerfully.
“One little sip.”
Another string of baby talk, ending with a very clear, “Water.”
“Water isn’t my favorite either,” he says reasonably. “But it’s all I could find right now. Maybe they’ll have milk on the plane.”
With a sigh Delilah picks up the sippy cup for a brief sip.
Luca hands over the cracker, and she munches away. My heart has turned into something less muscle, more balloon—expanding, stretching beyond what I’d known I was capable of.
Seeing such a large, brutal man, his bruises even more prominent the morning after, at ease with my one-year-old daughter does strange things to my insides. There’s guilt that she’s had to grow up without a father. There’s fear that this precious light will somehow be extinguished.
And worst of all, something like hope aches in my chest. Because Luca is so unbearably gentle in this moment. I hadn’t known he could be like that. Hadn’t dared imagine it.
As if sensing me, Luca looks up and meets my gaze. “Good morning.”
The words catch in my throat. All I can do is nod.
He gestures to Delilah. “I hope this is okay. I didn’t want to wake you.”
“It’s perfect,” I whisper.
Carefully, so as not to disturb the picnic blanket, Luca stands. His body unfolds larger than I remembered, as if he’s built for different rooms. Barracks instead of a crappy apartment. A gladiator ring instead of the parking lot of the Last Stop. He’s a soldier. A fighter.
“The car’s waiting outside,” he says more quietly, glancing back at Delilah to make sure she’s still occupied. She’s given up on the cracker and is sticking her fingers directly in the jar.
“I’ll just be a minute to pack what’s left. You should have woken me up.”
He frowns. “You didn’t get enough sleep as it is.”
My body agrees with him, reminding me that I had a long shift last night, the small aches and subtle bruises pointing out the places where Jimmy John grabbed me before Luca stepped in. “I’m fine,” I say. “Whatever we need to do to get Delilah to safety.”
His eyes narrow. “You’ll be able to sleep on the plane.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
The sound he makes raises the hair on my neck. “Someone needs to take care of you, little bird. If you aren’t going to do it, then I sure as hell will.”
I flinch. “Don’t swear in front of her. Please.”
“She doesn’t mind.”
My cheeks flush with warmth, a mixture of anger and embarrassment. I know that people swear out in the world. Adults use words like hell and damn. It doesn’t mean anything. But I can’t shake the twinge of fear I feel every time I hear them any more than I can cut my hair. I’m too well trained. I’m Leader Allen’s creature, even now that he’s dead.
Luca’s expression softens. “I’ll try not to swear.”
I expected him to fight me to the death on this. How does a man like him take orders from someone like me? It doesn’t make sense. He could have insulted me, called me names. He could have sworn a blue streak, and as long as he held the key to Delilah’s safety, I would’ve had to bear it.
Instead he’s given in, leaving me disarmed and off balance. “Thank you.”
“I followed you from city to city, tracking you until I found you in that stink hole they call the Last Stop. How the hell—” He shakes his head, looking bewildered. “How did you survive in a place like that?”
Every word feels like a blow. Every touch I couldn’t control rips at my soul. It was the hardest thing I ever had to do—and the easiest. I glance at Delilah, who has now turned the peanut butter jar upside down and created a cracker tower on top. “She makes everything possible.”
He glances back at her. “Yeah. I think I’m starting to understand that.”
I can’t help but ask. “How did you track me?”
“That long hair,” he says, laughing softly. “Bread crumbs wherever you go.”
I manage not to flinch, but it still feels like a slap. It’s a weakness, this hair. It’s a weakness that I still feel beholden to all the tenets I was taught as a child. They were drilled into me. Literally written into my skin. I can’t forget them any more than I can become a different person.
“Will you cut it?”
“Of course not,” he says softly. “It’s beautiful.”
Awareness sinks in. “And it’s part of the trap. The bread crumbs.”
His eyes darken as he studies me. “Everywhere I went, people remembered your hair. That was the first thing, what people notice the first time they meet you.”
“I’m not very good at hiding,” I whisper.
“And then they all noticed something else. The way you brought soup to the elderly woman next door even though you’re a single mother, with barely enough money to survive. How you fed the cats in the neighborhood until there was a damned—” He shakes his head, an abbreviated apology for swearing. “There was a buffet outside your back door. How you are always the first to give and the last person to take. Yes, you were the worst fucking—the worst at hiding, because you never stop helping. Even after what that monster did to you, you never stopped caring.”
Chapter Ten
I take refuge in the ordinary tasks I need to do—rolling up Delilah’s sleep things and then mine. Washing the peanut butter off her face and brushing her two teeth. It’s easier to focus on ordinary tasks than to think about what Luca said to me.
But his words are like a seed, and every moment that passes, it burrows a little deeper into the soil of my soul. There was water all along, a strange hope, a wistfulness that I could be something more than Sarah Elizabeth. That’s why I called myself Beth when I left Harmony Hills, but that’s just a name. Not a person.
I might be stronger than I thought. Might be memorable for more than just my long hair. At least Luca seems to think so—which is the most compelling realization of all. He sees me as more than my body.
Trucks are common in Alaska, with snow tires at this time of year. That’s what I’m expecting when I go outside. Instead I find a string of three sleek black SUVs, a man in a suit standing beside one of them. These aren’t limousines; these are their tougher, more protective cousins.
Inside the seats are covered in butter-soft beige leather, wood enamel along the door.
The pink car seat from my car, the one I left at the Last Stop, now sits in the middle of a wide back seat. Delilah clambers into her spot with relative ease, as if we normally use a car with low ambient lighting and a minifridge.
I buckle her in, feeli
ng a little dazed. I think Luca might take one of the other SUVs—why do we need three of them? But he steps into the car after me, shutting us inside.
Absently I dig in my bag for a set of plastic rings, which Delilah prefers for car rides. She begins to teethe on them immediately, making delicate baby grunting sounds.
Luca sits in the forward seats, facing me, his expression enigmatic.
“Where did these come from?” I finally ask, unable to stop myself.
“After what happened last night, I called in reinforcements. I couldn’t be sure whether those fuckers—those men would have relatives wanting revenge. I made sure we were covered for the ride to the airport.”
I can’t imagine the expense involved in getting these armed men, these glossy SUVs, out into the middle of nowhere. The newest car I’ve seen in weeks is a decade old, its back bumper torn off. This is a hard-scrabble place, which is a backward solace for me.
It’s always reminded me of home.
The relief I feel at being safe is greater, though. I can’t know what will happen next. Being bait for a man who’s been indoctrinated by a murderer and abuser is hardly a safe destination. But as long as Delilah is alive, I don’t care what happens to me.
Someone needs to take care of you, little bird. If you aren’t going to do it, then I sure as hell will.
Luca’s words come back to me in a rush of illicit pleasure. I can’t deny that I like the idea of him taking care of me. Isn’t that what he’s doing? Even though he scares me, he’s helping me protect Delilah. And he’s using me to complete his orders from Ivan Tabakov. It’s not a purely altruistic goal, nothing so special as love, but it’s something. More than I’ve had before.
He remains quiet on the drive to the airport, only occasionally taking a phone call. From his terse replies, he’s still coordinating our trip to Tanglewood.
“Is the plane ready?” he asks.
Someone answers on the other end, sounding brusque.
“I don’t fucking—I don’t care,” he says. “We’re taking off in an hour either way, and your other client can go and… Well, they can just deal with it.”
I have to smile at him, my throat a little tight, eyes too watery to be normal. It’s the same way I felt watching him at the kitchen-floor picnic, this fighter turned soft by one sweet little girl.
