Page 187 of Slashed Bonds

I swallow.

The lump’s there. It’s always there. I swallow it the way I’ve swallowed it a thousand times and it goes down and sits in my chest like a stone.

Then I see the paper.

On the ground ahead. Ten feet past the firefighter’s arm, white against the black grass, held down by a rock the size of a fist in a place where no rock should be. Not blown there. Placed. The officers coordinating the trucks are off to the left, shouting over the roar, and nobody’s looking at a piece of paper.

I walk to it.

The firefighter says my name, or a word like it, and I don’t stop. I crouch. I move the rock. I pick the paper up and it’s warm from the fire and it’s folded once, and I open it, and I read it slowly, because the letters are moving in the light.

The winner takes it all, right?

You were warned. Those who don’t listen deserve to burn.

Should we hurt those fuckers next?

My bottom lip’s between my teeth. I notice that. I notice my hand, too, the one holding the paper, and the way it’s begun to shake, a thin tremor that runs up into my wrist and makes the page shiver, and I grip it tighter until the paper creases, and I read the last line.

Drop this shit. Disappear in the pit of snakes you deserve to die in. Or we’ll teach you a lesson… a second time.

It’s obvious who.

There’s no mystery in it. No puzzle to solve, no name to find. Four men in Halbrook who taught me the first lesson in a boardroom and a car and a parking lot, who have a burner phone bought with cash and a tower that puts them where I know they are, who sat in a room with Naomi Vance and watched the footage of a window and laughed. They watched tonight. From somewhere, on a screen, they watched a spin on one blade and a top corner and a forehead kiss, and they got in a car.

A second time. They’re promising me a second time.

And what hums through me isn’t fear.

That’s the thing that pisses me off. I stand in the light of my own house burning with a threat in my hand and the thing in my blood isn’t terror. It’s frustration. A fury so clean it’s almost cold. Because they had me. For five years, they had me in a shed on the edge of the world, invisible, a shadow, and they were satisfied. And then they saw me under lights. In my element. The one place I’m whole. And the first thing they thought to do was reach out and try to break it again.

Not me. It. The thing I had tonight. They want to burn that too.

Lips touch my neck.

I didn’t hear him come up. The fire’s loud and I was somewhere else, and now there’s a mouth at the side of my throat, warm, soft, pressed over the ink and the scar beneath it, and it sends a different kind of shrill through me than the one the paper did. A pulse. A spread of warmth from the point of contact outward through my shoulders and down my arms, the kind of warmth that touch hasn’t given me in longer than I can measure.

I look up. Back.

And Nikolai’s above me, looking down.

The fire’s on his face. It makes a lantern of him, the orange climbing one side and leaving the other in shadow, and his eyes catch it and throw it back, the two shades of them gone to amber and coal. There are freckles across his nose and the top of his cheek, under the vitiligo, that I’ve never seen in any light but this one. The platinum side of his hair is standing higher than the black side where he’s dragged a hand through it. His brows are knitted. Down and together, the face of a man who’s already working a problem that’s been troubling all of us, who’s three moves ahead of the paper in my hand.

Then his hand comes up.

To my face. His thumb moves along my cheekbone, slow, and comes away wet, and I understand with a jolt what it’s wiping.

I’m crying. When did I start. I didn’t feel it start.

Tears. Pooling and falling, running down my face in the heat, and I hadn’t grasped a single one of them. This was supposed to be the night. The celebration. Drinking, chaos, a bed with three men in it, and instead I’m standing in a field watching the place I called home turn to ash with a promise of violence in my fist.

“We moved everything.”

He whispers it. Against my temple. And the whisper is what tells me.

The depth of it. The flatness. A voice that’s gone somewhere down below where Nikolai keeps his feelings and come back without them, and I know that voice. I’ve heard it in a lobby, in a flooded ring, through a locked door with a chair on the floor.

It’s not Nikolai. It’s Nik.