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"I don't know. I've had eleven years to figure it out." I look down at the word under her hand. "Maybe the praying. Maybe she was the first one who didn't beg me. I didn't understand it then. I told myself it was a mistake and I never made it again."

"And then the ledger."

"Six years ago the old man had a stroke. Not a bad one. He was in the hospital in Alexandria four days, and the afternoon they brought him home, the family sent me into the big house to get papers out of his desk for the lawyer." My throat does something I don't expect, and I wait for it to pass. "The book was in the bottom drawer. I'd never seen it. I opened it because it was old and I was curious. I found the year I was four."

Evie's hand moves from my chest to my face.

"Rose Harlowe. Age twenty-two. Offense, Refused to give up the child. Handled, R. Harlowe. Witnessed, and a name I didn't know yet. And the last three words written across all the columns." I say them the way they were written. "Cleansed. Witnessed. Sanctified."

"They killed her," she breathes, "for keeping you."

"She wouldn't hand me over. She wanted to take me and leave. So he took her down under the old jail, and then he took me, and he made me into the thing that stood at the gate." My voice has gone rough. I don't bother fixing it. "I killed nine of them that night. You know that part. What you don't know is that when it was over and I walked into the swamp, I sat down on a cypress knee in the dark and I waited for it to feel like something, and it didn't. For six years it hasn't felt like anything. Until last night in that church."

She looks at me for a long time, kneeling in the ash with her palm on my cheek.

Then she leans forward and puts her mouth on my chest.

She starts at the top. Her lips touch the S of SACRED, over my left collarbone, and she kisses it the way you'd kiss a burn, gently, and then drags her mouth across the rest of the word letter by letter. I feel her breath on the scar tissue, where the nerves are dead and alive at once, and it goes through me like a wire pulled tight. She moves down. Her tongue traces WEAPON across my breastbone, slow, following each groove the razor made. My hands hang useless at my sides. I don't know where to put them. I don't know how to breathe.

She reaches CLEANSED. She kisses it harder, open-mouthed, down over my ribs, and her teeth close gently on the edge of the C, not hard enough to hurt, just enough that I know she's there.

She looks up at me with her mouth against my skin.

"They made you a weapon."

"And?"

"I want you anyway."

Something in my chest gives way. Not breaks. Gives, the way a levee gives, water going through a place that held too long. I reach down and take her face in both my hands and bring her up to me, and I kiss her.

It isn't like the church. I feel both of us notice that at the same time. In the church she bit me and I took her against a wall and we tore at each other like dogs. This is slow. Her mouth is soft and salty and swollen from crying, and I kiss her like I've got all night, because for the first time in my life I think I might. She makes a small sound against my lips that isn't a dare.

I get up off the floor with her in my arms and put her on the cot. Ash comes up off the blanket in a puff and neither of us cares. I undress her one piece at a time. Her boots. Her socks. Her jeans, working them down her legs and kissing the inside of her knee where it's pale and soft when they come off. Her sweater over her head, careful of the gauze on her shoulders, and her bra, and she lies there under me in the lantern light with ash on her collarbone and her dark hair spread across the pillow, looking up at me like she's waiting to see what I'll do.

What I do is take my time.

I kiss the hollow of her throat and feel her pulse jump under my mouth. I kiss down her breastbone the way she kissed down mine, and when I get to her breasts I take one nipple into my mouth and suck slowly until it's hard against my tongue, and I don't rush to the other. I stay there. I learn what makes her breath catch, the drag of my teeth, the flat of my tongue, my thumb circling the other one at the same time. Her hands come up into my hair and hold on.

I move lower. Her stomach tightens under my lips. I kiss the sharp point of each hip bone, the bruises I left there last night, blue and ugly and shaped exactly like my fingers, and I put my mouth on every one of them and say I'm sorry against her skin, and she laughs, shaky and startled, and tells me she isn't.

I settle between her thighs and open her with my thumbs and look at her. She's already wet, glistening in the lamplight, and when I breathe on her she jerks and her thighs press against my shoulders.

"Silas." It comes out like a question.

I put my mouth on her.

I go slow. I lick up the length of her with the flat of my tongue, from her entrance to her clit, and stay there, circling, and she makes a sound high in her throat and her hips come up off the cot. I hold her down with an arm across her belly and keep going. I learn her the way I learn anything, by paying attention. Soft and slow makes her breathe hard. Firm and steady makes her grab the blanket in both fists. When I slide two fingers into her and curl them while I suck her clit, she says my name like it hurts.

I keep her right at the edge a long time. Every time she starts to tip, I ease off and kiss her thigh until she stops shaking, and then I start again. She curses me. She begs. She pulls my hair hard enough to sting and tells me she'll kill me. On the fourth time I don't stop. I keep my mouth on her through it, and she comes against my tongue with her back arched clear off the mattress and her thighs clamped around my head, crying out, shaking so hard the cot frame rattles against the wall.

I kiss her through it until she's pushing my head away, too sensitive, gasping.

When I come up over her, she's flushed from her chest to her hairline and her eyes are wet again, but it's different now. She pulls me down by the back of my neck and kisses me, tasting herself on my mouth, and fumbles my belt open and shoves my jeans down my hips.

I push into her slowly. An inch at a time, watching her face while I do it. She's so wet it's easy, but I don't hurry, and she feels every inch and so do I. Her mouth falls open. Her eyes don't leave mine. When I'm all the way inside her, buried to the root, I stop and stay there, and neither of us moves.

It's worse than the church. That's the only way I can say it. In the church we could pretend it was the blood talking, the adrenaline, the dead man in the study. Here there's nothing to hide behind. There's the lantern and the ash and her face six inches from mine, and I can see everything in it, and she can see everything in mine.