Chapter 11
1097 Words
We didn't speak on the way back from the east room.
That was normal for us now, the silence, the way we moved through the compound without needing to coordinate it. He went down the corridor; I went down the corridor. He stopped when I stopped. Not hovering—just present, the way Raze had always been present, like proximity was a decision he'd made a long time ago and didn't feel the need to revisit.
It was the proximity that broke it.
We came to the stairwell at the end of the west corridor, and I stopped walking, and he stopped a half step behind me, and the silence shifted the way silence shifts when it has been carrying too much for too long and finally puts something down.
"You were outside that door," I said.
"Yes."
"The whole time."
"Most of it."
I turned around. He was closer than I'd registered, the stairwell narrow and the light poor, and his face in the dim was the same face it had always been—certain, contained, watching me with that particular quality of attention that had never once felt like surveillance and had always felt like something harder to name.
"You heard everything he said," I said.
"Yes."
"And you're not going to say anything about it."
"What would you like me to say?"
"I don't know," I said. "Something. Anything that isn't you standing there being absolutely certain about everything while I—" I stopped. Pressed it flat. Tried to.
It didn't press.
"While you what?" he said.
"While I'm still trying to figure out what any of it means," I said. "While I'm standing here with my father three days in the ground and a man in a locked room who I spent two years with and apparently none of it was what I thought it was, and you—you've been here, you've been certain, you've been building things and waiting and you never once—"
“Never once what, Nyra?”
"You never told me." The words came out with more force than I'd intended. "Three years. Not one word. Not a call, not a message, nothing. You let me leave and you said nothing and I thought that meant—"
"What did you think it meant?"
"That you didn't care." The silence after that was enormous. "That I had read everything wrong and none of it was real and the easiest thing was to go and build something ordinary with an ordinary person and pretend the compound was something I'd grown out of."
Raze looked at me. His jaw was tight, but his eyes were steady, the way they were steady when something was costing him and he wasn't going to show what it cost.
"You didn't read it wrong," he said.
"Then why didn't you say anything?"
"Because you needed to leave." Quiet. Precise. "You had spent your entire life inside these walls and your father's world, and you needed to know what existed outside of it before you could choose to come back. If I had said anything — if I had asked you to stay or given you a reason — you would have stayed. And you would have spent the rest of your life wondering."
"That wasn't your decision to make."
"No," he said. "It wasn't. And I made it anyway."
The anger was clean and hot, and I let it sit there, in my chest, because that's easier than the thing below it, which was the thing I knew he had done it for, and it cost him something to do it, and he did it anyway, for me, and it didn't make me less angry; it made me more.
"Three years," I said.
"Yes."
"You built all of this in three years."
"I had to do something with it," he said, flat and honest, the one unguarded sentence in the whole conversation, and it hit me somewhere behind my sternum and stayed there.
"And now?" I said. "I'm back and my father is dead and Marcus is in a locked room and there is a man neither of us has met who had my father killed, and now what, Raze? What do you want from me?"
He remained silent for a short while.
"Nothing," he said. "I don't want anything from you."
"That's not an answer."
"I want you safe," he said. "I want you to have what your father built and what he meant to give you. I want whoever is responsible to be removed from the equation permanently. A pause. "That's operational. You're asking me something else."
"Yes," I said. "I am."
He looked at me for a long moment. The stairwell was very quiet. Somewhere below us, the compound moved through its evening routines: doors and footsteps and the low exchange of voices, all of it muffled and distant.
"I want you to stop running," he said. "Not toward me. I'm not asking for that. Just—" He stopped. Looked at the wall. Looked back. "Stop running away from what you already know. It's exhausting to watch."
The anger cracked.
Not dissolved—cracked, the way something cracks when the pressure gets too specific, and underneath it was everything I had been pressing flat since I came back through the compound gates, since I stood at my father's grave, and since I watched Raze in the yard this morning knowing he had built all of this with that knowledge sitting in his chest and never once let it make him smaller.
I stepped into him.
I didn't plan it. My body made the decision before I did, the way it always made decisions where Raze was concerned, and my hands were in his shirt and my face was pressed against his jaw, and he was solid and warm, and he put one hand at the back of my head and held me there, not tight, not pulling, just held, the way you hold something you have been careful with for a long time.
For a long while neither of us moved.
His mouth was at my temple. Stayed there.
"I know," he said. Quietly. Into my hair.
I pulled back before it became something else. Just far enough. His hand was still at the back of my neck, and I left it there and looked at him, and his eyes in the dim were the same as they'd always been.
"We're not done fighting," I said.
I know that too," he said.
But neither of us moved away.
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