HE WAITED 1,095 DAYS TO CLAIM ME

Chapter 40

The armoury smelled of gun oil and cold concrete.

I'd come in at half past two with the intention of running a weapons check on the compound's secondary cache, the one in the lower corridor that Carver's men used for the perimeter rotation. It needed doing. It was also the kind of work that required nothing from me except my hands and my attention, and my hands and my attention needed somewhere to go that wasn't the operations room or the map table or the specific arithmetic of thirty-two hours and what they contained.

I worked methodically.

Magazine check. Spring tension. Barrel inspection. Each weapon logged on the sheet Carver kept on the shelf by the door, the same sheet in the same format my father had used, and his second before him. The compound had its rhythms and I'd slipped back into them the way you slipped back into a language you'd spoken before you knew you were speaking it, below conscious decision, in the body before the mind.

Third weapon. Fourth.

I heard him in the doorway.

Not a sound, not a footstep. The specific change in a room when someone fills its entrance, the way the air pressure shifted and the quality of the silence altered fractionally. I'd been able to tell it was Raze since I was seventeen. That had not changed.

I didn't turn around.

"Carver's handled the east cache," I said. "This one needed the secondary check."

"I know," Raze said.

He didn't move from the doorway.

I set the weapon down and picked up the next one and ran the check the same way I'd run the previous four. Spring. Barrel. I could feel him watching and the watching had a quality to it I'd spent three years in a different city pretending I didn't miss, the specific attention of a man who looked at you like the room's other contents had stopped registering.

He crossed the floor.

I knew when he'd moved, tracked it without turning, the weight of his footsteps on the concrete and then the warmth of him behind me, close, the heat of his chest at my back without contact. I set the weapon down on the shelf.

His hands came over mine.

Not taking them. Covering them. Both of his over both of mine, the same gesture as this morning in the grey light with the scar and the compass drawer and the particular quiet of a thing becoming a fact, and I went still the way I'd gone still then, completely, the way you went still when your body understood something your mouth was still working toward.

I set the weapon down.

He turned me around.

Not fast. Not the urgency of something that had waited too long and lost patience. The specific deliberateness of a man who had decided something and was executing it without hurry, with full intention and all the time the compound had given them in this particular afternoon in this particular room. His hands were at my jaw. The one hold I could not manage my way through, that I had never managed my way through, that bypassed every layer of composure I'd constructed in the three years I was gone and in the nineteen days since I'd come back.

I looked at him.

"Look at me," he said, low.

I already was. He knew that. He said it anyway, the same way he'd been saying it since the first night, because what he meant was not look with your eyes, which I was doing, but the other thing, the harder thing, the thing that required setting down every piece of operational distance I'd been carrying since the cellar and being exactly where I was.

I set it down.

What followed was not gentle.

Not harsh either, not the desperation of something denied too long. The specific quality of two people who had run out of reasons to hold back and had the afternoon to be thorough about it, and he was thorough, systematically and without apology, his mouth at my throat and then my collarbone and then lower, his hands working with the same precision he brought to everything, deliberate and unhurried and completely focused in the way of a man who had decided what he was doing and intended to do it fully.

My back met the armoury shelf.

Weapons on either side of us. The smell of gun oil and cold concrete and the warmth of him against me, nothing managed about either of us now, my hands in his hair and his mouth doing something that made coherent thought a thing that happened to other people. He took his time. That was the particular quality of it, the unhurried attention of someone who had been waiting 1,095 days and was no longer in any kind of hurry and wanted me to understand that.

I understood it.

He pulled back once to look at me, both hands framing my face, his breathing not entirely even, and his eyes had that quality they'd had across the burial room and across every operations table and across the dark of every room we'd been in together. The look of a man who had been keeping count and had stopped counting because the waiting was over.

"Nyra."

Not a question. Not a request. My name in his mouth in that register, the low one, the one that meant he was done being careful.

"Yes," I said.

His jaw moved. He kissed me once, hard, and then his hands went to my hips and the shelf was at my back and there was no more distance between us and there had not been, honestly, since the moment I'd walked back through the gates, and we were both done pretending otherwise.

After, the armoury was quiet.

I stood with my back against the shelf and his forehead against mine and his hands still at my hips and the compound outside doing its ordinary things, Carver's men on the perimeter, the kitchen rotation, Price on the secondary radio, all of it continuing exactly as it had been, indifferent to what had changed in this room in the last forty minutes.

What had changed in this room.

He pulled back enough to see my face. I let him see it. I'd been letting him see things since this morning in the grey light and I'd stopped keeping track of what I was letting through.

His thumb moved across my jaw.

Once. Slow.

"Thirty-two hours," he said.

"Yes," I said.

We had thirty-two hours.

I intended to use every one.