HE WAITED 1,095 DAYS TO CLAIM ME

Chapter 6

Raze put Marcus in the east room.

Not a cell, exactly. The compound didn't have those, not official ones. But there were rooms that locked from the outside and had no windows and smelled like they'd held other people before, and this was one of them. Two of Raze's men took Marcus by the arms without being asked, and Marcus went without fighting, which told me he was still calculating, still running some version of a play in his head that ended with him walking out of here.

For his sake I hoped that he was right.

Raze shut the door. Turned the key. Pocketed it.

Soon we were the only two in the corridor, and the stillness between the two of us was too much.

"Silas," I said.

"In the morning."

"Now."

He looked at me. Not the way he'd looked at Marcus, that flat assessment. This was different. This was the look I remembered from before I left, the one that said he was reading something in me I hadn't decided to show yet.

"Silas is handling the compound tonight," he said. "You walk in there right now; you're walking in with blood on your hands and three dead men two floors below, and every person in that room will read it before you say a word. You want that?"

I didn't answer.

"Give it till morning," he said. "One night won't change what happened to your father."

He was right. I hated that he was right.

He moved down the corridor, and I followed, not because he asked, but because there was nowhere else to go that made sense, and some part of me had already accepted that. He led me through to a room on the upper west side, far removed from the room that Marcus was being kept in, away from the graveyard, away from the burial rooms and the smell of flowers going stale over a casket.

He opened the door and I went in.

It was plain. A bed, a chair, and a window that looked out on the yard. No pictures, no magazines... The kind of room that was prepared for guys, even though they discussed things very peacefully without saying why.

I put the gun on the small table by the bed. My hands were steadier than they had any right to be.

"You knew he was down there," I said. Not an accusation. The simple fact, which lay between us like something we had to gaze at.

Raze leaned against the doorframe. He didn't come in, and I noticed that.

"That's not the same as telling me."

"No," he said. "It's not."

I turned to look at him properly for the first time since the cellar door. Three years had done something to his face. Not aged it, exactly. Settled it. Like whatever uncertainty had lived there before had simply run out of patience and left.

The scar on his shoulder was hidden under his shirt, but I knew where it was. Someone had told me, secondhand, six months after I left. I'd spent three days not thinking about it and then spent the next week thinking about nothing else.

"Why didn't you come in after me?" I asked.

Because you didn't need me to."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the one honest one that I have" means one honest one. He pushed off against the door frame. "You want me to lie and say I wasn't standing outside that door for twenty minutes listening?"

I felt a feeling traveling in my chest. I pressed it flat.

"I had it handled."

"I know." Wisdom free of doubt. No inhibition in performance. He just knew, the way he'd always known things about me that I hadn't explicitly told him, and the certainty of it was the most destabilizing thing in the room.

I had to sit on the edge of the bed. The fatigue was sudden, the feeling of an entire load that had been operating on adrenaline for some hours and had just heard that it might stop. My cheek was starting to throb where they'd hit me. I hadn't let myself feel it until now.

Raze walked around the room.

He bent down in front of me, putting his face all right with my face, and he felt close to me like he always did: too close, too close now! as if a frequency I can't outrun has found me!

His hand came up and his thumb pressed gently along my cheekbone, just below the bruise.

I didn't pull back.

Three of them, he said, in a quiet voice.

"I've had worse."

"I know that too." The man's thumb was slightly trembling. Taking inventory. "Anything else?"

"Wrists," I turned them over. The ropes gouged deep red lines into them but not broken skin.

He looked at them for a long moment without touching. Just looked, the way someone looks at a thing they're filing away somewhere so they won't lose it.

Then he stood. Then he stood. Went to the small cabinet near the window, opened it, found a cloth and a shallow bowl, and filled the bowl from the jug of water on the shelf. Came back. Sat beside me on the edge of the bed and took my wrist in both hands.

As he cleaned the rope burns, he did not speak.

I looked at the big palms of his. They were careful. Exact. It's not like he wasted a single skill, as he wouldn't a single particle of anything else, but it's as though something wasn't as smooth as it could be under the precision. A piece of furniture, which could not have failed had it been measured.

I thought about Marcus. For the two years that I've believed in the warmth he performs. The way I had explained to myself that "common" meant "real."

"He said it was real," I said. "At the end, in the cellar. He said what he felt was real."

Raze didn't lift his gaze from the ground. "Probably was."

"That's not comforting."

"Wasn't meant to be." He set my wrist down gently. Picked up the other one. "A man can mean something and still choose against it. Doesn't make the choice smaller. Just makes him someone who knew exactly what he was giving up."

I glanced at his face on the side.

He had waited 1,095 days. He had not chosen against it once.

I didn't say that. But the thought sat in the room between us, large and unaddressed, and I knew by the slight tension that moved through his jaw that he felt it there too.

He finished. Put the cloth to one side.

We two didn't move.

Just get some rest, he advised.

He stood. Went to the door.

"Raze."

He stopped.

I didn't have anything to follow it with. Just his name, in the dark, in a room the compound had kept ready without explanation. He stood with his back to me for a moment and then he turned his head slightly, not enough to look at me fully, just enough.

"I know," he said.

He left the door slightly open.

I lay back on the bed with my hands resting on my stomach and stared at the ceiling and did not sleep for a long time.