Where Sinners Sleep

Shh, You're Safe Now

She felt it before she understood it.

His arms around her, warm and solid and certain, and for one completely disorienting moment her brain did not know what to do with the information. It just stood there, blinking, holding all its usual defences in its hands and not knowing where to put them because nothing in her twenty years of living had prepared her for this specific situation.

She stayed still for exactly three seconds.

Then she pushed him back.

Both hands flat against his chest, hard enough that he actually took a step back, and she looked at him with everything she had felt since last night rising up into her face all at once.

"What is wrong with you?" she said. "What is actually wrong with you? Last night you stood in your own living room and said things to me that I would not say to someone I genuinely hated. This morning your driver called me a thief in your own hallway. And now you are out here in the garden just hugging me like none of that happened?" She shook her head. "Why don't you take it somewhere else? Because as you so kindly mentioned last night, you can definitely afford to buy every single person in this wor"

"I am sorry."

She stopped.

She stared at him.

"What?" she said.

He held her gaze and did not look away and did not reach for the careful blankness he usually kept his face in. He just looked at her, steady and open in a way she had not seen from him before, like he had made a decision somewhere between the desk and the garden and was not going back on it.

"I should not have said any of that," he said. "Any of it. What I said last night was." He paused, and the pause was not evasive, it was someone choosing words carefully because they meant them. "It was wrong. It was cruel and it was wrong and you did not deserve a single word of it. Especially not after what you did for me the night before." He exhaled slowly. "I am sorry, Evelyn."

She looked at him.

Her mouth had opened slightly and she did not seem to know it had. She bit her lower lip, a small unconscious thing, and he noticed it the way he noticed the scar that cut through her left eyebrow, pale and thin and old, the kind of old that meant it had happened a long time ago when the skin was younger.

He found himself wondering how she had gotten it.

He found himself with a very specific and quiet suspicion about the answer.

"I will not ask for your forgiveness," he said, and his voice was lower now, more careful. "I am not asking for that. But I want to ask you something else." He looked at her steadily. "Stay here. Just until this situation is settled, until I know you are not in danger from the men who were looking for me that night. I owe you that much. Your safety is the least I can give you after what you did." He stopped and then kept going because he wanted to get it right. "But I do not want to force you. I want to be clear about that. This is your choice, your call, completely. If you decide you do not want to stay here I will understand that and I will still make sure you are protected regardless, I will still make sure no one can get to you, I will still make sure that you are safe wherever you go even if you never want to see this place again, even if you never want to see me again, I will still"

She hugged him.

She did not plan it. It was not a decision her brain made. She just closed the distance between them and put her arms around him and held on, her face against his chest, and she felt him go completely still the way she had gone still when he had done the same thing to her a few minutes ago.

Then his arms came around her.

His face lowered to the curve of her neck and she felt him breathe, slow and deliberate, like he was taking in something he wanted to remember, and one hand came up to rest against the back of her head gently.

"Thank you for saying that," she said, and her voice was already going, already thickening in her throat in a way she could not stop. "No one." She stopped. Tried again. "No one has said anything like that to me in a very." She stopped again. "In a very long time."

Her face was hot. She could feel it, the particular heat of trying not to cry when crying was already happening, her nose going red and her eyes filling and nothing she could do about any of it.

He pulled back just enough to look at her.

She looked back at him with her red nose and her wet eyes and her pink lips pressed together hard and her brown hair loose around her face and he looked at her for a moment with an expression she could not read.

How, he thought, can someone who put a grown man on the ground twice in one night look like this right now.

"Shh," he said, quietly. "You are safe now. Okay? You are"

"But I do not even know you," she said, still crying, which made the words come out slightly uneven. "I do not know your name or what you do or who you are and for all I know you are a serial killer who has a very nice penthouse specifically to lure unsuspecting women into and I have walked directly into your trap." She sniffled. "Or you could be a vampire. You are very pale at certain angles and you only came out at night when I met you which is exactly what a vampire would do and I have read enough books to know that the handsome mysterious ones are always the most dangerous ones and they always go for the neck first and you already have your face right next to my neck right now so." She pulled back slightly to look at him with genuine suspicion through her tears. "I am just saying. I have thought about this. What if I am your next target and this whole sorry thing is just to lower my guard before you drain me completely and leave me in this very pretty garden as a cautionary tale for the next girl you lure in with your face and your dog and your"

He laughed.

It came out of him like something that had been waiting, surprised past whatever barrier usually kept it in, and it was a real laugh, full and unguarded, and it changed his entire face in a way she was completely unprepared for.

She stared at him mid sentence.

"I am being serious," she said, but her own voice was wobbling dangerously toward something that was not crying anymore.

"I know," he said, and laughed again, quieter.

"It is not funny."

"It is a little funny."

"It is not"

"CHRISTOPHER YOU ABSOLUTE"

They both turned.

Coco was crossing the garden at speed, her blonde hair flying behind her, blue eyes locked on her brother with the focused energy of someone who had made a decision and was fully committed to it. She reached him in approximately four strides and smacked him on the arm hard enough to make him actually move.

"How dare you make her cry," she said. "You complete and total asshole."

"I did not" Kit started.

"Do not lie to me." Coco grabbed a handful of his hair, actual fistful, and he made a sound of genuine protest. "I can see her face from here. Look at her face."

"Coco"

"You made her cry on her second day here, Kit. Her second day. That is actually a record even for you and that is not a compliment, that is a"

"I did not make her cry, she was already"

"Oh so now it is her fault, is it, that is very"

"Would you let go of my"

"Apologise to her."

"I already"

"Apologise to her properly or I swear I will tell everyone what happened at Marco's birthday in 2019 and I mean everyone, I mean Eli will know by dinner"

"That is completely irrelevant and also you promised"

"APOLOGISE."

"I already apologised before you came flying out here like a"

"Do not describe how I walk"

"I was not describing how you walk I was describing how you ran across the garden like a"

"Like a what, finish that sentence, I dare you, finish it"

A sound from beside them.

Both of them stopped.

They turned.

Evelyn had her hand pressed over her mouth and her shoulders were shaking and her eyes, still wet, were bright with something that had nothing to do with crying anymore.

She was giggling.

Not a polite sound. Not a small careful almost laugh. A real giggle, helpless and genuine, her whole face changed by it, and it was the first time either of them had seen it, this girl who had come into their house with her swollen eyes and her worn hoodie and her twenty years of surviving things she should never have had to survive.

Kit looked at her.

Coco looked at her.

They looked at each other.

Then they looked back at her.

And for a moment nobody said anything at all, because some things are too good to interrupt.