Chapter 235: Mine Alone

Chapter 235: Chapter 235: Mine Alone

Grace stood in the stairwell on the eighteenth floor with the door open a hand’s width, and listened to men she hated protect the man she loved.

The rain hammered the roof. Below her, the building was a rush of boots and sobbing, the mob breaking apart and pouring down the stairs in a scramble of dropped pipes and splintered excuses. A woman with a burned sleeve passed within an arm’s length of her. A boy with blood on his lip. A man who kept muttering he said it’d be easy. None of them looked at her.

Nobody ever did, when she did not want them to.

She had pulled the illusion over herself the moment the first ram struck, as easily as drawing a veil. The face she wore now belonged to nobody. Plain, tired, forgettable, a woman in a gray cardigan who had been standing in a doorway for years. The eyes slid off her. The hallway lamp seemed to dim around her. Under it, her real face, the beautiful one, the one he would someday look at and never look away from, stayed folded safely in the dark.

From far above, down the long throat of the stairwell, voices carried.

"That’s it? That was the attack?"

Kai. Careless, bright, and so unaware of what he was standing next to.

Grace’s fingers tightened on the doorframe.

"Erik. That man looked at me too."

Another man. Thin, worn out, the one with the roots. She did not know his name and did not care to. He spoke to her Erik the way one speaks to a friend, with that easy, shameless familiarity, and her Erik answered him. I saw. Just two syllables, softly, the voice he used when he was worried about someone.

He was worried about them.

Six.

The word had come down the stairs too, from somewhere, from someone. Six of us up here, and he still walked away. She did not know who had said it. It did not matter. It lodged under her ribs like a splinter and began to work its way in.

Six men on the upper floors. Six, and every one of them behind a wall of steel that her Erik had helped weld. Every one of them eating his food, breathing his air, standing in his light. She had counted them over the weeks, through the gaps in the stairwell and the cracks in doors, and had thought of them as furniture. Obstacles. A fence around a garden.

But tonight she had heard how they spoke to him.

Not like subordinates. Not like people who understood what he was. They spoke to him like a brother. Like a peer. Like a man who needed them as much as they needed him. And she heard, beneath it, the thing that made her teeth ache: he let them.

Five men, she thought, and her pulse stuttered. Five who could not hold a staircase without him. Five who stood in his shadow and called it company. The big one with the stone hands. The thin one with the vines. The quiet one who unmade things. The one who read the air. And the loud one, the fire one, who laughed too much and touched his shoulder like he had a right.

Five leeches. And Erik, her beautiful Erik, bent himself in half to carry them.

The thought of it made her skin crawl with a hot, bright fury, and under the fury, something else. Something that curled low in her stomach and made her breath catch. She leaned her forehead against the cold edge of the door and shut her eyes, and for a moment she let herself imagine it.

An empty floor. A silent one. No laughing, no roots, no boots on the steps. Only him, standing in the dark, looking for someone. Turning, and seeing her. Only her. Everyone else gone, wiped from the world like breath from glass, and nothing left in his eyes but her face.

Heat rolled up her throat. Her lips parted. Her hands, pressed to the wood, trembled.

Yes, she thought. Yes.

When she opened her eyes, the corridor was quiet.

The last of the mob had gone down. A candle jar lay on its side, still burning, a little pool of wax cooling on the concrete. Grace picked it up, turned it in her fingers, and let the flame lick her thumb until the pain cleared her head.

The illusion fell away like a shed skin. She felt her own face come back into place: the long black hair, the black eyes, the mouth she had practiced a thousand times in the dark. Beautiful. She knew it. It was the one thing in her life she had never doubted.

Then why doesn’t he look?

It was the question that gnawed her at night. She had stood where he could see her. She had stood on the stairs with her eyes lowered and her hands clasped, a frightened woman on the eighteenth floor, and he had looked at her. She was sure he had looked. He had studied her for long seconds, his pale eyes steady and intent, and she had felt her heart climb into her throat.

It meant something. It had to. A man does not look at a woman that way unless he feels it too.

She would not think about the wolf. The small gray thing that went rigid every time she passed, whose lip curled back over its teeth. She had seen the way Erik’s hand dropped to its head afterward, the way his face went cool and careful. That was only the animal. Animals were stupid. They saw what they were told to see.

It’s the others, she decided. They poison him against me. They fill his head with their noise. There were two of them especially, the red-haired one and the silver-haired one, the ones who walked the stairs in pairs and laughed like they owned the building. She had watched them both. One of them would turn her head when Erik passed, and Grace had seen the way her whole face softened.

Mine, she thought. He is mine.

She had known it from the first moment, from the first glimpse of his pale hair and cold eyes in a stairwell on the day the sky turned red. She had been meant for him. Before anyone else had spoken to him, before anyone else had touched him. She had been chosen, and the universe had made her wait, and now it was finally giving her what was hers.

And all these people stood between them.

She climbed the last flight to the nineteenth floor, because it was easy to do and nobody was there to see.

The steel gate loomed at the top of the stairs, gleaming faintly, as tall as a wall. She had watched the boys on this floor carry it in through the gloom a few days ago, the stone-handed one and the quiet one who unmade things. They had stood in the hallway all morning, and bolted a cold thing into the concrete, and gone home.

For them. For a handful of children and tired men. Erik had put steel across a doorway for strangers who did not matter, who had done nothing, who were nothing to him.

And he had never once done the same for her.

She laid her palm flat on the metal. It was cold, and perfectly smooth, and it hummed faintly, as though something inside it were alive. She closed her eyes and imagined his hands on it. His warm, strong hands, the ones that had built this, laid on the same place she touched now.

I would give anything to be on the other side.

Her fingers curled against the steel.

The building had grown quieter lately, a few doors fewer than before, a few more empty rooms. She had told herself it was enough. That the noise was dying. That soon the way would be clear. But it was not enough. Tonight proved it. There were still six men upstairs who stood too close to him, who laughed with him, who stood at his shoulder and asked for his protection. And above them, behind another wall, whoever else he kept hidden. She had heard that too, the whispers of a red-haired girl and a silver one, and she knew there were more.

She would be patient. She was very good at patience.

But not forever.

"Soon," she whispered to the metal, to the dark, to the man somewhere above her who did not yet know her name. Her breath fogged against the steel. "Soon, my love. You’ll see. Everyone else will go away, and then it will just be you and me."

Her smile trembled, and sharpened, and settled.

Behind her, down in the dark stairwell, something very small scraped against concrete, and she did not turn around. She was already far away, in a room with no windows, where a pale-haired man knelt before her with his hands open and said her name.