Chapter 22-Hiding(2)

Chapter 22: 22-Hiding(2)

He placed his own octagonal crystal on his knee, resting his scarred hands over it.

"Think like a butcher, Val," Sol said, his glowing orange eyes steady on hers. "When a rat gets into the meat locker and ruins a prime cut, the master of the house doesn’t crawl into the floorboards on his hands and knees to catch it. It’s dirty. It smells bad. And if the other great lords see him crawling in the mud, he looks weak."

Valera frowned, her fingers tightening around her crystal.

"Especially if the rat is a Fyrn. If the other Houses find out the Vanes let a Fyrn survive in their sector, and that she’s killing their Captains... they would strip Vane of their Harvest rights."

"Right," Sol nodded. "So they have to keep it quiet. They shouldn’t march an army into Purgatory. They’ll send hunters."

He leaned forward slightly, the heat from his bare chest cutting through the chill of her core, warming the air between their faces.

"And every hunter they send down here," Sol said softly, "is just another bag of meat carrying pure crystals to our door. Voss thinks he threw us to the wolves. He just gave us eighteen refined inner-city shards and a quiet room to eat them in."

Valera looked at him for a long time.

Slowly, the tight, panicked knot in her shoulders loosened. She let out a breath that came out as a half-laugh, half-sigh, shaking her head as a strand of pale hair fell across her dirty cheek.

"You really are broken in the head, you know that?" she murmured. "A normal person gets framed for killing a noble’s retainer and starts looking for a hole to die in. You’re already calculating how much meat the assassins are going to have on their bones."

"I told you in the cistern," Sol said, a small, crooked smirk pulling at the corner of his mouth. "I grew up on the slaughter-line. Nothing goes to waste."

He shifted around on the grating, turning his back to her and patting the rusted steel behind him.

"Take those ugly metal gloves off and get over here," Sol said. "My stomach’s still itching where you ripped that sword out of me, and these eighteen rocks aren’t going to burn themselves."

Valera looked at the broad, heavily scarred expanse of his back, the faded white lines from the Overseer whips years ago, the burns from his own defective awakening, and the thick, fresh cord of healed muscle wrapping around his waist from tonight.

Her fingers fumbled with the clasps of the Night-iron gauntlets. She pulled them off, setting them carefully beside the bucket, and moved onto the grating behind him.

When she pressed her back against his, neither of them flinched anymore.

Her spine fitted neatly into the curve of his. She let her head drop back against the nape of his neck, exhaling a long, slow plume of white mist as the deep, steady heat of his Mid-Stage furnace soaked through her thin shirt and into her frozen ribs.

"Wait," Valera said softly, before he could crush the crystal in his hand.

"What?"

"Down in the vault," she stared up at the rusted rivets on the ceiling of the boiler room, her voice dropping so low it barely carried over the dripping pipe. "When Kael put that sword through your stomach... you didn’t try to pull back. You pulled yourself further onto the blade to hold him for me."

Sol didn’t answer right away. His thumb traced the smooth, cut edge of the octagon in his lap.

"If he pulled that sword out, he would’ve taken your head off next," Sol said simply. "You didn’t have your pipe up."

"You cooked your own insides, Sol. I smelled it. I felt it through your skin when I held you." Valera’s left hand crept backward, her cold, pale fingers sliding across the steel grating until they found his right wrist, gripping the warm skin just above the pulse. "Don’t do that again."

"It worked."

"I don’t care if it worked!" Her grip tightened, the cold of her fingers biting into his wrist, not enough to hurt, just enough to make him feel it. "My family died ten years ago. Every single person who knew my name, who knew what my mother’s voice sounded like, turned into silver dust and went up into that disgusting sky. For ten years I was just a specimen waiting for my blood to freeze."

Her breathing hitched once, a tiny, fragile sound in the dark iron room, though no tears fell this time.

"I am not watching the sky eat you too, Sol," she whispered fiercely against the back of his neck. "I don’t care about the ledger. I don’t care about sixty percent. Next time a Late-Stage swings at us, we run. We drop the bags and we run. Do you hear me?"

Sol looked down at the pale fingers wrapped around his wrist. Through his thermal vision, her hand was a mix of deep blue and the bright, pulsing gold of his own heat bleeding into her veins.

It was impossible to tell where his temperature ended and hers began.

He didn’t make a grand promise. Slum kids knew better than to swear oaths they couldn’t keep when the blades came out.

Instead, he turned his wrist over and caught her fingers in his palm, holding them loosely against the iron floor.

"Eat your crystal, Val," Sol said quietly. "If we get strong enough, we won’t have to run."