Chapter 383: Worth It.

A warm drop landed on my face.

Then nothing. Then another, and that one pulled me out.

My eyes stayed shut. Air moved somewhere close, a thin current from the shaft above the bulb, and under it a sound. Small pulled breaths, coming from below the level of the bed, too shallow to be rest.

Two more hits on my cheek. Warm. Thick. A few more landed lower—across my stomach, the top of one thigh—scattered, out of time with each other, as if whatever was producing them had no rhythm left.

Then a sound came up from the floor that started as a cough and broke on the way out into something wetter.

My eyes opened onto a blur with a light in the middle of it.

The bulb resolved first. Then the metal frame. Then the edge of the mattress and the dark drop beyond it.

She was on the floor beside the bed. Legs drawn up, knees held to her chest for a second, arms locked around them. Then the hold failed. Her legs went flat on the stone with a soft sound and stayed there, open, spent.

I dragged my palm down my face.

It came away sticky. Thicker than water, still warm, a pale smear across the lines of my hand. I worked it off with the heel of my palm while my sight finished arriving.

The bulb was on above me. Looking at it didn't hurt.

That means light from the shaft. That means it's morning already.

I looked down.

Sophia lay flat on her back on the cell floor. Her stomach pulled hard with every breath — the deep, involuntary work of a body that had been driven past what it knew how to do and was only now finding air again.

Dark hair stuck to her temples and the sides of her neck. Her mouth was open. The rope marks at her wrists sat bracelet-dark against pale skin. Between her thighs the stone was marked with what the night had forced out of her, already half-dried at the edges.

The last thing I had before everything went out was her going over. From the state of the floor and the walls, she had kept going long after I stopped being there for it.

[ One source remaining. ]

[ One mark left. ]

My hand went up to my neck.

Turning my head made the tendon hitch — a deep drag over tissue that hadn't finished settling. But the skin under my fingers was closed. No break. No scab.

The picture came with it and would not leave.

Her teeth at my throat. The wet pull of her feeding. My hands going numb on her thighs while I held the fold and drove into her through it.

If I hadn't seen it through to the end, that would have been the last thing I did.

I sat up.

The sheet under me had gone stiff in patches and stayed wet in others. Blood. Mine. It had soaked through to the mattress in a dark print roughly the size of my hand, the edges already browning.

I reached around to my upper back.

Eight places where her nails had gone in during the worst of it — I had felt each one punch through. Under my fingers now: smooth skin. Closed over in a night. Not even ridged.

The walls had not healed with me.

Tracks of her ran down the stone beside the bed in pale arcs and spatters — the record of a body seizing with nothing left to hold it back. Some lines still looked faintly wet at the centre. Most had dried into thin crusts across the paint, down the skirting, across the back of the door in a spray pattern that said exactly which way her hips had been facing when the worst of it hit.

That's the most intense extraction I've had. Nothing else has come close to it.

I put my feet on the floor.

Cold climbed through my soles into my ankles. I stood carefully. The room tilted once and settled.

She was asleep.

Genuinely asleep — chest rising in a steady shallow rhythm, the first real sleep she had taken since Monica pulled the knots tight and left her in this room with the fire eating her from the inside.

Her mouth stayed slightly open. One hand lay palm-up beside her head. The rope marks at that wrist were darker than the other. Dried sweat marked her hairline. Her legs carried the faint bruises of the fold and the fight.

I stood over her longer than I needed to.

What came back was the first time I ever saw her.

Walking into a classroom at Hogsby beside Miss Brown. Thirteen students going quiet without a single instruction. Straight back. Hands loose at her sides. The word I had reached for then was class, and I had never found a better one.

It was still there. Standing on a prison floor over a woman with her hair stuck to her temples and the night written into her skin and the walls.

I pulled the sheet off the bed.

It came away heavy in the wet places. I rolled it inward so the blood and the rest of it turned in on themselves, kept from the open air, and set the bundle against the wall by the tray.

Then I flipped the mattress.

The underside rose printed with the square grid of the metal base — cleaner, usable. The frame ticked once as the weight settled wrong and then right.

Worth it.

Everything last night cost me. Staying down here instead of walking out through Ingrid's door. Worth it.

One more. And it has to be done before noon.

I got my arms under her.

Under the knees. Behind the shoulders. She was light — lighter than she had any business being, lighter than most women I had carried — and her head rolled in against my chest without a flicker of waking. The heat of her was ordinary now.

I laid her on the flipped mattress.

Straightened her legs so they rested true. Set her arms down at her sides. Adjusted the angle of her shoulders on the thin pad until nothing pulled wrong.

Then I moved the hair off her face with two fingers.

Stuck strands peeled softly from her temple and cheek. Under them her face was younger in sleep than it ever was when she was awake. She could wash when she woke and her body belonged to her again.

I turned toward the door.

It was shut.

Not flush. A gap sat at the frame — an inch at most — and through it the corridor showed as a pale vertical line down the dark wood.

I had closed that door.

I remembered the flat of my palm against it. The sound of it going home. The latch finding its seat.

Somebody opened that. While we were both out.

I turned on my enhanced hearing and let the corridor come in.