“She was—” The word stuck in my throat. “Coffin.”
I expected him to flinch away from the superstition of saying it in the dark. He didn’t. He went still, the way he did before a trigger went, or a deal broke bad. Then I felt his palm on Emilia’s hip, grounding both of us. “Not here,” he said. “Not on our watch.”
The image would not be argued with. Blue mouth, stiff hands. Wax flowers. Her name on engraved on a coffin lid.
I slid lower in the bed because I couldn’t stop shaking. I hooked my arm around her waist and pulled her in until there was no space between us. She made a small sound. I buried my face in her shoulder and breathed.
She sighed only to roll slightly on to me. A choice her body made even asleep.
It undid me.
I pressed my mouth to her temple. Then the curve where her ear. Then the crown of her head. The kisses felt like triage, like I could shove heat into her with my mouth.
Luca’s hand stroked her side slow. I could hear the little sound he made when he counted breaths without meaning to, when he matched the rise and fall because that was how he had learned to hang on.
He used his other hand to smooth the hair back from her face, careful not to wake her. His ring tapped the bedhead once, a soft tick. I knew that sound. It meant he was keeping time. I knew it meant he would not let the night take us.
“She’s warm,” he said eventually. A fact. “She’s here.”
My chest tightened. “They’ll take her,” I heard myself say, and I didn’t know who the they was in the middle of the night—dynasties, men with rings, time, the idea of fate.
“They won’t. Because we break the hands that reach.”
The coffin wouldn’t leave me. I did what I could to burn new images over it. This one, her mouth parted against my shoulder. The small weight of her hand heavy on my chest.
“They’d lock her under and call it law,” I said into her hair. “They’d smile at us over it. They’d make it sound like mercy.”
He didn’t have to ask who they were now. The dynasty. The way the city was taught to look at girls like her and see instruments, bonds, collateral, names that could be moved from ledger to ledger if you wrote small enough. The way a crest thought a body was a thing. All for the bloodline. Power to stay where they bred it.
“Then we don’t speak their language,” he said, his hand gently tracing her side. “We write our own.”
I nodded.
“I kissed her. And it was like kissing stone.”
He heard the thing under the thing. “Kiss her again.”
I did. Her temple again. Her jaw. My mouth touched the corner of hers.
“Feel,” he said again, and pressed my hand deeper into her ribs, to feel her breathing.
I catalogued her the way I always did when fear made my eyes stupid. The raise and fall of her stomach. The little twitch in her thigh. She rested her foot on my leg.
“I hate her in blue,” I said. “She only looks good in colors we give her.”
“Mhm.” Luca’ kissed the top of her shoulder. “She looks best like this.”
“Like ours,”
He came closer across her. Caging her between us. He wasn’t sleeping either. We were animals, ears up, not because there was a sound, but because there might be.
“Say what you need,” he said, quiet.
“I need the thirty days to go faster,” I said. I was not good at asking for mercy; I knew better than to think it existed. “I need her on the island with a ring and ink and a law that pretends to keep up.”
“We move Damius in the morning,” he said. “He’ll hear it, he’ll see it, he’ll call it duty, which is just a different word for love when a man like that’s honest.”
“And the Adams?”
