Chương 24: 1.23. Knuckle Nine

Seth belted the taupe terrycloth robe at his waist and stepped from the bathroom in a cloud of steam. His water-spiked hair pattered errant droplets against the hardwood floor on the way to his bed, which was narrow and creaky in an expensive and antique way, but cozy regardless. The autumn bedspread had been rolled neatly by the baseboard, and he unfurled its fur-trimmed comforter. He was a bundler when he got the opportunity.

And this was the nicest bed he'd ever been in for longer than a tipsy tryst and an awkward goodnight. He'd asked Lisa the difference between a roadhouse and a hotel. She'd laughed and said a few dozen braces a night and some fantastic plumbing. Across a pair of flickering bedside corpselamps, a darkened ornamental fireplace, and an expanse of plush platinum carpet, the Verdugo sat in her own bed, in the his robe of the his & hers set they'd been provided, trimming her toenails.

Her sorcerously suntanned skin had faded back to its unlit pallor, bringing with it her lethal menagerie of tattoos. Long-haired Lisa was gone, reduced to bleached bone and packed away.

"How about that shower, eh?" Annalise asked, back in her melodic Orwinese lilt.

"Betcha haven't had one of those in a while."

"Sure haven't," Seth said, because he wasn't sure about admitting that had been his first shower ever, in fact. Not a bad gimmick, but certainly not something a place like Prossimo would splurge on when a dip in the river or a warmed-up basin did the job just as well. The doughty men and women of the Low Plainland saved their money for taps that dispensed lager, not water.

"Sorry for switching out on ya. But I don't, uh… I figured it'd be a bit awkward if it was Lisa." She shook her hair out and grinned—Annalise's gappy, crooked grin, not Lisa's dazzling smile.

"Plus the bob is a devil's shade easier to dry off." It hadn't been awkwardness, with Lisa. Not entirely, at least.

"No problem," he said, and as far as he knew it was true.

"Thanks for bearing with me while I was her," she said.

"That's the second head who's been a real dose with you."

"Dose?"

"Orwinese slang. Means feckin' annoying." It hadn't been annoyance, either. Now he knew how Annalise intended to address the Lisa situation: she didn't. He wasn't sure whether to be relieved or upset.

"We go to work tomorrow," Annalise said, "so I don't mean to mess with your sleep schedule too much. But it so happens I have a deck of cards and a couple of coins. You play much Knuckle Nine down there in Prossimo?

"Not well," Seth said.

"But I'd do a round or two."

"Brill." Annalise dropped to the carpet and sat cross-legged, propped on her bedframe, and Seth glanced at where her robe rode up the tattooed softness of her inner thigh, and told himself that this was not the woman who wanted him. She rummaged in her saddlebag and produced a beaten-up deck of cards and a sable change purse, both of which she opened and dispersed across the floor. Seth took his deck of nine cards and they fell into the rhythm of the game. It was easy enough, he supposed.

With the different head and the different skin. If he just looked at her like a different person, it was easy enough. But she isn't. She's the same. She told you that. The same thoughts in her head even if the head is different. If you're going to stay sore about what Anna did, you can't be choosy. Fine, then. He wouldn't stay sore.

"I wanted to say that I forgive you," he said, as Annalise reshuffled the deck.

"For the seraph incident. As long as you don't plan on doing it again."

"Can't forgive me yet," she said.

"I need to make it up to you still, don't I? Told you that."

"I thought that was just Lisa being Lisa." She shook her head.

"Sure look, Seth. I do still owe you one. And I would still be happy to hear what you want, if you've an inkling. Just wanted to repeat that in a, uh—less drooly way."

"If you say so." Seth pointed to a card in his hand.

"Got a four of wings right here." Annalise hummed in thought.

"If you say so. No challenge." Seth placed the card face-up.

"That was a seven."

"You little blighter." Seth drew a replacement.

"When I said stop trying to be my mother, I was angry. But I don't… it was shitty of me to say. You've been very kind to me. Probably…" He paused and rifled through his mind, trying to find something that would speak against what he was thinking. He came up short.

"I have to admit, you've probably been kinder to me than anyone else has. Saints, isn't that sad. The renowned kindness of the Verdugo." This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

"Can I admit something back?"

"You gonna tell me you've got a jack in there?" She grinned.

"Not that, but now that you mention it, I do indeed."

"Bullshit." Seth passed her a coin.

"Flip."

"Heads or tails?"

"Heads." She flipped her brace. The stern, thin face of Charles il Nekropoli stared upward from the bedspread.

"Bugger." She put a card face down in front of her from the top of the deck." Not well, he said. You wee liar."

"I'm lucky tonight." He drew a pair of cards into his knuckle-hand.

"What're you admitting?"

"Sometimes, Seth, I do wish I'd been your mother. That I'd been there for you earlier. That I could have kept some of the big nasty world from tossing you about. Or that someone had, anyway. Can't pretend like I managed it with Tiago and Ofelia."

"As far as I can tell so far, they're good kids," he said.

"Not that I'm the expert."

"Good kids." She chuckled.

"You're not far from their age, you know. That's what Tiago would say if he was here. A very defensive young man."

"You'd have been better than what I got, I'm sure," Seth said.

"Mother-wise."

"You never knew her, did you? Or not for long." Annalise rolled a coin between her fingers.

"What happened to her?"

"I don't know," he said.

"My oldest memory is getting kicked under a table by some guy who said I was his nephew, but he had a dozen nephews and two of us were murani." He laid a face-down card.

"That's nine. Knuckles up." Annalise grimaced at the pile in front of her. Six facedown, three up.

"I bet this is terrible." She flipped her cards.

"Ah, fuck off." Seth scooted a coin from her pile to his.

"How'd you know?"

"That my hand was banjaxed?"

"That I didn't have a mother." She shrugged.

"You're searching."

"Searching for what? A mother?"

"Dunno," she said.

"Just searching." They held each other's gaze for five silent seconds. Her Annalise eyes were wider than Lisa's, rounder and more expressive. He could see the tenuous sprouting something, growing thin and green from her to him, and the exact moment she slammed the shutter down to conceal it.

"And speaking of searching, we have a head to find tomorrow," she said.

"So I'll go on and shuffle these back, and then we ought to hit the pit." He shook the moment off.

"That mean you forfeit?"

"Ah, sure. Smug little so-and-so." She began to strip off her robe, to the flimsy nightgown beneath, and paused.

"Mind if we go lights out?" He reached to the corpselight by his bed and clicked its bronze-fitted chain. Annalise followed suit with hers, and the woman across from Seth was reduced to a pale, indistinct phantom.

"Thanks, kiddo." She kicked her legs onto the bed. Her skin was so bright in the dim that he could tell she had tattoos there, too. A dragon on her thigh, its tail curling up past the hem of her nightgown, slid beneath the surface of the linen bedsheets.

"Saints gild your dreams."

"You too." He sat in the dark, and wondered why he wasn't tired, in this plush bed, after a day and night full of travel and motion and drink. He couldn't just leave it like that with her, he realized. She could pretend, but he couldn't. He inhaled courage from the chilly night.

The muffled sounds and dim lights of Fontana's night shifts, reassuring him there was a whole world out there ticking along with amiable disregard for this high drama unfolding in his head, for the thief who was falling for the executioner, and after all, he was nothing but a man, and she a woman.

"Annalise," he whispered.

"Can I ask you something?" No reply.

"Annalise?" A snore sawed through the dark. He ought to have been irked, maybe, but he couldn't help but smile to himself instead. She slept as big and unbothered as she did everything else. It didn't bother him, the snoring. He'd slept through far worse. It was the rhythm of Annalise's breath, like the tide, that lulled Seth's eyes shut. It was Annalise who opened them again, too. The Verdugo was lying on her side, faced away from him, the covers all sprawled out away from her. Her wide shoulders shaking again.

The halting breathy grunting nnuh back in her throat. Another of her attacks, and no Tiago this time to make them stop.

"Shit," he muttered, and clambered from his bed.

"Shit, shit, shit—" He cast around, looking for something that'd do. Her real sword was propped up by her travel trunk—no giving that to her, obviously. The fireplace. He wasn't about to give her a splintery log of wood, but there was a black iron poker beside its ashy grate that seemed solid enough. He retrieved the metal bar and approached the shuddering woman. Carefully, he reached out to nudge it into her arms. Her grip shot out—not around the poker. Around his wrist. Annalise dragged him into her bed.

He let out a whoof of shocked breath and squirmed in her grip; she only held him closer. A huge, hearth-warm leg wrapped around him, laced between his, bound him tight to her. Her pulse thudded against his cheek. Her whimpering breath puffed against the crown of his head. Her belly pressed urgently against his.

"Annalise," he whispered.

"Annalise, hey."

"Nuh," she replied. Should he get louder? Should he try to wake her up? No—he remembered the way Tiago shushed him. He didn't want to be accidentally responsible for any harm. To himself, especially. It was not right for his heart to slam into his throat like this as she clutched and whimpered and tugged him further into her embrace. It wasn't right for his body to thrill to this.

But his face was buried in soft, heaving heat, and she gasped in his ear, and she clung to him as if he were the only thing keeping her from drowning. Her breathing evened out as whatever gory phantasm haunted her dreams departed. Her grip on him loosened from a crushing vise to a slumbering cuddle. The velvety sound of her thighs rubbing together as she shifted in her sleep. Then one of them hooked over his waist and lay across him, and she was halfway straddling him in the dark.

Her powerful arm draped over his shoulder. Her stomach, her chest. Rising and falling against him, like a gently rocking sea. His head nestled in her chest, just as he'd fantasized when she hung her sunglasses on her neckline. And oh, Saints save him. It was exactly how he'd imagined it. Exactly as soft and smooth and warm. His eyelids drooped. You can't stay like this. You'll wake up tomorrow with your skin desaturated. And Annalise will know.

Painstakingly he extricated himself from the warrior, back into open night air that suddenly felt frigid as winter frost. Halfway back to his bed, a quiet whimpering sound like a sob in the dark froze him in his tracks. He began to summon the courage to turn back around to her, Then she let out a long sighing snore, and he exhaled along with her, and returned to his bed. It had seemed so narrow the first time he'd beheld it. Now it felt much too large.