I had thought, naïvely, that having shot me once, Maryann West might just leave me alone.
She reeked of grain alcohol and subway muck, but her clothes were damp and her face scrubbed nearly clean, like she’d taken a dip in a fountain before coming to finish what she started. She held a gun, of course. I pictured my knives where I had left them, in their holster slung over the back of a chair three useless feet to my left.
“Raise your hands,” she said. A child had drawn the bags under her eyes in eggplant-colored crayon, frown lines radiated from her mouth in charcoal gray.
I didn’t move. It would take me four seconds to lunge for a knife and throw it. I had a good chance—a better one, at least, than I had point-blank from a raw barrel and a shaky trigger finger. But I just met her moonlit eyes and shrugged. If she hadn’t killed me yet, she would wait a little while longer.
“You whore, raise your goddamned—”
“How are you here?”
The gun jerked. I thought of Dev—a hard, final grenade full of the shrapnel of lost years—but she didn’t shoot. She said, “The door was open. And I got to wondering what on earth you wanted to ask me back there. Someone like you.”
I must have forgotten to lock when I stumbled back here. Such a stupid reason to die, but maybe that was always what caught us in the end. We drugged ourselves with illusions of competence, until fallibility laughed, and knocked us off.
“I’m not going to kill you,” I said.
“Because I’ve got the gun.”
Four seconds. Better odds if her finger eased off that trigger. Shock might do it, or sympathy. Not much of the latter going around these days, so I tried instead, “Victor told me that Trent Sullivan had murdered some people for their hands—people like me. That’s why I killed him. But I had wanted to ask you if Victor had lied.”
The woman radiated outrage. “He said my Trent killed—”
It took three seconds, and hurt just as much as I thought it would. I rolled from the chaise, pulled down my holster, unsheathed a knife, and threw. It slid into her right shoulder. The gun discharged and then rattled to the floor while she clutched at the hilt.
“I wouldn’t take that out,” I said, panting.
She cursed and stumbled forward. “Trent saved your life. That’s what I want you to know.”
“Saved my life? What, he put in a good word for me? Do you know how many people died because Trent fingered them?”
She wrinkled her nose, as though it had been impolite of me to mention it. “At least they didn’t feel a thing. I can promise you that. Unlike my Trent.”
Maryann West reached for the gun in spite of her own blood soaking into the carpet. I lunged and pushed her back against the door. Her heart labored against my breastbone. Even with one arm, even without a knife, oh Christ, she would be so easy. One hard snap and I wouldn’t have to worry about her nasty habit of trying to kill me. I tried to keep my home clean, but her blood already stained my best carpet. I could make an exception.
“Go,” I said. “I won’t kill you but Victor will. So save yourself and go.”
“I haven’t slept a night through since what you did to Trent. You ruined my life.”
We were pressed close as lovers, her blood soaking my shirt, spittle wet on my face. “I’m sorry.”
“Not yet, you’re not.”
She left. I knew why I hadn’t killed her, but the enormity of it pushed me to my knees. I stared at the open door.
I didn’t know how Maryann West planned to hurt me next, but I was sure she’d try. I couldn’t blame her, I couldn’t kill her, I could hardly defend myself. I had murdered an innocent man. My sins had turned my hands.
“Pea?”
Dev in the open doorway. Dev, locking it behind him before coming to where I sat on the floor. He fingered the spilled intestines of cotton fluff from the bullet hole in my chaise. His forehead shone with sweat, gathered in the furrowed skin of his frown. I touched his eyebrows, willing it away. I’d thought I was going to die ten minutes ago, and now Dev looked at me like he could swallow me up. I realized I was very tired.
“What happened?” he whispered.
“Maryann West.”
“The blood…”
“Hers.”
“But she’s not dead?”
“I’m going soft, Dev,” I said. “I couldn’t.”
I watched him realize. “Oh, Pea. It was you, then? The attempt on Victor?”
I laughed and laughed. “What attempt? I told you, I’m soft. I can’t do it anymore. Even though they want me to, this time. My—I don’t know—my heart?” I gulped for air. “It feels like it’s cracking apart, every time I lift the knife…”
He held me until I stopped crying. He pulled back. “Can you stand? There’s no one after you right now. Victor is rampaging but I think he’ll go through quite a number of his men before he gets to you. He didn’t see you.”
Against my better judgment, I relaxed at that.
“How are you here?” I asked a second apparition, for the second time that night.
He blinked and rested his hand against my collarbone, so his thumb jumped with my racing pulse. “I—had a feeling,” he said, haltingly, “that someone far away was thinking of me, and that they were dying, and that they had loved me for a very long time…”
“So you came straight here, huh?” I couldn’t meet his eyes.
He smiled, with all the tenderness that only Dev could find, and kissed me. “Pea,” he said, after long minutes, “you don’t understand—”
But I did, enough. “Take me to bed, Devajyoti.”
8
I had nearly died twice, and the second time seemed to shake loose the last of the mortar from his defenses. Dev loved me, or something
