Chapter 22 22

Chapter 22 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
Xavier

I didn't sleep.

By five in the morning I gave up pretending and went downstairs and stood in the kitchen and thought about the night. Thirty-eight people. The violin threading through the building and two people lifting their heads who hadn't lifted them in days. Carmen moving through the staging area like she had always belonged in an operation, like she had always belonged here, and the specific moment when I had watched her sit beside that woman with her knees pulled up and understood that what Carmen did with people was not a skill she had developed. It was simply what she was.

Apollo had been talking since we got back.

Not words exactly. More like a pressure, a continuous insistent warmth in the center of my chest that had been building since the extraction and showed no sign of finding its ceiling. I had felt the mate bond before, the recognition of it, the want of it. This was different. This was the bond with something added, with evidence underneath it, with three weeks of watching her be exactly herself in every situation she'd been handed, and the cumulative weight of that was significant.

I made coffee and drank it and when I heard her on the stairs I didn't turn around immediately, giving her the option of the kitchen or the corridor, not making the decision for her.

She came into the kitchen.

She looked tired in the clean way of someone who had worked hard and done it well. She had changed out of the extraction clothes and her dark hair was still slightly damp at the ends again and she was moving with the careful quiet of someone trying not to wake a house.

She saw me and stopped.

"Coffee," I said, and poured a second cup and set it on the counter.

She came and took it and stood on the other side of the counter and we drank in the early morning quiet and outside the kitchen window the sky was doing something slow and grey and almost beautiful.

"Mari's asleep," she said. "Lucia checked her an hour ago. She's alright."

"Good."

"The two from the lower east corner." She wrapped both hands around her cup. "How are they."

"Stable. Lucia has them in the south room."

She nodded. Drank. "It was the violin," she said. Not pride, just observation. "People hear music and their nervous system looks for the source before their conscious mind decides to. It bypasses the freeze response."

"I know," I said. "It worked."

She looked up at me. We were closer than I had registered, the counter between us but not much of it, and Apollo was doing that thing where he pushed forward and I managed him with the steady internal pressure of someone holding a door against wind.

"Hannibal is leaving this morning," I said.

"I know. He sent a note under my door last night. He wants five minutes."

"Do you want to see him."

She was quiet for a moment. "Yes," she said. "I think I do."

I nodded.

"Xavier." She set her cup down and looked at me in the direct way she had, the way I had understood within two days of knowing her was simply her default mode, no performance in it. "Last night, at the exit point. You came and stood behind me while I was with that woman. The one with her knees up."

I had thought she hadn't noticed.

"You didn't interrupt," she said. "You just stood there."

"You were handling it."

"I know. I'm not—" She paused, finding the words. "Nobody has ever just stood behind me before. Like they were covering me. Just in case." Her eyes were steady on mine. "I noticed it."

Apollo stopped pushing and went completely still.

I put my coffee cup down and came around the counter. She didn't move back. She looked up at me with that dark steady gaze and I could smell cinnamon and woodsmoke and the particular warmth underneath it that had been wrecking my concentration for three weeks.

"Carmen," I said.

"Yes."

"I'm going to ask you something and I need you to answer honestly and not because you think it's what I want to hear."

"That's the only way I answer things."

"I know." I looked at her. "The bond. What do you feel."

She was quiet for long enough that I respected it, she was actually considering rather than reaching for the easy answer.

"Something," she said finally. "I've been feeling something since that place. Since I smelled—" She stopped. "It's not nothing. I don't know what to do with it yet but it's not nothing."

"That's enough," I said. "That's more than enough."

I reached out slowly, giving her every opportunity to step back, and tucked a piece of dark hair behind her ear, and she went very still but she didn't step back, and the touch sent something through the bond that made Apollo press forward so hard I had to actually breathe against it.

She felt it. I saw her feel it, a small involuntary intake of breath, her eyes going slightly wider.

"That's the bond," I said quietly.

"I know what it is," she said. "I've felt it before."

With Hannibal. She didn't say it. She didn't need to.

"This is different," I said.

She looked at me for a long moment. "Yes," she said. "It is."

I lowered my head slowly and she didn't move and I pressed my lips to her temple, just that, just a breath of contact against her skin, and the bond flared between us like something that had been waiting a long time for permission, and I felt her hand come up and grip the front of my shirt briefly before she let go.

I straightened.

She looked up at me with an expression I was only beginning to learn how to read.

"Five minutes with Hannibal," she said. "And then I want breakfast."

"I'll have Rosaria make something."

"I'll make it," she said. "You can help."

She turned back to her coffee and I stood in the kitchen with Apollo singing in my chest and the pale morning coming through the window, and let myself have the moment entirely.