CHAPTER 44
Decembris 1786
THE WAR FROZE ALONG WITH PALADIA. THE tension between the two sides endlessly strung out. A fragile balance that might be lost at any moment.
Every battle was sudden, without warning and with terrible casualties.
The tension between Helena and Kaine felt similar.
There was a new sharpness to him that had not been there before, as though he were being ground down like the edge of a blade on a whetstone.
He’d show up sometimes badly injured, healing very slowly, and snap savagely at her when she offered to help him.
Normally he’d recover by the time she left, but she wasn’t sure how he was being hurt at all. As if this was the consequence of her request that he not die, she was instead forced to witness the misery of his inability to. She worried there was a defect in the array.
One minute he was lounging in a chair, watching her train; the next his eyes rolled back in his head and he toppled onto the floor.
There was a bloodstain under him when she got him on his back. His clothes were soaked with it.
Beneath his uniform, he was heavily bandaged, but his blood wasn’t clotting, and the wound wasn’t healing. When Helena tried to find it, her resonance seemed to fail.
She peeled the bandages off in terror and found a stab wound.
The injury had missed his organs, but whatever had been used had broken off, and there were pieces of it left inside him.
It wasn’t a lot of metal, but he wasn’t healing.
Maier usually handled shrapnel injuries; their treatment wasn’t suited for vivimancy.
Helena’s resonance faded, distorting when she tried to appraise the injury and gauge how much metal was inside the wound.
She didn’t have tools for surgery. She washed her hands and stuck a finger into the wound, catching a piece and pulling it out.
Holding it, she could feel it as a physical, tangible object, but when she channelled her resonance towards it, it felt drawn in towards the metal but then—static. Her sense of resonance told her there wasn’t anything there. It began crumbling in her fingers, as though rusting, little bits and grit, corroding in Kaine’s blood.
This was the alloy. The lumithium and mo’lian’shi. Kaine had been stabbed with it, and it had been left inside his body.
“You idiot,” she said to Kaine, even though she knew he was insensate.
She put the shard on a piece of gauze, wiping her fingers. If it distributed through his blood, she wasn’t sure what would happen.
His body was stubborn when it came to its immutability, but based on the way the alloying was interfering with regeneration, the Undying’s progress in blocking resonance seemed much closer to success than the Eternal Flame had expected.
She ran her hands across Kaine’s skin, trying to get as clear a sense as she could of the internal wound, her resonance flickering in and out as if it was e how he wasriddled with holes. at he not die,She retrieved her satchel; she’d put together a full kit of medicines and materials for healing him on the off chance he ever allowed it. She spread a salve around the wound to slow the blood loss as she tried to figure out what to do. If she had the stimulant injection she’d been working on, it might help, but she was still working out the right balance of epinephrine.
If she couldn’t use resonance to remove the shards, she’d have to do it with old-fashioned surgery.
Alchemical surgery was much less invasive. Most of the hospitals in the North exclusively employed alchemists, while manual surgery was viewed as archaic and brutal with its large incisions and scars.
She took her alchemy knife and muttered an apology to it as she broke the components apart. A transmutational weapon was complicated to reassemble.
It would be near impossible once she was done with it.
She tried not to think about the potential consequences of destroying an issued weapon as she manipulated the metal into a long set of basic manual clamps, using part of the blade to make herself a scalpel. She hoped the clamps would be enough.
She washed, heated, and cooled the metal, trying to get the pieces sterile.
Growing up, she had watched her father perform surgery. After her mother died, she’d preferred it to being alone.
She used her resonance in reverse, identifying the location of the shrapnel bits by the negative space they created. The pieces were delicate, and they crumbled easily. She had to work slowly. She pulled them out, depositing each one on a cloth.
Once she’d removed most of them, Kaine’s body seemed to remember how to heal itself, and the wound began to close while there were still pieces inside. She had to use the scalpel, making the incision over and over until she had all the pieces out and had irrigated the wound as best she could. She checked using her resonance several times to ensure that there was nothing left. There was still a slight hum of interference but nothing large; hopefully, his body could handle it. s progress inShe washed her hands and stashed half of the shrapnel pieces in a bottle, which she hid in the depths of her satchel, and then placed the rest in another more obvious bottle, in case Kaine demanded she give them back.
The wound left a scar that didn’t fully fade away. Looking him over, it wasn’t the only one.
She placed her hand in the centre of his chest, letting her resonance seep through. He was still weak with blood loss; the residual metal was impacting his blood regeneration. She propped his head on her lap and very cautiously poured an elixir down his throat, using her resonance to ensure it ended up in t might help,his stomach and not his lungs. Even unconscious, his expression was tense, as if braced for a blow. to do it withShe brushed his hair back from his forehead, trying to smooth the tense furrow between his eyebrows, and just sat with him for a while. When he felt closer to normal, she leaned forward, her fingers touching the back of his
as viewed ashead to help him wake.
His eyes shot open.
Faster than she could move, his hand was around her throat, jerking her o reassemble.down as he jolted upright, his expression panicked fury.
He recognised her, catching her an instant before the back of her head slammed into the ground. Her neck snapped back, and her vision went white,
pain shooting through her skull.
“What?” He still sounded dazed.
She felt his hands along her neck, resonance along her spine, as her vision swam back into focus. He was kneeling over her, the back of her neck
r her mothercradled in his hands. Her heart was in her throat, pounding with such shock she could barely breathe.
Kaine was also breathing hard. “What the fuck, Marino?”
“You—passed out,” she managed to say.
He looked at himself, only then realising he wasn’t wearing a shirt and that the wound was gone. She thought he’d relax once he understood, but he
looked angrier.
“I nearly killed you.” over until she“You were hurt,” she said, releasing a shaky breath. “Badly. Even by your standards.” She sat up and winced, touching the side of her neck gingerly.
“As previously established, it’s my job to keep the Eternal Flame’s assets alive. You’re one of them.”
“I wasn’t going to die,” he said scathingly, but he leaned towards her.
She almost drew back, but he reached out tentatively and she made herself hold still.
He pulled her hand away from her neck, his eyes fastened on her throat, his fingers moving slowly down the length of it. She felt his resonance under her skin, warm along her spine. Another crack in his façade of indifference.
“Were you not supposed to be healed?” she asked, suppressing a shiver as his finger brushed along her neck. “I can—cut you open and put it all back in if you want.”
His fingers stilled, and he glared at her. “I’m not your patient.” was tense, asHe might have been intimidating if he wasn’t sitting on the floor, both hands cradling her neck, tilting her head slowly from side to side. He’d clearly come around to taking spinal injuries very seriously.
Her heart was beating even harder now, remembering his fingers in her hair, pulling her towards him. When she was alone, she often went back to that memory, wondering what could have happened.
She drew a shivering breath and reached up, her fingers wrapping around his wrist. “I can’t let you die.”
He stilled. She felt his pulse against her fingers. She watched his eyes darken, the slow shift of black expanding as the heat of his hands bled into her skin.
He shook his head. “They don’t let me die.”
She squeezed his wrist tighter. “Are they—is Bennet still experimenting on you? I thought if you survived the array, then he couldn’t—”
He pulled his hand free. “I have this habit of surviving against all odds.
Deserves to be studied, apparently.”
Without thinking, she reached out, touching his cheek. “I’m so sorry, Kaine.” shirt and thatHe looked startled, and it made his expression turn so young and scared, as if a part of him was still that sixteen-year-old. Then he went rigid, wrenching himself away from her touch, and when he looked at her again, he’d turned vicious. He shook his head as if in disbelief.
“You are unbelievable,” he said. “Truly.”
She didn’t know what he meant.
He shook his head. “When you first showed up here, I didn’t think you’d have it in you, but you are truly something else.”
Her gut twisted into a hard knot. “What do you mean?”
“You will do anything for that family, won’t you? But someday, Holdfast will realise you don’t belong in his kingdom of gold and purity. I wonder throat, hiswhat he’ll do with you then.”
She knew he was trying to hurt her, but it was something she had thought about so much, the sting of it had worn away.
“He won’t have to do anything; you took care of that for him.” She gave a tight-lipped smile. “But even if you hadn’t, I knew I’d be expendable from the moment I became a healer.”
She thought that would silence him, but he laughed.
“You think it started then? You’ve always been expendable. Do you really think this war is about necromancy? That any of the wars have ever actually been about necromancy?”
She shook her head warily. “No. It’s always about power. And what people will do without caring about the cost.”
He tilted his head, studying her. “Have you never wondered why it was so easy for the High Necromancer to recruit the guild families? After all, plenty of them were devout, or owed their fortunes to the Institute.”
She shrugged. “Because you’re jealous and petty and wanted more than the plenty you already had.”
He raised an eyebrow as he pulled his blood-drenched clothes back on.
“Well, I suppose that was a part of it, but no, what Morrough did was widen a rimenting oncrack that the Holdfasts have been growing for centuries. Since the moment they founded this city, they set themselves up as kings while claiming not to
be. They weren’t the lowly sort who’d ‘pursue’ power; no, they were divinely destined for it. Called, you might say.”
“That’s because they didn’t want to rule,” she said fiercely. “Luc certainly never did, and Apollo always cared most for the Institute. He hated politics.” nd scared, asKaine’s mouth twisted. “Yes. Funny how often people in power hate politics, as if what they really want is to do as they please and be praised for it, and if they aren’t, then it’s all beneath them. Considering how much they despised it, they certainly were unwilling to part with it. Only handed the minutiae of governance over to those of faith, let the Falcons and Kestrels and Shrikes manage all that tedium. The Institute was founded on the idea of pursuing the heights of alchemy, but that began to crumble the moment the science began contradicting the Faith. You should have seen the crisis when new metals were first discovered. The Faith spent years insisting there could be only eight, calling them compounds or alloys, and refusing to formally acknowledge those guilds because religiously, celestially, the number was limited to eight. So much for all those ideals of uniting the world through the study of alchemy.”
He eyed Helena. “Of course, they couldn’t go back on all those promises completely, Orion’s legacy had to endure, so they’d import someone from time to time. Some prodigy from a distant land that they could show off as proof of their magnanimity, to serve their ends while beholden to the Principate.”
Fury rose in Helena like a volcano. “That’s not what they did!”
He flicked his eyes over her derisively. “You were a desperate scholarship student who nearly cried every year when your exam scores were listed d what peoplebecause it bought you one more year of education, and your father lived near the water slums because he couldn’t get a job.”
“Yes, but if they’d been any more generous, you guilds would have thrown fits about it.”
“Why would that have mattered? We already hated you. It would have cost more than thethe Holdfasts a pittance to find your father some menial job, but if you’d ever been able to stop struggling, you might have realised what a web they had you trapped in. I hear Ilva Holdfast was particularly talented at that kind of was widen athing. Always knew just how much pressure a person could take.”
A sick feeling swept through her, but she shook her head.
“So all you guild students were just—what? Playing along?” she said scathingly.
were divinelyHe laughed. “No. We did hate you. Consider it from our perspective: You were the line the Holdfasts drew between the Eternal Flame and all the rest of us. Some little nobody plucked from obscurity and given the attention and praise that none of the guilds could ever earn. We built ourselves from the dirt and emptied our pocketbooks annually buying certification and lumithium from a family that could make wealth from nothing, and we were expected to be grateful to do so. When we looked up at what we wanted, you
were the first thing in the way.”
A chill ran down her spine.
Kaine looked across the room. “When Morrough came here, he didn’t even have to offer immortality or riches. He just offered to remove those who would never let us rise further. With the Holdfasts gone, the Faith’s grip on Paladia was supposed to crumble. An easy takeover. The city should have barely been affected. Even the Institute was intended to be left intact.”
“But then your father was arrested.”
He nodded, his eyes flat. “But then my father was arrested, and it was all a lie anyway, but by the time those who’d object realised that, it was too late for them.”
“There were Undying who objected?” Her pulse sped up, thinking about potential sympathisers. This was critical information. This could change
everything.
He nodded idly.
“Who?” She leaned in. “Who objected?”
“You really want to know?”
She nodded, fervently.
He reached out, fingers wrapping around her throat, and pulled her close.
“Basilius Blackthorne. Recognise that name?” have thrownHer blood ran cold. Yes, she knew it.
“Blackthorne was—?” uld have cost“Quite the monster now, isn’t he? I told you about the phylacteries, if you’d everremember?” His fingers around her throat tightened. She gave a small nod, heart rising.
“After I killed Principate Apollo, Basilius said he’d never agreed to such methods and bloodshed. Morrough—he still went by Morrough back then— pretended to give this some consideration. He called a meeting of us all. We hadn’t known our numbers until that night. Morrough said he wanted us all there, to see him change Basilius’s mind. He brought out Basilius’s
phylactery in a box and reminded us that we had all entrusted ourselves to all the rest ofhim, and then he began carving into it using a talon ring. Basilius began to scream and tear at his own body, until there were pieces of him all over the floor, but it never stopped, he just kept regenerating. Over and over until the floor was covered. When Morrough was finally done, I’m told Basilius went home and ate his wife alive in their marriage bed. I believe he had children, too. All gone.”
Kaine described it without emotion, his fingers still wrapped around her throat. e didn’t even“We are all expendable to Morrough. So you see, I am intimately acquainted with the illusion of choice.” He smiled, slow and cruel. “That’s why I recognise it.”
She shook her head, and he gripped her tighter, until she could feel her pulse against his palm. Her heart was pounding in her chest. He leaned in, looming over her, and she could tell he wanted her to be afraid of him. But she wasn’t. Not anymore.
“Luc isn’t like that,” she said. “The reason I remain loyal to him is because
I know he’d do the same for me.”
His eyes turned black. “Really?”
His thumb had found the curve of her jaw. There was faint colour in the pale hollows of his cheeks. His eyes darted down to her lips, and she felt the draw between them. A feeling like a string instrument, stretched taut and ready to vibrate.
He drew her closer until their faces were nearly touching, and everything around them seemed to fade away. She watched his lips part, hesitating, so close she could taste his breath. He inhaled.
“And what would your dear Luc say if he learned how you let his father’s killer buy you like a whore?” As he spoke, his free hand found her waist and he pulled her close, hand sliding up her body, groping her as if he were about to push her down and ravish her there on the bare floor.
But his eyes were cold.
There was no desire. It was a pantomime of their kiss, now performed with rough indifference, as he reminded her of who it was she’d willingly given herself to.
She jerked away, skittering across the floor until she was out of reach.
He just laughed.
Her cheekbones ached, body going hot and cold as she curled inward, trying to compose herself. As if there was any point. What a grotesque and
pathetic creature she was.
Property. No, not even that.
She was a trinket. Something he’d thrown into his demands. So insignificant that Ilva and Crowther had looked at her and seen no reason to refuse.
He could talk all he wanted about how her education was to leverage her, how the Holdfasts were to blame. But he was the one who’d turned her into a whore.
Sometimes she wished she’d died in the hospital with her father, to be remembered and mourned for her possibilities, rather than live day by day growing ever lesser. Now it didn’t matter if she’d been an alchemist, or a healer, or anything else. To anyone who ever learned of it, she would only be that one thing. Women were always defined by the lowliest thing they could be called. m is becauseBut worse still was knowing all that and still craving those rare moments in which he was gentle. Because that was all she had left.
“I have to go,” she finally forced out. “Do you have—do you have any information this week?”
It was almost ironic to ask that question right then.
He reached into his discarded coat, pulling out an envelope, its edges bloodstained.
He tossed it, letting it land on the floor between them.
HELENA WAS OUTWARDLY CALM WHEN she returned to Headquarters, but her hands were shaking as she presented the shards to Crowther and received instructions to have Shiseo analyse them. She took them to the lab and wente were about down to the hospital for her shift.
She wished it wasn’t such a quiet day. She couldn’t stop thinking.
She returned to the empty lab after curfew and sat, left alone with herself.rformed with It was nearly the winter solstice. The North had many feasting traditions from back when they’d slaughter the animals they couldn’t feed through the winter before the new year set in, sharing supplies so that everyone would survive until spring.
In modern times, supplies had been replaced with gifts: books, crafts, puzzles, things to while away the dark hours of the long Northern winters.
Helena had never been very good at gifts.
Her singular success had been a map she’d given Luc, upon which she’d marked a route to all the places they’d travel someday.
She hadn’t given anything last year, but this year she’d thought of making medicine kits, with some basics that were good to have on hand in case the field medics weren’t nearby. But Ilva had made no mention this year of her ed her into aseeing Luc or anyone else for solstice, so she’d discarded the idea.
After a few minutes, she went over and opened a cabinet, pulling out vials from various shelves, laying them out on a strip of waxed canvas, making marks on the fabric as she arranged everything to fit, blinking hard every few minutes. ould only beShe had a job. She had to do it.
THE ICY, MISTING RAIN MADE it hard to see when Helena crossed the bridge thee moments in next week. She gripped her foraging knife close as she walked through the Outpost. It couldn’t be transmuted without losing its edge, but it was still serviceable.
It was going to be a while before she had an alchemy knife again.
A person couldn’t lose an alchemical weapon and expect to get a new one without an explanation. If Helena said she lost it, she’d be subject to discipline and, as a noncombatant, be placed at the bottom of the wait list. If she attributed the loss to an attack, she would have to specify which attack.
Until Ilva or Crowther could find an unaccounted-for alchemy knife, Helena would have to make do.
The tenement was so cold that day, her breath condensed into a wisping cloud in the room. Kaine entered a minute later, shoving a hood back from his face. She looked away but couldn’t help but notice his black uniform was
drenched.
“Where is your knife?”
Her heart sank. She’d hoped he wouldn’t notice immediately.
“Oh.” Her voice lifted in an awkward attempt at casualness. “Well—” She swallowed. “I lost it.”
“You—lost it?” He said it slowly, and she could hear the implied use of the word idiot punctuating each word. “When?”
She was still staring at the floor, watching his feet. He moved lightly, almost like a cat, making very little noise.
“Last week.”
His feet stilled. “You were attacked?”
He came towards her very quickly, and his eyes had that intense gleam to them, looking her up and down.
She shook her head. “No, I broke it. I needed tools for surgery when you wouldn’t wake up. So I made them.”
She risked glancing up then to gauge his expression, and rather enjoyed the stupefied look on his face.
“I’ll get a new one,” she added hurriedly. “There’s just some—logistical rd every fewdelays. Anyway, I brought you a present,” she said, forcing her voice to be bright.
She rummaged through her satchel, finding the wax-cloth case, and hurriedly held it out.
“It’s—it’s an, um—it’s an emergency healing kit,” she said, trying to explain herself quickly before he could refuse it. “I made it with things that will work with your regeneration.”
This seemed to catch him fully off guard. He stopped short and took it, then—realising that she was waiting expectantly—he sighed and flipped it open. “You realise I can buy medicine, and I don’t particularly need it.”
“Not these. I developed them. They’re designed to work with vivimancy— or regeneration in your case.”
She took a hesitant step closer, pointing at the various vials.
“They’re all labelled, and I added notes about exactly how to use them on the waxed paper here. These are made to support transmutational healing.
Traditional medicine can interfere, so I’ve been developing things that complement a regenerative healing process.”
She pointed to the nearest vial. “This is yarrow powder infused with copper, to slow bleeding. You pack it around the wound before bandaging. I know you’re used to just letting yourself regenerate, but slowing blood loss is still a good idea. This”—she tapped a blue-green bottle—“will support blood regeneration; it has a high concentration of the components your body needs, so you’re not giving yourself a deficit of crucial minerals and other things your body requires to function. This is the salve I developed for your back, ied use of thefor topical pain. If you have a wound that doesn’t heal, you can at least numb the area until—”
“Until what?” He looked sharply at her then.
She knew he expected her to say something like, Until you can come to me, and I’ll tenderly nurse you to health.
“That’s the other part of your present,” she said, meeting his eyes. “I thought I could show you some healing techniques, so you can do them yourself. I know most of the time you don’t need it, but if you’re strategic and direct the way your body regenerates, you’ll recover faster.”
She reached towards him slowly. “May I?” r enjoyed theHe gave the barest nod.
She took his hand and set it on her own arm, then rested her fingers over his. She ran her resonance through his fingers, into her own body, the sensation creating an almost ghostly feeling under her skin.
“Of course, my body isn’t the same as yours, but—most of the anatomy is, and you do regenerate according to the same basic rules.” She spoke in the efficient way that she’d taught the trainees. She was grateful now for the practice. “You’ve mentioned that regeneration starts with the most vital parts of the body: brain, organs, limbs. When you lost your arm, the reason it didn’t regenerate was because you’d been bleeding too long, and you’d already had to heal from extensive burns. Just because you have the vitality to regenerate doesn’t mean that you necessarily have the physical resources for it. Those have to come from somewhere. If you’re badly injured, you vivimancy—might not have a resonance stable enough to heal yourself, but you can guide it, and the kit can provide support.”
She ploughed through as much information as she could. Showing him all the different systems in the body, how they interacted, how a disruption in one place could have effects elsewhere.
She kept rattling off tips for as long as she could, working through all the major systems as quickly as possible.
“Eyes are awful. I mean, hopefully if you ever lost one, it would just grow back, but if not …” She exhaled. “The tissue doesn’t matrice the same way. blood loss isIt’s very tedious work, and nerve-racking. You should—probably come to me
for that. Well, I mean—”
She stammered.
“The High Necromancer doesn’t have eyes,” he said.
She stopped short and looked up. “What?” t least numbShe’d never seen Morrough, but she’d heard that during his rare appearances, he wore a golden mask—a large crescent that obscured most of
his face and fanned out like horns on each side of his head. An eclipsing sun.
“It’s rather gory to look at, but he doesn’t seem to mind.” He pulled his hand free, clearly done with the lecturing. “It’s like someone burned them out. He uses his resonance to see.”
“I didn’t know that was possible.” She rubbed her hands on her skirt.
“Well, that’s the basics. If there’s anything you’d want added to the kit, or ideas you have, I can try to make them.”
“The basics?” He pulled a watch out of his pocket. “You’ve been talking for over an hour.”
She fumbled for her own watch, certain he was mistaken. No, he wasn’t.
She was going to be late for her shift if she didn’t leave.
“I mean … it was still only the basics,” she said defensively, but she added, “I should go. Happy solstice. I hope your days grow brighter.”
He did not return the season’s greeting but then spoke as she reached the
door.
“Marino.”
She tensed, looking back. He was still standing where she’d left him, irritation evident in the sweep of his eyes. He looked her up and down as if debating something.
“I have—something for you,” he finally said, as if having a tooth extracted.
He pulled out something rolled up in an oilcloth and held it towards her.
Inside lay a set of beautiful daggers, sheathed in mesh holsters. Helena felt her resonance respond before she even touched them.
“The longer one goes on your back, the smaller one on your forearm,”
Kaine said when she was silent. “They’re sized for you. Titanium and nickel is a mnemonic alloy, which will allow you to transmute them further than most weapons; they’ll still return to form. It has three memory shapes depending on the resonance phase you use, and you can alter them if you wish. That’s why the sheaths are malleable.”
She picked up the larger dagger. y come to meAfter the months of training with a steel weapon, the dagger hardly weighed anything. She slipped it from the sheath, and it sang in her fingers.
She barely had to focus her resonance before it morphed, maintaining its razor edge but changing shape and length entirely, unfurling like a ribbon into a long, flexible whiplike blade. She altered the timbre of her resonance just slightly, and without her even needing to guide the metal, the blade morphed back into a perfect dagger.
She let out an unsteady breath, hardly able to believe that anything could be so easy to transmute. It was as effortless as moving her own fingers, and it weighed nothing.
She couldn’t stop turning them over, taking in every detail, the weight and texture, the incredible sharpness of the blades. There were elegant curving details like vines on the hilts that made the grip more secure.
She didn’t know what to say. Thank you felt entirely insufficient.
Kaine was watching her, his eyes intent, but the expression vanished the instant she looked up. His eyebrows drew down. “You are not ever allowed to take these apart or turn them into medical instruments. Not for anyone.”
She flushed. “I thought you said the shapes were programmable.”
“Not enough to be entirely deconstructed. Are we clear, Marino?” His voice was icy.
“All right. I promise,” she said, rolling her eyes. Trust Kaine to ruin any moment.
After a pause she looked at him again. “Thank you. I don’t even know what to say. They’re beautiful.”
He avoided meeting her eyes. “It’s nothing.” He cleared his throat. “I’m glad you like them, though, because I expect you to wear both every time you extracted.set foot outside of Headquarters. Actually—you should always be wearing them. They shouldn’t come off unless you’re asleep. These do not belong in the bottom of your satchel. When you arrive here, I will expect to see them already on you, every time. Are we clear?”
“Yes, I’ll wear them,” she said as if it were a concession. She didn’t ever want to put them down.
“Good.” He shifted. “Well, this has been delightful. I can’t even remember how many times I’ve wished someone would lecture me on the systems of the human body.”
She looked up, and he smiled insincerely at her.
He started turning to leave and then paused. “Now that you have a decent weapon, I think we’ll move on to training that’s a bit more intense. Be ready for that next week.” He held out an envelope. “My latest instalment.”
As she reached to take it, he held on until she met his eyes.
“I must say, Marino, you’ve ended up being quite expensive.”
ingers, and it
very time you
en remember