fully-equipped with enough weaponry and training gear for three people. What did one buy their lover who was also their rescuer and their provider? With whom they killed on a regular basis?
She’d been gearing up to an actual anxiety attack about it before she’d stumbled across a website for a small, boutique secondhand bookshop. International shipping had been offered, but there wasn’t anything so convenient as an online catalogue available. She’d had to make a phone call, jangled nerves soothed by the smooth, accented tones of the London shopkeeper, and he’d been able to steer her toward three very old hardback books about King Arthur, complete with illustrations, which Beck unwrapped now.
The leather covers were embossed and gold-lettered; when she’d wrapped them, Rose had marveled at the wonderful way they smelled; at the yellowed edges of the pages, and, best of all, a handwritten inscription inside the covers. These books had been a gift before, more than a hundred years ago, to someone named Tom, Love, Elizabeth.
She bit her lip, tingling with fresh nerves, as Beck opened the cover and passed a hand across that inscription now, fingertip pressed to the little heart. Rose had added her own above it. For Arthur, Love, Rose.
He lifted his head, and caught her gaze, and his smile was the very best thing that had ever happened at Christmastime.
~*~
When she let slip that she’d never been party to a snowball fight, Beck insisted they rectify that immediately. Kay begged off. “I’m too old to be falling down in the snow.”
It turned out that getting hit in the face with snow burned, and Beck fought dirty.
Wet, shivering, laughing so hard her ribs ached, they finally sought the warmth of the fire when it began to grow dim, and by then the roast was ready to come out of the oven.
After, Kay put her foot down, and they all watched It’s a Wonderful Life on the big TV in the parlor, dark save the screen and the twinkling colored lights of the tree.
“Thank you,” Rose said, when they were getting ready for bed.
Beck was folding back the sheets and glanced up. “For what?” Light, casual, as if he didn’t know.
“This is the best Christmas I’ve ever had.”
His head tilted, expression sad for a brief flicker – a deeply sympathetic sort of sadness – before a slow smile warmed his face. He seemed to glow. “Me, too.”
They met on their knees in the center of the mattress, slow, sure touches, and warm, lingering kisses.
Later – days, weeks, years – she would look back on this moment; treasure it; carry it in her pocket and rub it like a talisman, until it was smooth and vague. One of the best moments, and one of the last, before everything went to hell.
Literally.
TWENTY
After New Year’s, hunting began again in earnest. Castor seemed to have dealers everywhere – and enforcers, too. The nightly news fixated on the violence in the streets, the bodies, the drug crisis. One ugly story after the next, and it was clear the crime families were running the city, rather than any sort of government official.
The rain slackened to a thin mist, and the security lights from the warehouse behind them glimmered on the surface of the river in front of them. Rose leaned her forearms on the metal rail at the water’s edge and fished a bit of clean cloth from inside her jacket. She wiped her knife clean with long, careful strokes, using her thumb nail to press the cloth right along the hilt where the blood had gone dry and gummy.
Beside her, Beck lit a cigarette and exhaled smoke in thick, gray plumes. “He knows his people are being killed,” he grumbled. “Why isn’t he changing the way he operates?”
It had been seeming too easy. Anyone who left their men out to dry like that was either stupidly uncaring…or he meant for this to happen.
The latter idea left her deeply unsettled, but she didn’t say anything. She slipped her knife back into its sheath, and bit back what she wanted to tell him.
Bit it back the next night, and the next. When her knife sank deep. When blood splattered up a wall. Rose kept holding, and holding, and holding her tongue, for three weeks. Until she couldn’t anymore.
They were in the basement, sparring on the mats in the center of the floor. He never truly sparred with her – didn’t grapple with her or throw punches beyond the sorts of slow, telegraphed blows he