sparking with little but desperate intuition. I needed to find Simon—he could help—he had been here.
My eyes rolled in their sockets, desperate to make sense out of what they saw. The mess in the apartment wasn’t large. The explosives had only held a big enough boom to blow apart whatever barricading Rio had put on the door.
Blow it all apart—from the inside.
The conclusion came too slow and after far too long. The bits of twisted-up items from my emergency supplies strewn across the stove. The shredded, burned plastic on the floor, suggesting some sort of controlled gas pressure explosion made in a food container. The shock wave and blast pattern sluggishly sketched themselves out for me, every number coming stubborn and difficult, until a wobbly half picture centered itself just inside where the door had been.
The Australian hadn’t been rescued. He had escaped.
Someone groaned.
I twitched toward the bathroom, groping for my gun. Had I left the Colt on the pavement outside? No, here it was—but my hand wouldn’t close on it, my tendons stretching the joints into unreal talons.
The flimsy bathroom door was shut, but it had been partially shredded by shrapnel from the explosion, a large chunk of the lower half missing.
“Cas…” a voice croaked.
It wasn’t relief that grabbed me by the throat—I was too far gone for that. More like a driving need. With a herculean heave of my remaining energy and sanity, I hauled myself at the bathroom door, shoved it open, and fell inside.
On the floor, pupils dilated and bleeding copiously from a head wound, was Simon.
twenty-one
“CAS,” SIMON said. He reached out and gripped my arm.
Aren’t we a pair, drifted through the haze of my mind.
Then the haze lifted, sloughed off like a skin I had shed and left behind. I rolled up to sitting, pulling away from Simon. I felt like myself—alert, whip-fast, and capable of instant momentum calculations. Like I had just had a cleansing shower for my brain, with everything settled back the way it should be.
I blinked at Simon and scrabbled backward, my heels hitting rubble. “Holy shit. What did you do?”
“I’m sorry…” he murmured. “I didn’t mean, I just wanted you to … feel better…”
Black suspicion reared in me at the wrongness of it. Simon had just reached in and—fixed me—with no warning, no permission, no effort on my own part—
But what was wrong with that? I did feel better now, didn’t I? Everything set back in its proper place.
I had to … do something, tell people, I had learned something …
A man slashed at his own face. But dimly, like a reflection of a reflection that had been dulled by years.
And Simon was hurt. I needed to take care of him. Everything else could wait.
I managed to help him up and over to the apartment’s threadbare sofa, where I set to work cleaning his scalp wound and brought over the medical kit I’d had stored here. The injury didn’t seem deep, but he was worryingly woozy.
Well. Worrying if he was the sort of person I’d worry about …
I blinked.
“Cassandra,” he murmured.
My fingers became gentler as they carded away the black curls of his hair. No matter what I thought of him, I didn’t like to see him hurt. It made me feel protective of him in a way I never had before.
His hand shot up and locked around my wrist.
“What is it? Did that hurt?” I tried to soften my touch.
“I’m sorry,” he gasped. “Cas—I’m trying to stop—” His eyes went in and out of focus. A tear slid down the side of his nose, leaving a trail in the dust and sweat.
“Stop what?” I said. “Lie still. You almost certainly have a concussion.”
“Cas…”
My senses fuzzed for a moment, like I was seeing two of him, like I was living two identical moments, but in one I was tender and concerned and in the other turning away in frantic urgency.
The world snapped back into clarity, settling on concerned.
“What happened?” I asked. “Can you tell me?”
He shut his eyes. Even though he was lying still, his body was strained, his fist locked in the ratty blanket across the cushions. “I didn’t think anyone could hurt me,” he said.
He sounded like a lost little boy.
Well, I’d hurt him before, I recalled with some embarrassment. If you counted punching him when I’d really wanted to kill him.
I was abashed at the memory. I had been so naïve.
Hurt people … I had been worried, a few minutes ago. About somebody being hurt. Who? It