HER

  Day three in the safehouse, and here is what I knew about the man who kidnapped me:

  He didn't sleep.

  Not in any way I recognized as sleep. He'd go still against the wall—always the wall nearest the door, always seated, always with his back to the concrete and his eyes on the room—and his breathing would slow, and his body would settle, and for maybe forty minutes he'd exist in some twilight state between rest and surveillance that didn't look like either. Then he'd open his eyes. Fully awake. No transition. No groggy blink. One second unconscious, the next operational, like someone had flipped a switch.

  It was deeply unsettling.

  He didn't eat enough. Three meals a day for a metabolism running at his rate should have been six. He'd eat whatever I put in front of him—because Lena and I had taken over the kitchen, and the kitchen was also my lab, and there was a territorial dynamic happening there that I was choosing not to examine—but he ate the way he did everything else. Efficiently. Without pleasure. Like fueling was a mechanical obligation rather than a human experience.

  He took up too much space. Not physically—though physically, yes, the man was built on a scale that made the loft feel like a studio apartment. But spatially. Gravitationally. He warped the room around him. When he stood by the window checking the feeds, the window was his. When he sat against the wall, the wall was his. When he walked through the kitchen—my kitchen, my workspace, the six square feet of counter I had claimed with the ferocity of a woman staking a flag on colonized territory—the air shifted. Displaced. Like the molecules themselves were adjusting to accommodate something denser than they were designed for.

  I was aware of him constantly.

  Not the way you're aware of a threat—though he was that. Not the way you're aware of a roommate—though he was, unfortunately, that too. I was aware of him the way you're aware of a sound you can't identify. A frequency just at the edge of hearing. A vibration you feel in your teeth and your chest and the spaces between your ribs, and you can't locate the source, and you can't make it stop, and after three days you start to suspect the source is you.

  This was a problem.

  This was a significant, escalating, biochemically inconvenient problem, and I was going to solve it the way I solved every problem: by ignoring it completely and focusing on work.

  The work was going well. By "well" I mean the compound was stabilizing, the molecular adjustments were holding, and I'd managed to extend the effective window from nine hours to approximately fourteen, which meant fewer injections, which meant fewer instances of the thing I was about to describe, which was the other problem. The bigger problem. The problem that made the first problem look like a minor scheduling conflict.

  The injections.

  God, the injections.

  Here is how it works. Every fourteen hours—every fourteen hours, like clockwork, like a debt coming due—I have to put a needle in this man's body. The compound needs to be administered intravenously. It needs to hit the bloodstream fast and clean, which means finding a vein, which means proximity, which means my hands on his skin.

  The clinical version: I locate the antecubital vein in the crook of his elbow. I swab. I insert. I depress the plunger. I withdraw. Thirty seconds. Maybe forty-five if the vein is being difficult.

  The actual version: I stand close enough to count his eyelashes. His arm is out, extended, offered—and the word offered is doing a lot of work in that sentence because there is something about a man this dangerous presenting his arm to you, holding still while you put a needle in him, trusting you with the specific vulnerability of a vein—that does things to the nervous system that have no business in a clinical setting.

  His skin is hot. Always hot. Hotter in the crook of the elbow where the blood runs close, where I can feel his pulse against my fingertips, and his pulse does something when I touch him. It accelerates. Not much. Not enough for him to acknowledge. But enough for me to feel, because my fingers are on his vein and a vein does not lie.

  He watches me. The whole time. Those dark eyes tracking my hands with a focus that is entirely too much for a routine medical procedure. He doesn't look at the needle. He looks at my hands. At my face. At the space between my eyebrows where I frown when I'm concentrating, which I know because Lena mentioned it once in a tone that suggested she found the entire situation unbearably entertaining.

  He holds his breath when the needle goes in. Not because it hurts—this man's pain tolerance makes my dental experiences look like a spa day. He holds his breath because of the proximity. Because I'm close. Because for thirty to forty-five seconds, twice a day, the woman who holds his life in a syringe is standing inches away with her hand on his arm and her focus on his blood, and he doesn't know what to do with that.

  Neither do I.

  "Today's cocktail," I said, snapping the air bubble from the syringe with a flick I'd practiced until it was muscle memory. "New formulation. I adjusted the binding affinity. It should run smoother."

  He sat on the stool at the kitchen counter. Rolled his sleeve. The forearm that emerged was a topographic map of damage—scars layered over scars, the skin pale where it had healed thin and flushed where the blood ran hot beneath it. I'd memorized his veins by now. The specific geography of them. I could have drawn his vascular system from memory, which was information I absolutely did not need and could not return.

  I stepped close. Swabbed. My fingers found the vein—and there it was. The pulse. Kicking up. A fraction faster than resting. A fraction that meant I was not the only one who found these sessions complicated.

  "Arm's tense," I said. "Relax."

  "I'm relaxed."

  "Your brachioradialis is contracted. That's not relaxed. That's a man pretending to be relaxed, which is the opposite of relaxed."

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  A beat. Something shifted in his arm. The muscle releasing, degree by degree, under my fingers. Not because I'd told him to—because my hand was on his skin and some part of his autonomic system had decided, without consulting the rest of him, to yield.

  I inserted the needle. Depressed the plunger. The compound hit his bloodstream and I watched the reaction travel—the faint shudder, the microsecond of tension as the formula bonded, the slow exhale as his system accepted it and the heat began, incrementally, to bank.

  His eyes were on my face. I could feel them like sunlight through a window. Warm. Focused. Too much.

  "Done," I said. Withdrew. Capped. Stepped back.

  He didn't roll his sleeve down immediately. He sat there, looking at the puncture site, at the tiny bead of blood that welled and caught the light. Then he looked at me.

  "It is smoother," he said. Quiet. Like the observation cost him something.

  I turned away. Cleaned the syringe. Cleaned the swab. Cleaned the counter. Cleaned things that didn't need cleaning, because I needed to do something with my hands that wasn't touching him.

  Behind me, I heard him roll his sleeve down. Stand. Walk to the window. Resume his position as the most stationary, infuriating, overwhelmingly present man I had ever shared a confined space with.

  Lena, who had watched the entire exchange from her cot with the rapt attention of a woman watching her favorite reality show, caught my eye.

  She mouthed: Oh my God.

  I mouthed back: Shut up.

  She grinned. The grin of a woman who had identified a situation with devastating accuracy and intended to enjoy every second of my suffering.

  I went back to work. I had a compound to perfect, a dead brother's research to reconstruct, and a pharmaceutical corporation to eventually bring to its knees. I did not have time for whatever my nervous system thought it was doing every time I got within arm's reach of Kael.

  Absolutely not.

  Not even a little.

  My fingers were still warm where his skin had been.

  Shut up, I told my fingers.

  They did not shut up.

  Day five, and we had our first real fight.

  Not the productive kind. Not the kind where two adults identify a disagreement and resolve it through rational discourse. The kind where a man who runs at 39 degrees Celsius and a woman who sleeps with a blanket in July discover that sharing a climate-controlled space is an exercise in mutual psychological destruction.

  "It's a sauna in here," I said. I was sitting at the counter in a tank top and shorts, sweating, my hair up in a knot that had given up on structural integrity two hours ago. The loft didn't have air conditioning because the loft was a reinforced industrial bunker, not a Marriott. The single oscillating fan Lena had found in a supply closet was doing the work of a candle in a hurricane.

  "It's fine," Kael said. He was standing by the window. In a long-sleeved shirt. Buttoned. Like a man who had never once experienced the concept of being too warm because his baseline was "the surface of the sun."

  "It is not fine. It is actively hostile to human biology. My compound is degrading in the heat—do you know what happens to molecular stability above 27 degrees? It destabilizes. My work destabilizes. The thing keeping you alive destabilizes. So either we address the thermal situation or I start running synthesis outside on the fire escape in my underwear, and I don't think any of us want that."

  From the cot: "I mean," Lena said. "Speak for yourself."

  I pointed at her. "Not helpful."

  "Never claimed to be."

  Kael looked at me. At the counter. At the compound, amber and precious in its sealed container. Something calculated behind his eyes—the rapid cost-benefit analysis of a man weighing his comfort against his survival. The survival won. It always did.

  "I'll open the vents," he said.

  "The vents have been painted shut since the Clinton administration."

  He walked to the nearest vent. Gripped the grate with his bare hands. Pulled. The metal screamed. Paint cracked. The grate came free in a shower of dust and decades-old neglect. He set it on the floor. Moved to the next one. Same result. Same effortless destruction.

  I watched him peel open the ventilation system of a building with his bare hands and tried to maintain the appropriate level of professional indifference.

  Professional indifference was getting harder.

  "That'll move air," he said.

  "Thank you," I said.

  He nodded. Returned to the window. Rolled his sleeves down. Like the entire interaction—the casual, offhanded dismantling of industrial infrastructure with his hands for the sake of my compound, for the sake of my comfort, for the sake of me—was nothing.

  Lena was looking at me. I was looking at the vents. Fresh air was moving through the loft for the first time in years.

  "You're blushing," Lena said.

  "It's the heat."

  "It's really not."

  "Lena."

  "Maren."

  "If you value our friendship—"

  "Oh, we're friends now? Lovely. Friends tell friends when they're developing a deeply inconvenient attraction to a man who could literally tear a building apart with his hands and who also happens to rip open vents because you mentioned being warm."

  "That is not what's happening."

  "Your pupils are dilated."

  "I'm in a dim room."

  "Your pupils have been dilated since Tuesday."

  I threw a pen at her. She caught it. She was insufferable. She was also correct, which made her significantly more insufferable.

  At the window, Kael stood perfectly still. If he'd heard any of that—and he could hear a convoy at two blocks, so he had absolutely heard every word—his face betrayed nothing.

  But his ears were red.

  I'd never seen his ears turn red before.

  I filed that. In the folder. The growing, unwanted, increasingly dangerous folder that I was maintaining with the scientific rigor of a woman cataloging her own destruction.