Page 19 of Claimed By River

I sit with it for a long time before I go downstairs and tell the others.

Raiden takes it the way he takes everything, arms folded, saying nothing until he’s turned it over completely. “Eight months. He filed before he found her.”

“He filed while he was still looking,” Royal says quietly. “He was building somewhere to stand before he ever picked up the phone.”

“So we take him,” Roman says.

“We vote on him,” Raiden corrects. “All four. One target at a time, and nobody moves alone. That hasn’t changed because it’s Nadia.” He looks at me when he says it, and I know exactly why.

Because it has changed. For me, it’s changed completely.

Royal pulls up something else on his screen. “There’s a clock, too. Ivan’s birthday is nineteen days out.” He glances over. “After that, whatever leverage the marriage bought us is gone.”

Nineteen days.

⁎⁎⁎

She’s been inside that apartment for nine days.

I notice it the way I notice everything about her now, which is to say constantly and against my own better judgment. She doesn’t complain. She reorganizes my kitchen, argues with me about towels, and doesn’t once mention that the last time she stood outside in daylight, she was somebody else.

“Get your shoes,” I tell her on the tenth night.

She looks up from the couch, immediately suspicious. “Why?”

“Because I said so.”

“That’s not a reason.”

“It’s the only one you’re getting.”

She grumbles the entire way down to the street, right up until she sees the bike, and then she stops talking altogether. I hand her the spare helmet. She turns it over in her hands like she’s never held one.

“Have you ever been on one?”

“My father would have shot the man who put me on one.”

“Good.” I swing a leg over. “Get on.”

She’s stiff for the first two blocks, and then she isn’t. Somewhere around the third mile, her arms tighten around my waist, her cheek settles between my shoulder blades, and she stops holding herself apart from me. Atlanta streaks past us in hues of amber and red. I take the long way for no reason at all.

When we stop at a light on Edgewood, a woman is breaking down a flower stall for the night, hauling in buckets. Nadia turns her head and looks. Just looks, the whole length of the light, and doesn’t say anything about it.

I file it away.

***

“You’re doing it wrong.”

I look up from the bed.

Nadia stands in the doorway wearing one of my old T-shirts over leggings, her dark brown hair piled into a messy bun that somehow makes her look even prettier. She folds her arms across her chest and watches me with the unmistakable expression of someone preparing to criticize my work.

“I’ve made a bed before.”

“I’m starting to doubt that.”

I tug the comforter into place. “It looks fine.”