Page 27 of Shatter

I don't know if he hit a wall or something upstairs.

His eyes find mine and hold, pale gray in the lamplight, and something in his face loosens, like he's been holding his breath for an hour.

"Hey." His voice is rough. "You're awake."

"She's a tough one." Vail stands and stretches, one hand pressed to the small of her back, and gathers up her jacket and her book. "Pills in the cup are for pain, two more at eight if she needs them. If her breathing changes or she spikes a fever, you call me, not Aesir. Understand?"

"Yes, ma'am." He doesn't take his eyes off me.

She stops beside him in the doorway and says something too low for me to hear.

He nods once, looking at the floor.

Then she's gone, and the door clicks shut behind her.

He doesn't come closer.

He stands with his back against the door while I lie in his bed, and neither of us says anything as the fan turns.

I've been alone in a room with a man before.

With Desmond, in the study at his house in West Vancouver, the door locked behind us while he poured two glasses of scotch and told me how our life would go.

The smell of the scotch comes back first, peaty and sharp, and my heels are already digging into the mattress, pushing me back an inch, then another, until my shoulders hit the headboard.

Hakon watches me do it.

He doesn't say anything about it.

Slowly, he reaches over and turns the knob of the door and pulls it open a few inches, so a thin line of light from the hall falls across the floor.

"It doesn't lock." He lets go of the knob. "It's never locked. If you want out, it's right there."

The strip of hall light lies across the concrete like a path, and I can't stop looking at it.

Then he carries the wooden chair Vail left beside the bed across the room and sets it down against the wall beside the door.

Not in front of it.

Beside it, off to the left, so the open doorway sits between us, clear, with nothing in the way.

He sits.

He stretches his long legs out across the floor and tips his head back against the wall, arms crossed over his chest.

"You should sleep." He lets his eyes fall shut.

"You're going to sleep there?" I pull the blanket higher.

"Yeah." He doesn't open them. "I've slept in worse chairs."

"It's your bed." My fingers twist in the sheet.

"It's your bed tonight." A yawn cracks through the words. "Go to sleep, Katie."

The name sits wrong in his mouth.

He says it slowly, carefully, like a man handing back something he knows is counterfeit, and doesn't make a fuss about it.