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I take his face in my hands and make him look at me.

"I love you," I tell him.

He goes still inside me. Completely still. His eyes are wide and black in the lamplight.

"You don't have to say it back." I say it fast, before I lose my nerve. "I'm not asking you to. I just needed you to know. In case."

He doesn't say anything for a long moment. I watch something move across his face that I've never seen there, something raw and frightened and young. His throat works.

"I love you," he answers.

It comes out rough, like it's scraped the inside of him coming up. Then he says it again, quieter, his forehead against mine. And again, his mouth against my cheek. He starts to move inside me again and says it with every stroke, low and broken, into my hair, into my throat, against my lips, as if now that it's out he can't stop it coming.

"I've never said that," he breathes. "Not to anybody. Not once."

"Say it again."

He does. And he doesn't stop.

He reaches between us and finds my clit with his thumb and circles it slowly, in time with his strokes, and it builds in me different this time, deeper and slower, until I'm clinging to him with my nails in his back and my heels locked behind his thighs. When I come it's with my eyes open on his, and I feel myself clench around him in long waves. I watch it pull him over the edge with me. His face comes apart. He groans my name and buries himself deep and holds there, shaking, spilling into me, and I hold his head against my shoulder and don't let go.

Afterward we lie tangled under the wool blanket with the lantern turned low. His arm is heavy across my waist. My cheek is on his chest, over the word SACRED, and I can hear his heart under it, slowing.

"What if we die?" I ask the dark.

He's quiet for a long time. His thumb moves in a slow arc on my hip.

"Then we go together."

I lie there and listen to him breathe. His breath gets longer, heavier, and his thumb stops moving, and I think he's asleep. I think I'll stay awake and watch the lantern until three. I think it right up until I stop thinking anything at all.

CHAPTER 14

SILAS

Ilie beside her until her breathing tells me she's all the way under.

It takes a while. She fights it the way she fights everything, twitching awake twice and reaching for me in the dark, and both times I put my hand over hers on my chest and hold it there until her fingers go slack. The propane heater ticks. The lantern burns low and blue. At twelve-forty, her mouth falls open against my shoulder and stays that way, and I know.

I told her three o'clock. I swore it. She'll never forgive me for that part, and she'll be right not to.

But I've done the arithmetic the old man taught me, and it comes out the same every time. Three men, maybe four, in a stone room with one stair in and one stair out. A room built so nobody down there can run. Two of us going down that stair is two targets on a staircase. One of us is a shadow. And if it goes wrong with her beside me, I'll spend the last seconds I've got looking at her instead of at the man with the gun, and we'll both die in that room with our names on the wall beside our mothers’.

I ease out from under her arm an inch at a time. She murmurs something, curls into the warm place I've left, and settles.

I dress in the dark. Dry jeans from the shelf. A black thermal. The coveralls are no good, too loose, too loud. I take the Glock and two magazines and my knife, and a second knife from the shelf, short and double-edged, which I tape upside down to the inside of my left forearm below the stitches. From the Pelican case I take two packets of hemostatic gauze and a roll of tape and shove them in my back pocket. I've never once gone out without them. I've never once needed them.

At the door, I look back at her. She's a shape under the wool blanket, one hand hanging off the edge of the cot, her sister's locket gleaming in the lamplight at her throat.

I close the steel door behind me without a sound.

It's two miles through the marsh to the lease road and another mile and a half on foot from there into town, and I do it in a little over an hour, moving fast. The water's colder than it was at dusk. The moon's a sliver. Front Street is dead. The bank is dark, the hardware store is dark, and the only light on the whole block is the red glow of an EXIT sign behind the glass door of the old jail, which shouldn't have power at all.

Somebody turned the power on.

The green Chevy is parked in the alley behind the jail beside the broken pallets. Its engine is cold. There's a second truck behind it, a white F-250 with a toolbox across the bed and a Guidry Construction magnet on the door. I put my palm on the hood. Cold too. They've been here since before ten.

The back door isn't locked this time either. I ease it open and stand at the top of the basement stairs and listen.