“DON’T DO IT, GRAY,” BREE says. “Don’t do anything he tells you to.”
“You really shouldn’t test me,” the Order member says. “After all, you know I have it in me to follow through.” He shifts so that he is no longer fully sheltered behind Bree. I can see only half his face, but my stomach drops. I’m looking in a mirror.
“You were dead. She shot you.”
“I was dying,” my Forgery corrects. “But stomach wounds are a slow, painful way to go, and it bought me time. Enough to be flown to Taem and receive expert medical care. So thank you for that. Now, put your gun down.”
With half his face still hidden behind Bree, I barely have a shot. Barely. I’ve never been good with handguns. Not like Bree. And if I hit her . . .
I tuck my elbow in, letting the gun train toward the ceiling.
“Dammit, Gray!”
“That’s a good boy. Now put it on the floor.”
“Don’t,” she says. “I’m begging you not to.”
But what am I supposed to do? What can I possibly do?
“Shoot him. Take any shot you’ve got,” she urges.
“So noisy.” The Forgery brings his blade to her lips and hushes her. She falls silent, but he continues to apply pressure, to the point that she gasps. The knife slips into her mouth and I can see it like a blister rising, pressing against her cheek from the inside. My blood thins at the sight of it, then slows at the words spilling from my Forgery. He makes his threats as though they are a song he enjoys singing: Bree has a dirty mouth . . . She used it as a weapon against him and he should take it from her . . . She’s a dog who needs a muzzle but perhaps she’d be safer without a set of lips at all.
Her eyes lock on mine and she rolls them. This is so like her to judge me even now, to criticize my hesitation. Like I have a mountain of options at my disposal. There is nothing to shoot, no part of the Forgery I can hit without also hitting her.
Bree slides her feet into a broader stance and rolls her eyes again. An exaggerated motion. And I understand.
She is going to roll.
Before I can reason with her, she stomps down on the Forgery’s foot. He howls. Then she bends, throwing her hips into his gut and rolling him clear off his feet and over her back. He smacks the floor, and my bullet finds him next. Twice. So there can be no mistake. I pick up Bree’s dropped weapon and double-check the Forgery. He’s gone. Gone for good.
But when I glance up, I realize worse damage has been done.
Bree is bleeding. Everywhere. There is so much blood I can’t tell where her mouth ends and the injury begins.
I rush to her, cup her face. His knife fought its way free. When she bent over to throw him off balance, she did so even with the knife pressed against the inside of her cheek, even when that motion required her to fight against the very edge of the blade.
The corner of her lip doesn’t end where it used to.
She’s not screaming in pain—not yet at least—but she’s sputtering as blood pools in her mouth, catching the overflow in her hands.
I tug her away from the window and down the hallway. The medical kits were abundant on the lower level, but here it feels like forever until I find one. I yank it from its brackets and pull Bree into a nearby bathroom. I drop our guns and riffle through the kit. I pull out bandages and press them against the wound.
Bree swears awkwardly through her ruined mouth. “Is it bad?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say, because I know she doesn’t want a lie. “But you’ll be fine.”
I find a surgical needle, medical thread. I can stitch, and I can fix her. Not that she’s broken. She has never, ever been capable of being broken. Not even at the hands of that worthless lump of flesh cooling down the hall—some horrible shadow of myself.
Bree sits on the edge of the sink as I try to clean away the excess blood, but the bandage catches the ragged flesh of her cheek. And that’s when the tears come.
She’s caught sight of herself in the mirror.
I’ll admit it’s nasty. It’s one of the worst, most unnatural things I’ve ever seen, a smile that stretches into her cheek. She swears again. The tears fall. I tell her I can make it better even though I’m not positive I can.
I clean the wound with a solution I find in the kit. She screams, her hands digging into my forearms.
“You’re okay. You’re going to be fine.”
She digs her nails deeper into my skin.
Next come the stitches. The needle snags as I force it into her cheek. It takes all my self-restraint to calm my shaking hand, to continue drawing her cheek together, to look at her perfect face and know I’m going to scar her. That this, even the good I’m trying to do now, is another wound she’ll wear for the rest of her life.
I’ve sewn to the corner of her mouth before it dawns on me that I don’t know how to close off the stitches. I wish Emma was here to make this right. Her work would be cleaner, less intrusive. But she’s not, and so I do as best I can. I tie off my work, snip the excess string with a flimsy pair of scissors I find in the kit. The moment I finish, I kiss Bree. Right on that wrecked mouth, as far away from the fresh stitches as possible. She tastes like blood and I hate that it makes me cringe.
I throw the dirty bandages and utensils in the sink and dress the injury. It’s bulky and awkward, the way the gauze is taped over the lower half of her cheek. She’s shaking, I realize. Her entire body is convulsing.
“What is it? Pain? Do you need something?”
The front of her leather jacket is shiny with blood, and a few dried streaks trail down her chin and neck. Something defeated is written on her features, a sort of doubt and hopelessness I’ve sensed in her only once before—when we were trapped beneath Burg and she cried against my chest in a pitch-black holding cell.
“Hey.”
She won’t pull her gaze away from the mirror.