Medsi

[Natalie Grey]

She watched him carefully, not from doubt, but to find a foothold. Natalie was fully prepared to bear the weight alone, but she refused to walk the path she’d watched Jay choose before her: singular, alone, refusing to share the burden in case it dragged them both down. Their lives hadn’t been stable in a long time, and it hadn’t ended when they finally left Mexico’s bloody trials behind. The experience had bound them in a way Natalie had never tried to shake loose, nor wanted to. But in grief or blindness Jay seemed to think her life had gently returned to its normal currents, unaffected by the tide of his. Or maybe he simply hoped for it. Natalie had been living in the margins of something unsafe long before he’d entered her life, though. Jay just didn’t see it. Or he didn’t want to.

She saw the moment wariness sharpened him. It was a soldier’s instinct which assessed anew, no emotional pull but for the fact he called her Nat; he rarely did that, and it felt more real than the mechanical kiss on her cheek that morning. Natalie didn’t wilt when his brow darkened, or shift under the weight of it. Her voice remained soft, unruffled. She didn’t stall. It wasn’t from lack of concern, or absence of fear, just careful self-control. “Someone didn’t appreciate the questions I’ve been asking, and they sent a warning. I’m fine. Well, more fine than you. It was just the apartment – and no, I wasn’t there when it happened.”

Only for the aftermath, once Toma had left her to wade through the wreckage. It didn’t seem wise to add how she’d spent her evening, though: she wanted to haul Jay back from the edge, not pluck a few more fingers loose. The whys were a little more complicated to unravel – while standing in a hospital waiting room anyway. And Jay wasn’t exactly known for weathering storms without reaction. But there were no shadows in her expression, just the rawness of her honesty. Natalie habitually held herself apart from others, but she wasn’t alone. She had friends in Moscow by now, family who already proved their devotion by plucking her from the jaws of hell when they thought she needed it. But it was him she had chosen to confide in. It was him she had travelled half way round the city in the early hours to find. She would tell him everything so long as he could bear to hear it. Once they were somewhere they could talk properly. And only after a doctor had looked at his hand.