By the time Raphael made it back to the guesthouse, the sky outside had gone fully bright. The room was empty, the small shoes that usually sat on the mat were gone. Elena had gone out somewhere.
"Strange. What does she have to do at this hour?"
He shook his head, collected a change of clothes, and went to the bathroom. The warm water worked at the dried blood on his skin, and where blood had mixed with dust and mud and rainwater it had consolidated into a grime that came off in pieces. He’d arrived looking less like a person and more like something that had crawled out of the ground, he’d even had to borrow money from the landlady to pay the taxi, given that the search of Blitz’s remains had produced only the half-moon badge and a hard decorative case, and he hadn’t had time yet to examine either.
The blood and mud and cold of the night came off steadily in the heat, and he stood under the water for a long time, until the tension finally unwound from his back and shoulders and his body remembered what relaxed felt like. He dried off, changed, and went back to the room.
His head touched the pillow and there was nothing after that.
---
Light moved across Raphael’s face, the pale blue of early morning first, then the flat white of midday, and finally the amber that belonged to late afternoon.
He opened his eyes slowly, and the depth of the sleep he’d come out of left a sense of strangeness, like a man who had been somewhere else for a long time.
From outside the room came the rhythmic sound of a knife on a cutting board. Beneath it, the rolling sound of something simmering. In the air, the smell of beef rendering in a pan, the fat crackling, and underneath it the lighter scent of something green.
From the living room, a television, a variety program’s host with the kind of voice that carries through walls.
He watched the orange sun through the window for a while. Long enough that he lost track of himself, of what came next, of what he was supposed to be. He was just there, looking at the light.
A warmth moved through him that he didn’t have a ready category for. Not relief exactly, and not comfort exactly, something quieter than either. Something that sat naturally in the chest without asking to be named.
The feeling of a home.
He exhaled through his nose, pressed both hands over his face and rubbed, and put his normal expression back on. He opened the door.
He’d forgotten to lock it when he came in. That wasn’t like him.
The sound that greeted him was familiar, bare feet on hardwood, quick and light. Elena appeared from the kitchen doorway with half her body and a full expression, grinning and holding a half-peeled potato. She was wearing home clothes and a kitchen apron.
"You’re up! I’m making something good tonight. I watched a video. I think you’ll like it."
She broke off and made a quick gesture when he moved toward the kitchen, expression shifting to something quite serious.
"Wait, stay there. Don’t come over, the food isn’t ready yet. I want it to be a surprise. Shoo. Don’t disturb me."
She made a face at him, entirely delighted with herself, and disappeared back into the kitchen.
Raphael rubbed his forehead, sat down on the sofa, and couldn’t quite help himself.
"Fine. I’m staying. Light on the salt though, better for you. And don’t let the broth boil dry."
Her voice came straight back through the kitchen wall, clear and cheerful.
"I know, I know. Stop nagging. Watch TV."
He exhaled a sound that was almost a laugh, picked up the remote, and sat back. His head still carried a faint pulse of discomfort, his circadian rhythm protesting again, the way it always did when he slept into the afternoon. He’d been doing that a lot lately.
He held the remote for a moment and then put it down without turning to the news. He didn’t need to watch it to know what was running. If the Archbishop had moved fast enough, if the Church’s operation had translated into the kind of institutional pressure it was capable of generating, then the city’s political tier was currently being taken apart at every level.
The people who had provided cover for the nightclub, the ones whose names were on that encrypted drive, would not be sleeping tonight.
But following it in real time meant wading through everything those same people would throw into the information space to counter it, fabricated developments, manufactured distractions, crisis management in the form of conflicting stories, social media flooding in twelve directions at once.
He’d spend hours verifying and cross-referencing and still come out uncertain. Better to wait. Let the false accounts collapse on their own. Come back to it in a few days and read the shape of what actually settled.
"I’ll need to ask Miguel about the people who were taken. And the ones in the castle." He pressed two fingers to his temple. "So much to deal with."
He set all of it aside and watched whatever was on. An entertainer in a sequined jacket explaining the rules of something to a panel of guests. Probably fine.
Some time later, Elena emerged from the kitchen with oven mitts and an expression of undisguised pride, carrying a large wooden tray.
On the tray: a pot, still simmering at the edge of a boil. The broth was the orange-yellow of tomato and carrot cooked together properly, chunks of carrot and potato moving slowly in it, pieces of beef and sausage in colors that said they’d been handled with attention. A faint off-white at the surface where a touch of coconut milk had been added. Fresh green herbs floating on top.
Raphael’s eyebrow went up.
"Borscht. That’s a northern recipe. When did you learn northern recipes?"
Elena set the pot down with the triumphant posture of someone who had accomplished something difficult.
"It’s been getting cold out, so I wanted to make something warming. Borscht has been everywhere online this week, there are about forty different tutorial videos, I picked the one I liked best." She tilted her head. "First time making it. Pretty good, right?"
He nodded. It was.
She brought out two bowls and two small plates. The main was pan-fried steak in butter, good fat distribution, three thick cuts with some genuine color on them, alongside thin noodles dressed in black pepper sauce. The presentation was considered. He stood to help her arrange the table.
He turned and found Elena frowning at a bottle of red wine she’d apparently just purchased, an opener in her other hand, making gestures that suggested she hadn’t done this before.
"First time with one of those?"
She nodded, a little embarrassed. Raphael took the bottle, showed her the technique, and worked the cork free with a clean pull. It came out with a soft pop, and the wine moved into the glasses in a thin red arc.
They sat down.
Elena waited until they’d started eating before asking the question she’d clearly been holding.
"You went out hunting again last night, didn’t you? It was a lot, wasn’t it? You slept the whole day, same as last time. You looked completely wrung out when you came back."
Raphael swirled the wine in his glass without rushing to answer. He turned the question around first.
"I’ll tell you about it in a bit. First, something I’m curious about, what made you decide to cook tonight? You’ve been ordering in every day since I got here."
Elena touched her cheek with one finger, a small self-conscious gesture, and her voice came out with a directness that wasn’t performed.
"Last time you went out, I didn’t have anything ready when you got back. You came in exhausted and I couldn’t do anything useful. That bothered me." A pause.
"You’ve helped me so much, you saved my life. And I kept not being able to give you anything back. I figured since I can’t help you in a fight, maybe I could at least make sure that when everything’s over, there’s something small waiting for you. Something that’s... a little bit of a relief."
Raphael hadn’t expected that answer. He’d assumed some external reason, something she’d seen, something she’d felt like trying. He hadn’t considered that it was about him.
The unfamiliar warmth touched the same place it had when he first walked out of his room and smelled the food.
"Thank you."
It came out simply, the way things came out of him that he meant. He wasn’t good at expressing gratitude, and he knew it, so he did what he could instead, he set the glass down and told her about the previous night. Everything that wouldn’t put her in a position she shouldn’t be in, he laid out directly. The nightclub, the underground level, the ritual, the castle, what had been at stake and how it had ended.
Her honesty and her straightforwardness had always disarmed him a little, in a way he’d never fully accounted for. The most honest thing he could offer in return was the same thing.
Elena’s jaw worked lower and lower as the account went on. When he reached the people who had been taken, she gripped her fork and knife in both hands.
"Raphael, you’re really, you actually are kind of a hero, you know? You saved all those people. If it were me I don’t think I’d be able to do something that dangerous. That’s... incredible."
He smiled quietly and said nothing, and let the story come out in pieces between bites of the steak and spoonfuls of the soup, which was genuinely good, the broth deep and slightly sweet, the beef yielding, the vegetables having given up exactly what they were supposed to give.
Outside, the orange sun continued its descent and the city’s evening moved in from the horizon, the night air carrying the first chill of the season.
Inside, neither of them noticed the cold.