Chapter 12: No More Masks

I woke up warm.

That was the first thing. Heated blankets, piled to my chin, and something beeping slow beside my head.

My fingers throbbed inside thick gauze.

The room was dim. A hospital room, with a window full of gray dawn.

Someone was asleep in the chair beside the bed.

I turned my head on the pillow and looked at him.

Beckett.

His suit jacket was gone. His white shirt was torn at one shoulder and stained with rust-brown streaks.

Both of his hands lay in his lap, bandaged white to the knuckles.

His glasses had slid crooked on his nose.

He was asleep with his mouth a little open, and I knew that mouth.

I had known it for two years.

I'd kissed it in the dark. I'd felt it say good girl against my ear.

My eyes went down his arm.

His sleeve was pushed up. On his left forearm was a pink, healing line where a bullet had grazed him six weeks ago.

And on the inside of his wrist, just above the bandage, a small raised scar.

I'd touched it with my lips a hundred times.

I'd never seen it.

I lay there and looked at all of him, slowly.

The black hair falling over his forehead. The shadow of a beard. The line of his jaw that my thumb knew.

My professor.

My stepbrother.

My Master.

One man, asleep in a plastic chair.

I didn't cry. I thought I would.

Instead I just looked, and looked, until he opened his eyes.

He saw me watching him.

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