Chapter 18: Equal Footing

Calla's POV

He didn't move.

He stood in the hall with the barrel on his breastbone and his hands open at his sides, and he looked at my face and not at the gun.

I had a hundred ways to do it, and I had known all of them for nine years.

I breathed out, and I could feel exactly how much pressure the trigger wanted.

I pulled the bolt back and drew it out of the rifle instead.

It slid free in my hand, a cold brass-and-steel weight.

"That's the part that makes it work," I said. "I'm keeping it."

"All right."

"The rest you can take to the river."

"All right."

I put the bolt in my sweatshirt pocket and laid the useless rifle across the hall table.

Then I held out my hand for the folder.

I read my dead target's letter standing up, with the door open and the stairwell cold on my ankles.

*Don't hunt the hands. Find the man holding them.*

*If the hands turn out to be someone worth saving, I'd like you to save them.*

I had killed a man who wrote that.

I had never known him, and he had known me before I fired.

I read it twice, and then I couldn't see the page.

"Calla."

"Don't."

He stayed where he was. I could hear him not coming closer.

I wiped my face on my sleeve.

"I'm not forgiving you," I said. "I want you to know that now."

"I'm not asking you to."

"You shot me in the back."

"Yes."

"I put a bullet in your brother."

"Yes."

"I'm not asking you to forgive me, either."

"I know," said Bram.

"So what do we do?"

He looked at me, and he said the thing I would never have guessed he would say.

"You tell me. I'll do what you say, and I'll say no when I mean no."

My throat closed.

"Then these are the terms," I said. "You never decide for me, and I never go alone."

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