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She’d always disdained flesh magic, but she had a knack for the aorta. – Harrow the Ninth, chapter 3
“Are you certain about this?” Harrow asked as she closed the door to her quarters. She turned, hands tucked behind her, to look at where Gideon sat on the bed, trying not to squirm.
Gideon was not at all sure about this.
She hadn’t even known what all this was about until yesterday. Before yesterday, she’d been enduring Harrow’s furious glances every time they happened to pass each other in a corridor. That was okay, for a while. Harrow’s fury was a million times better than (thinking Harrow was gone for good, thinking she’d failed utterly and didn’t even have the grace to die about it) no Harrow at all.
But that got old fast. Especially since Harrow refused to talk to her. Avoided her as much as possible. Gideon couldn’t be content with a taste of Harrowhark Nonagesimus’s anger when she was used to the whole fucking buffet.
Gideon broke yesterday afternoon, when Harrow came around a corner going the opposite direction, and in the split second when their eyes met it was like she wanted to cremate Gideon’s corpse right there in the hallway. But it was only a second, and then Harrow was trying to slip past her, muttering “Excuse me” in a very un-Harrow-like way, and Gideon lost it a little.
She grabbed Harrow’s shoulder and pushed her back against the wall. She didn’t do it hard enough to hurt. She could have, easily, but she didn’t. But Harrow still flinched and gasped like Gideon had struck her, and Gideon ripped her hand from Harrow’s arm. She planted her palm on the wall a safe distance above Harrow’s shoulder and leaned down into her space.
“What’s with the face, Nonagesimus?”
Harrow wouldn’t look at her. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”
“Cut the shit. If I did something to piss you off, the least you can do is tell me so we can fight about it like adults.”
Harrow did look at her then. She blazed with the force of her anger. Gideon was forcibly reminded that Harrow was powerful, had been powerful before Lyctorhood had amped her up to eleven, and that she knew how to be fucking scary when she wanted to be. Those eyebrows could kill.
Lucky Gideon was already dead.
“If you did something?” Harrow said.
Well. Yeah. Gideon figured anything that made Harrow this mad was something she’d fucked up. That had always been the case before. She was strangely offended not to be the target of Harrow’s ire.
Before she could figure out a response, Harrow reached up to touch the rag knotted around Gideon’s neck like a bandana, carefully positioned to hide the hole in her throat. Harrow’s fingers trembled where she brushed the fabric. She tugged it down, just slightly, just enough for the ragged edge of the wound to peek over the top, before Gideon grabbed her wrist.
“Harrow,” she said. She didn’t know if it was a warning or a plea.
“He left you like this,” Harrow said in a low, dangerous voice that in another life would have meant Gideon was going to get her ass kicked in a new and exciting way. Anyone on the other side of that voice would know to run.
“Will you let me fix it?” she asked, softer but no less dangerous.
And now Harrow was asking if she was sure.
Gideon cracked her knuckles one by one. Neither of them looked away, but Gideon noted the twitch of Harrow’s eyes, the aborted flinch in response to each deliberate pop. She was uncomfortable. She wanted to be anywhere but trapped in a room with her broken cavalier. Like this wasn’t her fucking idea in the first place.
“Nonagesimus, if you changed your mind, just tell me to fuck off already,” Gideon said.
Harrow frowned. “That isn’t what I meant.” She walked toward Gideon, straight-backed and purposeful, and in her mind’s eye Gideon saw the Reverend Daughter, painted and veiled, peeling off her black gloves one finger at a time.
But it was just Harrow in front of her. Bare faced. Wearing only a soft shirt with long sleeves, dark pants, and tremendously scuffed boots, all in different shades of black. There was no Drearburh chill in her eyes. “I only meant,” she continued, “that it will—hurt.”
Gideon rolled her eyes. Set her jaw. “I’m used to it.”
This did not seem to reassure Harrow, but she must have seen that Gideon hadn’t changed her mind. They were doing this.
“All right,” Harrow said.
For a long moment, neither of them knew what to do. Harrow exhaled quietly, and reached again for the rag around Gideon’s neck. Gideon beat her there. She unknotted it with a few mechanical tugs and dropped it onto the bed beside her. Harrow’s expression when she saw her throat made Gideon want to get up and walk out the door, but she wasn’t going to be the first to back down from this.
The seconds dragged. Harrow didn’t start whatever necro bullshit she had planned. Her eyes looked distinctly wet, even in the low light of the ship’s habitation deck.
“What?” Gideon demanded, as though she wasn’t a gaping red hole below the chin.
“Gideon,” Harrow said faintly, “I am so—”
“Don’t,” Gideon said. Harrow closed her mouth. “Don’t do that. Let’s just—get on with it, huh?”
Harrow looked briefly stunned, but this was a girl who had spent most of her life locked up in the dark, dealing with awful things that nobody else could or would. Gideon watched her put whatever she was feeling away. She made it look easy. She nodded once and said, “Very well.”
Then her hot fingers swept over the side of Gideon’s neck, right where her pulse should have been. Harrow closed her eyes; a familiar crease appeared between them as she concentrated. Gideon focused on that crease, ignoring the rest of Harrow’s face, ignoring the soft touch against her skin. It was still strange to be this close to her without one of them trying to beat the shit out of the other. She couldn’t tell if it was strange-good or strange-bad. It was difficult to parse emotions when your body refused to give you any feedback.
“Larynx is intact,” Harrow murmured. Her thumb traced the bloodless edge of the wound. “Punctured trachea.”
“Yeah, talk dirty to me,” Gideon wheezed.
Harrow’s mouth twitched. “Hush, Griddle,” she said.
Gideon shut up. And that meant she didn’t have anything to distract her when the magic started.
Harrow was wrong. It didn’t hurt—exactly. Mostly it just felt fucking weird. Mostly it was heat, and a crawling sensation as the punched-in cartilage unfurled and knit back together, and the overwhelming awareness of Harrow’s fingertips, feather-light, in a place where fingers were not supposed to be.
Those fingers reached, pressed deeper, and Gideon must have made some kind of sound, because Harrow’s eyes opened, searching Gideon’s face with something troublingly close to concern. A line of warmth spread from the place Harrow touched her down into the pit of her chest and up her neck until her whole face was burning with it.
“Artery,” Harrow said, and they both ignored how breathless she sounded. That made two of them, at least. “Nearly done.”
Her fingers withdrew slowly, leaving flesh and skin in their wake, until it was just Harrow’s hand against Gideon’s unmarked throat. She stayed like that, taking slow, controlled breaths until Gideon’s own fingers brushed hers. She blinked twice and took a whole two steps backward, as though embarrassed. It was cold where her hand had been. Gideon tried not to let it show on her face. She examined her neck instead. Perfect, of course. Smooth, unbroken skin, except for the familiar dips of acne scars, exactly where they were supposed to be. Harrow was nothing if not precise.
“Not bad, night boss,” Gideon said when she finally found her voice.
Harrow gave her a tiny smile that must have been flesh magic with the way it made Gideon’s throat and cheeks flush with heat like a necromantic aftershock. “It will do,” she said. Her brows drew together slightly. Already formulating a new plan of attack. “Is it only your—”
“Got one in my gut,” Gideon said quickly, when she saw Harrow reach up toward her chest.
She didn’t know why she thought that would be better. She quickly discovered it was not better and was, in fact, very bad, because Harrow stepped between Gideon’s spread knees. Harrow rucked up her shirt and pressed low on her stomach, right above Gideon’s belt, and Gideon definitely couldn’t look at her this time. She stared over Harrow’s shoulder, trying to find anything worth looking at on the featureless gray walls. Harrow’s hair was too long. It fell around her ears, and Gideon had more than once seen Harrow angrily brush it back out of her face to no avail. Gideon could probably get a hair clip from one of the Sixth, since Harrow certainly wasn’t going to ask and—okay, this wasn’t helping at all.
“This one isn’t deep. Some minor damage to the abdominal wall,” Harrow said. Her voice was very close to Gideon’s ear. Everything about her was very close to Gideon’s everything, actually. She realized she could smell Harrow, old iron and dust and sweat, and that was so familiar and so bizarrely, sickly comforting that it finally hit Gideon that Harrow was really here. That after six months believing she’d left Harrow for dead in the River, and weeks ricocheting off each other like apopneumatic ghosts, they were really here, in the same room, together.
“Be careful with those. I worked hard on them.” Fuck, that came out way more reverential whisper than Gideon intended.
“Oh, I know,” Harrow breathed against her cheek. Gideon ascended briefly to the Place Over the River. She might have made some extremely embarrassing noise. She definitely flexed a little because she was a creature made mostly of base instincts and muscle mass.
Harrow swatted her thigh. “Stop that. This is delicate.”
“Since when are you a flesh magician, anyway? Didn’t think there was anything that could compel Harrowhark Nonagesimus to truck with lesser magicks.”
“Don’t be foolish,” was all Harrow said.
There was an almost pleasant burn as Harrow smoothed her hand over Gideon’s abs and the flesh sprang back together like there had never been any fencepost. Gideon exhaled unsteadily. Harrow removed her hand from Gideon’s shirt and stepped back. Gideon fought with the impulse to grab her and keep her there, to crush them together until neither of them could move, neither of them could breathe without tasting the other. She felt dizzy. Untethered. It wasn’t that she liked the big, gory holes in her hot bod, but there was something disorienting about erasing them. They were hers. That had been the last time she’d done something that mattered, before doing a truly shit job defending her necro’s body, before her dad had leashed her back to meat that didn’t want her, before the long, ugly months on the front. It had been her choice. It seemed like undoing them could undo everything else too, throw everything Gideon had tried to protect back into jeopardy. That it would unwrite her somehow, and it would be her and Harrow and Camilla dead under that bone and Palamedes exploded three rooms away and even Ianthe cut to pieces on a mad Lyctor’s sword. That it would all be over.
She didn’t want this to be over.
“Gideon?”
“Mmf?” She’d been silent too long. Harrow would think she had serious being-dead brain damage. Maybe she did.
“We need—rather, could you—”
Harrow, lost for words? Something interesting must be happening. She could always take a break from her own mental breakdown if it giving Harrow shit. Gideon dragged herself out of the mire long enough to make a fascinating discovery: Harrow was blushing furiously all the way to the tips of her hateful little ears.
“Harrow?” Her necromancer was clearly also going through something. She looked like she was about to go into cardiac arrest, or else burst into flames from how red her cheeks were turning.
“I will need you to remove your shirt,” Harrow said, with the air of someone making a confession before a firing squad.
“Oh.”
Obviously, obviously she would need to remove her shirt. She somehow hadn’t considered that possibility, but it wasn’t like Harrow could regrow her major organs with a layer of fabric in the way. She blanched when she strayed too close to thinking about the torn-up chunk of offal she had in place of a heart before wrenching her thoughts onto a different track. Right. Shirt. Harrow. She could do that. She could totally do that.
“Or I could get Paul,” Harrow said. She wasn’t looking at Gideon anymore. The featureless gray floor was about as interesting to look at as the walls, but Harrow gave a convincing performance of being riveted by the steel paneling. “I’m sure they would be more than willing.”
“No!” She had said that too quickly. She didn’t want to seem overly eager for her necromancer to stick her hands all up in Gideon’s chest cavity. But the idea of Harrow leaving her here, adrift, unfinished, while a stranger wiped away the last of Gideon’s sacrifice—no, she needed Harrow here with her. Needed her where Gideon could see her, where Harrow was touching her, where Harrow inexplicably wanted Gideon whole and unbroken even if she hadn’t wanted her soul to keep. “No. It’s fine. Stay.”
Harrow hesitated. “You’re certain?”
There she went with that again. Gideon had been certain of precious few things in her life. Somehow, this was one of them. “Fair’s fair, right? You show me yours, I show you mine.”
Harrow scoffed and turned an even more worrying shade of red. But she was silent as Gideon shrugged out of her—now very grubby—Cohort jacket, grabbed her shirt by the collar, and dragged it over her head.
She knew this was the bad one. The wound was deep and wide and dark inside, like a mouth had opened in her chest, yawning to bite. She was embarrassed by it. How gruesome. How empty. Every time she glimpsed it in the mirror she saw yet more evidence of her failure, because if she’d just done her job right, she wouldn’t have to know what a real-life broken heart looked like. Good cavaliers didn’t have to clean up the mess.
So, really, she knew it was the bad one. But she was still surprised by the sob that tore out of Harrow’s throat.
She was trying to contain herself. She’d been trying this whole time, Gideon abruptly realized, but this was a lot even for the Reverend Daughter of the Ninth, lord of all that was unsightly and depressing. Harrow’s throat worked like she was trying to swallow any other disagreeable sounds, trembling lips pressed thin and pale. As Gideon watched, a tear broke from her lashes and ran down the sharp angles of her face.
“Come on,” Gideon said. “I know these tits are transcendent, but the tears are a bit much.”
Harrow took an unsteady breath through her nose. She barely heard Gideon. She didn’t look anywhere but the wound.
“Nonagesimus. Hey. Look at me.” Slowly, painfully, Harrow looked up into Gideon’s face. “I’m okay. Really. Doesn’t even hurt anymore.”
“Shut up,” Harrow said viciously. “Shut up, you moron, you—you imbecile—how could you—”
Gideon rolled her shoulders in an effort to conceal her chest. “This imbecile saved your bony hide, you know, a little gratitude would be appreciated.”
”Gratitude,” Harrow wheezed. Her fingers twisted in the fraying ends of her sleeves. “Gratitude for your death? As if it was something I wanted—”
“You spent a good decade acting like it.”
“I wanted you with me,” Harrow said. It was too much. She broke. “And it was selfish of me, and cruel, and I drove you to this final escape, I know. But this was not what I wanted, Gideon. Never this.”
Escape? What the fuck was Harrow talking about? “You’re the one who got rid of me, remember? Shit, if you just wanted to keep me in a box, I made it pretty damn easy for you.”
“You forget I am greedy,” Harrow said. She shook with some exertion Gideon didn’t understand. “I did not get rid of you. My soul only knows how to take and destroy, not a bit of it belongs to me. I needed to keep you separate, undamaged—I was trying to buy myself time—I—” Her words tumbled out faster, a rising alarm of distress that pinned Gideon in place. “I sought to keep you. Not only your soul. All of you. I want your noisy, living flesh. I want your irritating voice. I want your crass jokes and your stupid hair and your damnable eyes. I want your beating heart. Anything less is not enough.”
Gideon sat there with her mouth hanging open like an idiot. It felt like she’d been slapped. Her brain sputtered like a clogged stele, turning over the words to find some trick, some reason Harrow would lie to her. There had to be a catch. Gideon wasn’t worth any of that.
Harrow sighed unsteadily, tears still tracking down her cheeks. “I’m sorry. I’ll—I’ll get Paul, they can—”
Oh no, absolutely the fuck not. Gideon snatched at Harrow’s hand, probably crushing all her delicate necromancer bones, and Harrow froze. Seemed to stop breathing entirely. It was the first time Gideon had touched her through this whole encounter.
“It’s yours,” Gideon insisted. “All of it.”
Harrow shook her head. “You should not trust me with it.”
“Too late for that, sweetheart.”
And that was the bottom of it, really. She trusted Harrow. It wasn’t something either of them had seen coming and probably she was crazy for doing so, but she did. She’d already decided to trust the work of Harrow’s hands and the sure touch of her magic. If Harrow said she wanted her, really wanted her, had wanted her the whole time—enough to crack open her genius skull, holy shit—well, Gideon trusted that, too. What was the alternative? Walk away? Pretend she never wanted to see Harrow again? She’d already lost her once.
Harrow looked at her with a pathetic, animal longing and Gideon took pity on her. Reeled her in gently until she was back between Gideon’s knees. Harrow’s cheeks turned faintly pink again and Gideon remembered she was shirtless. What a fucking conversation to have with your tits out.
They stood like that for a few aching minutes, not quite holding each other, but near enough that it didn’t matter. Harrow kept her eyes closed like a gentleman until she got her breathing under control, which Gideon thought was a tremendous waste of her assets.
“Come on,” Gideon urged. “We’re not done here.”
“Yes,” Harrow said. She took a deep breath, squeezed Gideon’s fingers once before releasing her. “Yes. You’re right.”
Her eyes were still red, but she gave her face a businesslike scrub to wipe away the tears, and examined the wound with a critical eye. She ghosted the tips of her fingers down from Gideon’s clavicle, between her breasts and just to the left of the hole. In another life, that image would have got Gideon through at least a dozen sleepless nights.
“Could you lay down?” Harrow asked.
“Aw, gonna be gentle with me, Nonagesimus?” Gideon asked, already scooting back and swinging her legs up onto the bed.
“If you’re good,” Harrow said. Gideon’s arms did something unsanctioned and she fell on her back with an ungraceful oof.
She could already tell this wouldn’t work. Harrow was small. The bed was too high and the hole in her chest too deep. She wouldn’t be able to get a good angle from all the way over there. Gideon patted the blanket next to her hip. “Come on. Get up here.”
Harrow still hesitated, which seemed insane to Gideon after everything else. “Look, it’s my organs we’re messing around with. I’d prefer if you could see what you were doing.”
The moment Harrow crawled into the bed next to her, Gideon grabbed at Harrow’s waist and dragged her necromancer on top of her, to a gratifying cry of “Nav!” They settled with Gideon on her back and Harrow on her knees, straddling Gideon’s stomach.
“I’m just trying to be practical,” Gideon said, grinning up at her.
“I’m sure,” Harrow muttered. “Can you control yourself? This will be significantly more complicated.”
Gideon dropped her hands to her sides. “Yeah, as long as you’re sure you can handle it.”
“I know your heart,” said Harrow simply.
She pressed one palm flat to the skin beneath her sternum and it burned there like a brand. Gideon squirmed under her touch. She felt unfairly small like this, shrinking under the white-hot intensity of Harrow’s attention. Harrow’s fingers rested at the edge of the wound.
“Be still,” she said, and Gideon was still, Gideon was a fucking statue.
And then Harrow was inside her.
Harrow slid her hand delicately into Gideon’s ruptured chest. She went by touch, fingertips gentle, exploratory, finding her way to what was left of Gideon’s heart. Harrow’s hands were small, narrow palms, thin fingers, and Gideon was desperately grateful as her entire awareness shrank to the heat and pressure beneath her ribs. Her breath punched out as Harrow carefully moved a lung aside, searching, reaching, curling her fingers around the shredded lump of meat that used to be valve and atrium and ventricle.
Gideon didn’t have anywhere to look except Harrow’s face. She saw her eyes widen when she found what she was looking for, saw her lips part, her expression reshape itself into something Gideon had only seen her wear a handful of times. It was the same look she’d had in the pool at Canaan, when Harrow had told her what lay within the Locked Tomb and confessed she would make herself immortal just to see her awaken. But now the Tomb was empty, and Gideon hadn’t seen Harrow look at the living Alecto like this even once.
“There we are,” Harrow said. She closed her eyes. Squeezed.
The pain came all at once. Whatever Harrow was doing had strung wires through her veins, mercilessly turned a winch in her chest, pulling, slicing, and her muscles bent in the opposite direction like her body was trying to run away from itself. She gasped, filling her lungs with useless air, and arched beneath Harrow, was terrified to find her body completely out of her control. She almost launched her necromancer clear off the bed with a violent twist. Harrow hissed—she’d cut herself on one of Gideon’s ribs, Gideon could feel the thalergy, had the half-mad impression that she could taste Harrow’s blood on her bones—and caught herself on Gideon’s shoulder. Gideon’s hands spasmed, one fisted in the blanket, one somehow clenched around Harrow’s arm like she meant to throw her off or hold her in place, Gideon wasn’t sure which.
Harrow practically bent in half over Gideon, breathing deep, sweat beading on her forehead. She took Gideon’s wrist in her free hand, pried her loose with no effort at all, and pressed it firmly into the mattress beside Gideon’s head. “I know,” she said. “Hold on.”
She didn’t even know if it could be called pain at this point; it was the only way her body was able to process the sensation. It felt like her limbs were trying to turn themselves inside out. It felt like there was something huge and hot boiling inside her, something that wanted to tear her apart to get out. Her spine was a dying eel and Harrow was the hook and she wanted to twist and writhe and bite herself free, wanted to sink into the cold water of the River itself if it meant that this would stop.
She didn’t. She focused on Harrow’s knees against her ribs and her fingers around her wrist and, yeah, even the hand inside her chest, pulling her heart-meat like taffy. She turned herself to stone. Badly carved stone, stone that was crumbling apart in the earthquake of being put back together, but it was the best she could do.
“Harrow,” she groaned. Her jaw fused together with the struggle not to scream.
“Hold on, Gideon, you can do it, hold on for me.”
Yes, yes, she would, she would hold on. She’d survived the creche flu, she’d survived avulsion, she wasn’t going to let resurrection of all things be the final nail in her coffin. She would hold on. She wanted to stay. She wanted to live.
Harrow’s fist inside her, Harrow’s pulse beating fast and bright, something swelling, growing, pushing Harrow aside to fill the empty space. Gideon sobbed when her severed veins slithered out of her flesh to knit themselves to the construct Harrow raised within her. Harrow stretched her aorta like restringing a violin and it connected with the satisfying pain of setting a dislocated shoulder, a rightness that reverberated through her whole body.
Harrow let out a tiny, wounded sound when Gideon’s heart, whole and entire, filled her palm. “That’s it, you did it, you did so well,” practically speaking the words into Gideon’s throat, she was curled so tightly around her. “Nearly there, beloved, nearly done.”
Harrow gingerly released her, slid her hand out, shining with old blood. As she left, she touched the edges of Gideon’s broken ribs and the bone answered her eagerly, twining toward her like sun-starved vines, growing where she bade. Gideon’s sternum shimmered into place as easy as breathing. And then it was only muscle, and flesh, and skin beneath Harrowhark’s splayed fingers, leaving smears of red against Gideon’s chest.
Harrow reared back, fierce and wild-eyed with triumph, a black pillar of fire alight with thanergy. She braced herself against Gideon’s chest, and she pressed, and pressed, rhythmic, relentless, and Gideon felt—her heart—beat—
Her heart beat and her blood moved and her lungs burned for oxygen, and it was so loud, it was so much, but something was wrong, she wasn’t finished, her body ached and howled and tried to buck her off, the ropes that the Emperor her father had used to bind her soul were fraying, slipping, and she didn’t want to go—
She fumbled for Harrow’s hand, clung to it. “Harrow,” she panted, “please.”
Confusion in Harrow’s eyes, quickly sliding toward panic, and Gideon could only trust her, would hang on while her heart beat beat beat against her, every blow trying to shake her loose. Harrow’s mouth moved but Gideon didn’t hear the words. Her nails dug into Gideon’s chest, drew blood, real fresh blood, and a light went on in Harrow’s eyes.
Without a second thought, Harrow bit deep into her cheek the same way Gideon had seen her do a thousand times. She leaned close over Gideon and said only, “Take it,” teeth shining red, and pressed her bloodied mouth to Gideon’s.
Gideon gasped. Harrow’s tongue invaded her mouth, swift and decisive, and Gideon drowned in the rust-salt taste of her. She pawed weakly at her necromancer’s arms, reaching for something she didn’t understand, tears pooling in her eyes, spilling down over her temples. Take it, she said, Harrow on top of her, Harrow inside her, and there was something, something she could almost grasp, Gideon pulled, Gideon took—
She felt something snap free from Harrow and slide into her, pouring into her like hot tea, scalding her everywhere, not just her tongue and throat and gut, but in the tips of her fingers, the backs of her knees, bursting bright behind her eyes. She broke away from Harrow’s mouth, curled up off the bed—gave her newly repaired abs a workout—and pressed her forehead to Harrow’s throat, trembling, sucking air. She felt her lungs expand and her body cry out in relief when her blood flooded with oxygen. She had forgotten breathing felt good.
Harrow held her through it all. She combed her fingers through Gideon’s hair, whispered her name against her scalp, and Gideon’s flesh reacted involuntarily, beautifully, pulling tight into goosebumps that made her arms and neck tingle. Gideon twitched through a million bright little zips of sensation as her soul settled into her bones and muscles, nerves firing randomly, flooding her with a sweet chemical rush. At the last, her body and soul exhaled as one, and she fell back against the bed. Her limbs were impossibly heavy, but not with the rigid corpse-weight she’d gotten used to. Heavy like after a workout, heavy like she wanted to sleep for nine hours and wake up stronger. Her chest heaved, and Harrow bobbed up and down with the motion, staring down at her. Gideon’s breath caught.
Harrow’s eyes—one black, one gold.
“Gideon,” Harrow breathed. She stroked her thumb beneath Gideon’s eye, opposite to Harrow’s black one. “Gideon,” she said again, rougher. And then Harrow’s face crumpled.
“Whoa, hey, hey,” Gideon said. She tried to intercept her, but her arms wouldn’t move the way she wanted, and Harrow folded herself in two to press her cheek to Gideon’s chest. Her heart beat strongly against Harrow’s ear. Harrowhark Nonagesimus took one ragged breath and started to sob.
“You’re alive, you’re alive, Gideon, I’m so sorry, I’m—” It devolved into incoherent noises, her necromancer openly weeping into Gideon’s tits while Gideon tried to remember how the connection from brain to nerve to muscle was supposed to work. She felt utterly useless and a little like Harrow had stolen all her bones, but she was alive, and her sobbing necromancer was alive, so all things considered, she was doing all right.
Eventually, Gideon managed to roll them both onto their sides, one of her arms draped across Harrow’s shoulders, Harrow curled into the living warmth of Gideon’s body. Her sobs had become little wordless gasps, smearing tears and spit against Gideon’s breastbone; every now and then she would hiccup an “I’m sorry” until Gideon had had more than enough.
She pulled Harrow closer, buried her nose in her sweat-damp hair. “Shit, don’t apologize for that, Harrow. I think you finally sold me on the whole necromancy thing.”
“Don’t,” Harrow sniffled. “Don’t act like—Gideon, I killed you.”
Gideon hummed. “Pretty sure I killed me and you just brought me back to life, actually.” Harrow thrashed in her arms. Gideon was pleased to find she’d regained enough strength to keep her in place. “Hey, hey, okay. How about this? We’re square. For real, for all of it. No more blame. No more debt.”
Harrow shuddered. “I do not deserve it.”
Gideon shook her head. She was starting to think deserve was a stupid concept. “Hey,” she said, tucking her hand beneath Harrow’s chin. She lifted Harrow’s face, blotchy from crying, her mismatched eyes red-rimmed and beautiful, and she kissed her. They were both so exhausted that it was barely more than a brush of lips. Harrow still tasted like blood, but that was fine. Hell, that was what Gideon had signed up for.
At some point they weren’t really kissing anymore, but they both refused to move away, breathing the air from each other’s lungs. Gideon shifted to get her arm out from under her—it was falling asleep, wasn’t that wild?—and Harrow stiffened. “Don’t go,” she whispered against Gideon’s lips.
Gideon laughed. “Not going anywhere, honey. You did a number on me.”
“Hmm,” Harrow mumbled, pressing her face into Gideon’s neck, seeking out her pulse. “Good.”
Gideon had to agree. They lay tangled together, sweaty and bloodstained, two hearts beating, two souls shared between them, until Harrow’s breathing slowed and she finally relaxed into Gideon’s embrace. Gideon could feel sleep coming for her and there was no good reason to fight it. She missed sleeping. So she let darkness rise up to claim her, gentle as forgiveness.